Ljova and the Kontraband
Mnemosyne
A Kapustnik
By Jose Fritz
I was out that night to see Alina again. I can’t omit her name in this tale so there it is. That night she had a violinist onstage that tore the shit up. He was trying to saw through his fiddle with a rosined bow. Horsehair whipped back and forth, snapping in the air. He broke a string, but he fiddled on like the fabled boy trying to best the Devil. We met later, and he was quite unassuming and as far as I could tell, an entirely different person than the one I saw on stage under the stage lights just minutes earlier. He mentioned casually, that he had a band of his own. He didn’t press the topic. The CD just showed up a few months later.
There are very few bands functioning in this art-space of a genre. Bands like The Four Bags and Taraf de Haidouks try to keep that jazz-inflection toned down and the rock turned up. It’s all too easy to strap on the vandalized band uniforms and march down the street. That shambling and loosely dissonant feeling of the Reeks and the Wrecks is entirely absent. Ljova’s compositions are brighter, fuller and more able to express the amity and enmity of each imprecation.
This kind of instrumentation tends to be overdone, even treated as a novelty. In its worst lows it can be exploited through schlock melodrama like Itkevä tyttö. Here the vice never materializes. The songs reserve the right to steer into brackish waters at any time, dissonant, melancholy and bitter at any time.
The album begins from nothing, instead choosing esotericism. Tinkling metal bells, a bird flitters and adjusts itself; a wooden clicking, more metal, bright and tinkling segue into the snapping clicks of zils in the fingers of a seated dancer and then the song.
Who is this mad Russian? He plays the Untango, which is the deconstructed Tango you’d expect it to be, except that the parts —the bricks and mortar are so changed from his handling of them that they no longer belong to the tango criollo. The result is a plateau of tango debris on which he builds kleyzmurim, which is a modern Freilech music. He cannot escape his post-classicist leanings but as a quintet he seems more inclined to samba with Edmundo Ros than than to wave a baton with Gershwin.
The album stands as a Rhapsody in Blue for Eastern Europe, a Death and Tansfiguration for the Americas. It looms large and epic over all of us, projecting a shadow on to anyone that fails to listen and understand.
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