Mp3 Files
The Ladder
Gules, Gules
Marmarosh
Der mentsch trakht un lakht
Mazltov Boris
Hora Flora		 A shpay in yam
Tsum tish
Still Happy
At Midnight
Yankl Dudl
Es iz shoyn shpeyt

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Discography:
Dus gezang fin geto Lodzh / Song of the Lodz Ghetto
Recorded live in Bordeaux, this is the first Brave Old World CD to appear on the prestigious Winter & Winter label, famous worldwide for the highest standards in recording quality, design, and concept.

Developed over the last 15 years, Song of the Lodz Ghetto is a unique musical work, a song cycle in which memory and imagination freely interact to create a Proustian journey between present and past. At the center are Brave Old World's arrangements of the rare Jewish street and cabaret songs from the Nazi ghetto of Lodz, Poland, 1940-44. Leading through the Lodz repertoire like stepping-stones through the river of memory are Brave Old World's own original compositions, reflections on 17 years of performing Jewish music. Michael Alpert's moving "Berlin 1990" forms the emotional and musical counterpoint to the passionate and ironic street songs of the bard of the Lodz ghetto, Yankele Herszkowicz. A musical and spiritual journey of resistance, love, and reconciliation.

The superior recording quality of this CD is matched by outstanding cover art by Steve Byram and Warren Linn, as well as detailed song texts and liner notes in Yiddish, English, and German.

Bless the Fire
Recorded live in Weimar, Germany, Bless the Fire includes some of the finest playing of BOW ever recorded. New compositions by Alan Bern, Michael Alpert, Kurt Bjorling and Stuart Brotman take New Jewish Music another step, in a beautifully lyrical and poetic direction. Fans of BOW's meditative side as well as our more exhuberant side will find their appetites satisfied by the 12 original tracks on Bless the Fire.
 
Blood Oranges
Following in the footsteps of Klezmer Music (1990) and Beyond The Pale (1993), Blood Oranges (1997) goes even further in the direction of creating New Jewish Music. Beginning with a musical prologue, "Wailing World," which slowly fades in from the distance to bring the listener into the here-and-now musical landscape of "Yiddishland" ("from San Francisco to Brest-Litovsk"), the CD is a journey to a partly-real, partly imaginary world and the places and characters in it.
Its musical "flow" reproduces that of a Brave Old World live concert, but the CD breaks from a "purist" acoustic music recording approach and openly embraces the effects of the recording studio. Musically, there are moments reminiscent of jazz, others of minimalist music, others of Kurt Weill. Is it still "klezmer" music? Noted Internet Klezmer Critic Ari Davidow wrote of this program in concert: "the band plays a klezmer music that is so entirely grounded in the present, so intensely evolved from the music as it was, and yet so clearly, obviously, entirely klezmer that one could not even separate out many of the influences." (Ari Davidow's Klezmer Shack, Reviews)

Beyond The Pale
Berlin in May ... fragrant linden trees in bloom, sidewalk cafes overflowing on long evenings. The walls are down - outwardly, at least - and the world streams into this city like floodwater... Where are the modernist poets of Vilna and New York, the avant-garde artists of Moscow and Vitebsk, the proletarian intelligentsia of Warsaw? We are the Native Americans of Europe... Such a happy people... Was wollen Sie hier in Deutschland? What do you want here in Germany? So play me a sweet Diaspora song, with a longing that's pure... (Michael Alpert, BOW)

That text, excerpted from Brave Old World's 1993 groundbreaking CD Beyond The Pale, pointedly confronted the irony of the presence and absence of Jewish culture in contemporary Germany, including the reception of Klezmer music itself. Beyond The Pale was awarded the Preis der deutschen Schallplatten Kritik (German Record's Prize), and features the original songs Berlin Overture/Berlin 1990, which place a bittersweet frame around the rest of the titles, an accordion solo (Big Train), a poignant tsimbl waltz (Waltz Roman a Clef), BOW's popular "hit" song (Basarabye), as well as introducing Kurt Bjorling on clarinets and his original works such as Rufn Di Kinder Aheym and A Tish-Nign. Berlin Overture was on the German Bestenliste ("Best of..." list) for six months, fittingly ironic for a song about the irony of playing Jewish music in Germany.

Klezmer Music
Then: The world is in an uproar. Millions travel from land to land, looking for a home. Old ways are obsolete, and new ways become old faster than ever before. Nationalism rises, promising self-determination while threatening global disaster. Technology runs amok - will it serve us or will we serve it? Mass movements and powerful governments struggle to control human destiny in an era of uncertainty. For some, it is the end of time, for others, only the beginning. To ride out the hurricane of change takes great courage, hope, tenacity and a sense of irony. Now: (See "Then").

That text introduced Klezmer Music, the award-winning first CD from Brave Old World, published in 1990 and still relevant today. Highlights of the CD include Alpert's bitterly ironic song about the nuclear disaster in the one-time Khassidic shtetl, Chernobyl, historic recordings of the drummer/singer Ben Bazyler (who died in 1990), the tsimbl/accordion duet "Moskowitz meets Beckermann," as well as introducing the suite concept of interwoven instrumental and vocal pieces in "Keshenev."

WITH OTHERS
Itzhak Perlman, In The Fiddler’s House
Itzhak Perlman, Live In The Fiddler’s House
In the Fiddler's House & Live in the Fiddler's House. These two record-breaking best-sellers feature not only Itzhak Perlman and Brave Old World, but also the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and the Andy Statman Orchestra, with Alan Bern and Stu Brotman playing in Andy's Band.

Klezmer Music: A Marriage of Heaven & Earth

Global Gumbo

Tanz-& Folkfest Rudolstadt 94

Jüdische Lebenswelten