Cover of Nu Haven Style.
“Turetskaya,” the opening number on the Nu Haven Kapelye’s new album, Nu Haven Style — to be officially released the day of the klezmer orchestra’s annual concert at Congregation Mishkan Israel on Ridge Road in Hamden — gallops out of the gate, with horns, strings, and winds belting out the melody in unison while the rhythm section surges beneath them, an irresistible force, exploding with emotions, carrying, as so much klezmer does, simultaneous senses of deep happiness and sadness together.
The Nu Haven Kapelye this month is celebrating both Hanukkah and 25 years of klezmer at CMI with two concerts. The first, centered on Hanukkah, happens at Best Video tomorrow, Dec. 14, at 7 p.m. The second marks the ensemble’s 25th Dec. 25 concert and doubles as a CD release party for Nu Haven Style at CMI, at 4 p.m.
Brian Slattery Photo
David Chevan.
Nu Haven Style was recorded over a couple days about a year ago, but “we figured this” — the 25th anniversary of the concert that started it all — “was the time to release it,” said David Chevan, bassist and bandleader for the Nu Haven Kapelye. The album’s release taps into the histories of both the annual concert and the Kapelye as an ensemble.
The concert and the musical group assembled for it started off in 1998 as more of a free for all, which continued for a few years. “I tried to have this crazy wide-open-door policy,” Chevan said of encouraging musicians to participate. People could play with just one rehearsal, or even just play on Dec. 25. The idea was to have a “project that brings people in, introduces them to the music” — that is, klezmer, the music rooted in Eastern European Jewish culture that found its way to the United States a century ago, riding waves of Jewish immigration.
Chevan kept and still keeps that door open. But the ensemble started to solidify over the years as well, developing its steady core members within those who played more occasionally. Also, “I started getting these calls,” Chevan said, from congregants requesting that the group play for bar mitzvahs, or for a klezmer service. He started thinking a little bigger, more organized, and hearing a big sound for a klezmer ensemble. He started writing parts for mixed ensembles of strings, winds, and horns, bass, accordion, and percussion, and learned, “through failure and success,” how to arrange, and be flexible with those arrangements — “being a democratic person who believes in equality,” to make sure all the players got equal time, no matter who showed up.
Fast forward, and 25 years later, the ensemble is playing its 25th show on Dec. 25, a streak that not even the pandemic could interrupt. It’s now a fully developed band. To stay true to its more anarchic origins, Chevan is inviting people throughout the history of the Kapelye and the concert to sing and play for this anniversary. The goal, then as now, has always been to “make it work really well, and fluidly, with musicality, with joy and fun for everybody.”
Helping Carry The Culture
The Kapelye’s concert is happening as Israel continues its military campaign in Gaza, which casts the music in a different light than it might have in more peaceful times. At the same time, because the concert and the ensemble have a 25-year history, it’s not the first time the group has playing during ongoing strife in Israel. Chevan also spent a year there from 1972 to 1973 when he was a kid. “We left, and a month later, the Yom Kippur War happened,” he said. His memories are of a place of safety, but “there were signs that things were brewing.” The Munich massacre happened while he was there.
The sense of history, and a lived history of strife, has given Chevan a certain perspective as he navigates the current politics and emotions within the Jewish community, ranging from support for to horrified reactions against Israel’s assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with a panoply of complex feelings in between.
“I play klezmer for people who want to hear klezmer,” he said. “I like to think that the thing about music is that it can be the one thing that keeps us all together. We have a lot of melodies in common, and I’ve seen it in the Jewish rallies after October 7. It didn’t matter whether you were Orthodox or Reform or Conservative. You knew those melodies and they spoke to you. I think that’s a way I can serve.… What I can do is create a safe space for everybody.”
Chevan takes seriously the idea of the Kapelye as preserving and carrying forward Jewish culture, and so is planning on doing more shows with accompanying workshops to show people how to dance to it — which is what most of the klezmer repertoire is intended for. Last winter the Kapelye did a show with Steven Weintraub, who performs and teachers klezmer dance styles internationally. For the upcoming Dec. 25 concert at Mishkan, they have booked musician and dancer Adrianne Greenbaum to lead dances, to “demonstrate the steps” and “teach by doing.”
But Chevan is also seeing some of the fruits of a 25-year labor of love. He has heard musicians come into their own as part of the Kapelye, like Anna Reisman on flute. He has also seen young musicians — like Yoni Battat — who first discovered klezmer with the Kapelye go on to have careers playing Jewish music.
“It gives that real Jewish l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation,” Chevan said. “We probably have at least one or two kids who are 12 or 13 playing with us, and then a member who’s 90, and everybody in between.”
And powering it all is the deep tradition of klezmer itself, and its ability to express big and complex emotions, in its rhythms, in the scales it uses, and in the style in which it’s played. “There’s these moments where you can’t tell if the music is telling you to be happy or sad. There’s this really interesting level of ambiguity. It speaks to a certain zeitgeist that some of us want to capture in our own playing,” Chevan said.
It’s in the Kapelye’s music, which can be heard live on Dec. 14 at Best Video and on Dec. 25 at Congregation Mishkan Israel. And with the impending release of Nu Haven Style, it will be able to be heard everywhere.
It has been my pleasure to play with the Nu Haven Kapelye since 2004. In the first few years we mainly performed the annual December 25th concert. However, by 2008 or 2009, we were being asked to perform at many more venues and we generally had at least one performance per month!
I have learned a great deal about this music from our Artistic Director, David Chevan!