Holiday Klezmer concerts

The kindling of the lights can wait and the dreidel can remain unspun for a couple of hours. The 2014 Chanukah season signals the arrival of klezmer in the Los Angeles area, with bands both local and East Coast-based planning holiday concerts. 

In fact, devotees of the Eastern European folk music tradition known as klezmer can give themselves a double dose with an afternoon holiday concert on Dec. 21 by L.A’s own Mostly Kosher at Valley Beth Shalom (VBS), followed by a return visit from the Klezmatics to Walt Disney Concert Hall on Dec. 22.

Mostly Kosher

The two bands share a love for preserving traditional Yiddish music and cultural traditions — sometimes with the addition of a contemporary spin — and both have enjoyed plenty of critical and audience acclaim. Still, Mostly Kosher and the Klezmatics can, to some extent, be viewed as the new klezmer kid on the block and the genre’s lion, respectively.

Mostly Kosher is hot off the Nov. 1 release of its first CD. During the five years Mostly Kosher has been performing, the band appeared at synagogues, festivals, private parties and retirement homes before going on to book dates at larger, prestigious cultural institutions around the Southland, such as the Ford Amphitheatre, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the Gene Autry Museum and the Skirball Cultural Center.

The VBS Chanukah celebration is organized under the auspices of the Jewish Music Commission of Los Angeles, an Encino-based organization that looks to showcase new Jewish music and promote the art form. This will be the first time in its 32-year history that the agency has booked a klezmer band. 

And what took so long? The question draws a laugh from Richard Braun, the founder and chairman.

“I think it has to do somewhat with attracting an audience that has been underserved,” Braun said. “We have had requests for a number of years for different kinds of groups, and klezmer is something that has been increasingly appreciated by younger audiences. A lot of younger people are finding out about their roots in Eastern Europe.”

Billing themselves as a Jewish revival band, Mostly Kosher’s band members schooled themselves in klezmer sounds. Under the leadership of Leeav Sofer and with founding member Janice Mautner Markham, serving both as violinist and shtick provider (she takes on the role of a pushy elderly matchmaker), a Mostly Kosher concert can be as much musical theater as  concert. 

“They’ve started calling us the Jewish ‘Prairie Home Companion,’ ” Markham said. “I did a little bit of research on my own into Yiddish theater and radio, and it sort of grew organically. Leeav got interested in researching old commercials and radio theater around the same time, and I was developing my Jewish mother character. We ended up putting the two things together.”

So you might hear Sofer cutting loose on the classic “My Yiddishe Mama,” or the band’s version of “Donna Donna” that was so jazzy it earned a spot on Craig Taubman’s CD “Jewels Vol. IV: A High Holidays Music Sampler.”

The Dec. 21 date will feature the band’s entire eight-piece lineup, along with guest soloist Cantor Faith Steinsnyder, who will be flying in from New Jersey for the occasion. Attendees can expect traditional favorites with a distinctly Mostly Kosher flavor.

“We’re starting to branch out past klezmer,” Sofer said. “We’re rebranding ourselves as a Jewish cultural revival band. So for a Yiddish tango like ‘I Love You Much Too Much,’ we make it into a Brazilian samba or an Argentinian tango. All of a sudden, you have taken something shmaltzy and given it new energy.” 

Although audiences may feel they already know the Klezmatics, they, too, boast an eclectic, ever-changing catalog. When the Klezmatics return to Disney Concert Hall for the first time since 2011 (the band played Santa Monica’s Broad Stage in 2013), they arrive with the fanfare born of having won a Grammy, performed in more than 20 countries, released 10 CDs and been the subject of the feature-length documentary film, “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.”

Not surprisingly, the Klezmatics are a draw whenever they are booked, according to Johanna Rees, associate director of presentations for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association.   

“From a global perspective, it’s just really easy music to like,” Rees said. “If you are a world music fan or a classical music fan or contemporary or pop music fan or a jazz fan or a punk rock fan, I think it could run that whole spectrum because the Klezmatics really touch upon so many different sounds and styles and energies.”

Befitting the occasion, the Disney Hall gig will likely include several selections from their renditions of Chanukah songs by Woody Guthrie. For their albums “Wonder Wheel” and “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah,” the Klezmatics composed new music for largely forgotten songs that the famed folk singer had composed about Jewish life, spirituality and culture during his years in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Singer Susan McKeown and multi-instrumentalist Boo Reiners, who appeared on the band’s Grammy Award-winning “Wonder Wheel,” will join the fun for the Disney gig.

“The Chanukah music all sounds Jewish and klezmer-y and upbeat, but ‘Wonder Wheel’ is much more what you would think of  as world music,” said Frank London, a founding member of the Klezmatics. “That album really expanded what the Klezmatics were as an American band.

“Since the concert will be during Chanukah, maybe we’ll bring a menorah out on stage,” London added. “That would be fun.”  

Mostly Kosher performs at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 21 at Valley Beth Shalom’s Hanukkah celebration at 15739 Ventura Blvd., Encino. Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door and reservations close Dec. 19. (818) 788-6000, www.jewishmusicla.org.

The Klezmatics: Happy Joyous Hanukkahis at 8 p.m. Dec. 22 at the Wal Disney Concert Hall, 151 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets are $42-$105. (323) 850-2000, www.laphil.com.