Breath & Hammer

Clarinettist David Krakauer played with The Klezmatics before forging a distinctive solo career that pushes at the boundaries of many forms. This duo album with South African pianist Kathleen Tagg is as genre-defying as any. ‘For this album, we created the raw material by recording thousands of our own clarinet and piano sounds,’ the musicians write. ‘No other instruments or samples are used, and many of the pieces are made up of 40 or more layers of prepared ‘piano orchestra’and clarinet’. Despite this, the album doesn’t sound cut and pasted, but flows with an energy and drive. And in ‘The Geyser’, the opening track, there is certainly the ghost of The Klezmatics’ ‘NY Psycho Freylekhs’ hovering in the background.

Although klezmer is a primary source, the repertoire and influences here are diverse, including pieces by Syrian clarinet master Kinan Azmeh, Brazilian forró accordionist Rob Curto, saxophonist John Zorn, klezmer specialist Emil Kroitor’s evocative ‘Moldavian Journey’ and the closing ‘Berimbau’, Kathleen Tagg’s own homage to the Brazilian musical bow. The videos from their performance at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal with visuals by Jesse Gilbert are suitably kaleidoscopic.