When was the last time you heard klezmer at Wavelength? My guess would be never. Montreal's Black Ox Orkestar are truly special: they are not concerned with reviving this traditional Jewish music, instead they just wish to 'œrephrase'? it. Scott Gilmore gave me the scoop on what to expect. (Hey! Record on Constellation! Members of Godspeed! Blah blah blah! '” publicity-hound ed.)

Please introduce the members of your band: their names, instruments, and preferred summer activities. There's four of us in Black Ox: Gabe, who plays the clarinet and guitar, and spends most of the summer reading in the hay and heather; Thierry, who plays the double-bass and spends all summer in an intense regimen of practice; Jessica, who plays the violin and wishes she had summer activities to speak of; and Scott (me). I sing and play the mandolin and cymbalom and guitar. I do as little as possible in the summer, like a dog lying in the shade.

How did the band form? Do you all share the same religious/political beliefs? Gabe and I started playing because we discovered that we had a common interest in old Jewish music. We had both gotten really into these weird, strangely amateurish recordings of klezmer bands from the 1920s. The combination of strange melodics and socially-oriented dance music seemed like a welcome retreat from the rock world. The two of us started spending summer evenings together playing our version of this music. Jessica, who has serious violin skills, joined us and we realized that we all shared the same taste and sensibility. Then Thierry came and pretty much completed the circle. From the start, our band has been defined by an intangible feeling of what we want this music to sound like. We have since started to experiment in different directions, but at heart what is singular about this band is that we've developed a sensibility and an approach to traditional music that lets us take a song that's been done to death and rephrase it. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're not obsessed with being archivists or preservationists. It's the sterility of 'œrevival'? movements that make them so irritating.

Why klezmer? Why now? Because it's a beautiful weird kind of music that is somehow relevant to today's aesthetic. It's also one of the few aspects of modern Jewish culture that hasn't gotten all wrapped up in nationalism.

Since all of the songs are in Yiddish, could you please translate some of your favourite lyrics for me? 'œSad is the father and the mother/ who have an extra son/ they dress him up like a soldier/ and send him straight into battle. When we came to the train/ I stood in the square/ and when the whistle blew/ a great wailing broke out.'? That's from a song about getting drafted into the Tsar's army during the First World War.

What kind of reaction do you usually get from your audience? An eerie, chilling silence at first. Then people get into it. I think the language freaks people out, plus the fact that something intense is going on, but you're not exactly privy to it. When we play dance sets, people have been known to stomp around in an alcohol-fueled frenzy, like Romanian dancing bears. Those people are often our friends.

What's the story behind the name 'œBlack Ox Orkestar'?? It's quite beautiful, by the way. We were sitting around making word association lists. On the page there was Gronam Ox, a character from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, and black bread (chorny khleb in Russian). Orkestar was there too, it's the Serbo-Croatian word for orchestra. So we put black ox orkestar together and it seemed to have a logic of its own... There's a more esoteric side as well. There is a kabballic doctrine that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have numerical and symbolic (or pictogrammatic) values. The first letter 'œaleph'? stands for 'œox.'? There's also a belief in Jewish mysticism that Hebrew letters are actually black flames and that the paper they are written on is white fire, so the written letter 'œaleph'? would be a black ox: a burning black ox. And that's exactly what our band sounds like. So basically, the name is just obvious.