Big City Blues / Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird

»Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.« A number of contemporary musicians who live in the liminal world between (at least) two cultures might well second this famous exclamation from Goethe’s »Faust«. On the one hand they make music in the traditional styles of their musical forebears – be that raï, which is often called the »blues of Algeria«; the melancholic Finnish tango; the wistful rembetiko sung by the Greeks expelled from Asia Minor; or the klezmer, which remembers the lost world of the Jewish schtetl.

On the other hand, however, these musicians also live in the present, in modern cities such as London, Paris and Berlin, where they soak up new influences and integrate them into the old genres. In the process they create a new blues of the big city – with one foot in the present and the other in the past.