>>PREVIEW
GEOFF BERNER
Friday, February 9
Ironwood
Some people are born to accordion. Others have accordion thrust upon them after a drunken rant forces them to put their money where their mouth is. Pianist Geoff Berner falls into the latter category.
"I was just drunk at a party and I was… angry at guitar players because they could go busk on the street," he says. "I was making an empty threat. I’ll show you all, I’ll get an accordion. Then somebody at the party (said) ‘Yeah, I’ve got one. You can have mine.’
"And that was that. I actually had one. I just started to play it and it just grew these weird invisible tendrils that grew into my brain and took it over."
Making the transition from piano to accordion required recalibration on Berner’s part. The piano is a hybrid percussion-string instrument while accordion is a wind instrument. By the time Berner got his head around that concept his conversion was complete. "The accordion is not a piano that you hang on your chest. It’s more like 1,000 clarinets," he says.
For many, the accordion comes with more baggage than the enormous case that it takes to lug the thing around. Legions of polka outfits, the house bands from almost any French bistro and gypsy travellers have all coloured our notions of what an accordion is capable of. Many preconceptions of the accordion are entrenched in folk music history.
For his part, Berner has chosen to express himself in the Eastern European Jewish tradition of klezmer. That’s not to say he is trying to revive a long lost musical art. In self-deprecating fashion, Berner claims that his lack of technical competence on the instrument ensures that. "I’m never going to win any accordion playing contests," he says. He has turned his self-proclaimed lack of talent into an ethos.
"I’m definitely opposed to any idea of being authentic as a folk musician," he says. "To me people who want to preserve a folk style, it’s kind of like laminating. How is it going to breathe under all that lamination?"
With the help of violin player Diona Davies (Po’ Girl) and percussionist Wayne Adams (Zolty Cracker), Berner is giving klezmer a modern twist. His music beats with a definitively organic pulse. Recording live off the floor, Berner’s albums bring an unabashedly raw sound that ebbs and flows with the subtle dynamic of something that is almost living. While Berner’s hands provide the droning wheeze of the squeezebox, his sardonic lyrics and sneering delivery eschew a pristine sound in favour of something far more interesting.
"Without that sneer, without that element of subversive speaking truth to power, what you’ve really got is sanitized folk music," he says. "You got nice, sweet folk music that everyone can enjoy, which is actually not folk music. That’s middle-class music. That’s folk music dressed up in its Sunday best. I feel like I stand with the people who are genuine folk music players."
Berner’s latest album, The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride, supports his claim. He may not be playing traditional klezmer, but that doesn’t mean he has forgotten tradition. Berner says, weddings have always played a strong role in klezmer music and the matrimonial thematic on the album runs much deeper than just the title.
"There were guys who were klezmarine who were knock-about travelling disreputable guys, with no serious musical training and they played weddings. You didn’t want them to marry your daughter," he says. "That is where this music, klezmer, comes from, so it made sense to do an album that dealt with weddings and brides."
From the off-kilter shuffle "Widow Bride" and the acidic waltz of "Weep, Bride, Weep" to the subdued lament of "Traitor Bride," Berner has turned the idea of wedding music on its ear. "It just started to take shape as an album that had some thematic unity," he says. "The symbol of the bride being the unifying idea – the bride has always been a symbol of happiness and hope and prosperity for the community."
On The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride, Berner takes the symbol of the virgin bride and has his way with it. In this musical world, white gowns become ironic funeral wear, mourning widows are touted as perfect wives and the happiest days of their lives are tarnished by anal sex among the wedding party. This is not a traditional wedding to say the least.
"You gotta not be too worried about that," says Berner. "The main thing you should be worried about is, do you feel anything and are the people listening to it – are they going to feel something? Where are the ideas that are going into this and do they mean something to me?"
"If you feel it and mean it then people hearing it will get it."
The wedding march
On his latest album, The Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride, Geoff Berner reworks the tradition of klezmer music and wedding imagery. Like many of us, Berner has attended his fair share of weddings. They might not have ended in twisted despair or ironic disillusion like the ones in his songs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t all have a story of their own.
"I went to a born-again Christian wedding where every member of the bride and groom’s party gave a speech about how it was that they had come to Jesus and stuff like that," says Berner. "And we were waiting to eat. That’s a bad wedding. I remember thinking if this was a Jewish wedding, we’d be fed by now." |
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