Vancouverite Geoff Berner is touring his whiskey-soaked
klezmer music to various watering holes across Canada. On February 20,
he’ll drain liquor bottles and toast “mazel tov!” with The
Whiskey Kisses and IDOW darling Amy Honey at Gus’ Pub to celebrate his
latest album, Klezmer Mongrels.
“The album is about the value of a good bar to get people talking
all kinds of things,” says Berner, calling on the ways to Peterborough,
Ontario. “So the ideas for the songs often come from what people tell
me after the show when we’re all having a bunch of drinks. I travel a
lot. I play a lot of shows. I meet a lot of interesting people, and if
you get them going they’ll tell you the craziest stories.”
City characteristics like architecture, landscape or population can
inspire a writer, but a good bar is paramount. These late-night
fixtures, most often found in seedy underbellies, cultivate
counter-culture.
At the bar, Jameson Irish Whiskey is Berner’s musical muse of
choice.
“I find Irish whiskey is better than cheap scotch and cheaper than
good scotch. There’s a balance there.”
In a city rich with diversity, heritage and culture, Toronto is
notorious for being aloof as listeners—but wasn’t on this
evening.
“We are still in shock, really,” he says, while his band mates Wayne
Adams and Diona Davies banter about 401 East highway signs in the
background. “I really thought I crossed into another dimension; or at
least a different city, anyway.
“There is a temptation to taunt other cities with the fact that
Toronto audiences, who are famously standoffish and arm-folding, did a
conga line. It’s a shaming kind of thing. I might haul it out as a
shaming motivator, if necessary. Don’t make me do that, though.”
Berner describes his own hometown, Vancouver, as a paradoxical
lyrical resource—the contradictions are vast, as there is an extreme
gap between the rich and poor.
“The Downtown Eastside is kind of like where we sacrifice people in
order to appease the materialistic gods that Vancouver worships,” he
says.
“Vancouver is the place where people move west to leave their past
behind and reinvent themselves, so memory itself can be subversive in
Vancouver. There is a general lack of collective memory there.”
Drawing on his Jewish faith, yearning for community and love of
drink, Berner tours extensively throughout North America and Europe,
sharing his vision. His onstage crassness once earned the tag
“potty-mouth Berner,” in contrast to his calm, collected and colloquial
conversational skills.
“It’s an album about mixing, you know, about mixing races, drinks,
people and cultures,” he says. “It’s just the idea that it’s an
anti-purity record. The folk purity that says, ‘Well this is the rules
of this kind of music and you must play it this way otherwise it’s
inauthentic. The record that flies in the face of that, it’s also about
people coming together and sharing difficult ideas with each other.
It’s about the value of a good bar to make those things happen.”
Armed with an accordion, an astute wit and Jewish faith, Berner
creates artful political satire. The musical gypsy has crafted an
impressive discography, including: We Shall Not Flag or Fail, We
Shall Go On to the End (2003); Live in Oslo (2004);
Whiskey Rabbi (2005) and Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride (2007). Klezmer Mongrels taps into the narratives of other
people’s lives. Instead of feeling isolated in his journey, Berner’s
found other like-minded strays.
“I’ve met a lot of people on the road that are of mixed-race
heritage, who are having some trouble figuring out who they were
because of the mix—maybe they’re African American and Swiss, or
Japanese and Norwegian,” he says. “They are proud of all the elements
of who they are. I wanted to make a record that was celebratory of that
instead of bemoaning it in some way.”
Geoff Berner w/The Whiskey Kisses and Amy Honey,
Friday, February 20 at Gus’ Pub, 2605 Agricola, 10pm.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2009.