The new Brave Old World CD has been released: “Dus gezang fin geto Lodzh/Song of the Lodz Ghetto,” on the Winter & Winter label. The CD is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and should be in the stores across North America. The program has been evolving since 1990, and it reflects BOW’s own experiences over 15 years of performing Jewish music. This album represents a step over into new form of Jewish music–a ‘yiddish song suite’ and is not only of high musical performance quality, but may set precedents for future art forms in Jewish music. I’m calling this new Jewish art form, a ‘bernian suite’ in honor of Alan Bern. For more information read on:

Alan Bern writes:
“The core material consists of songs collected from Lodz survivors by Dr. Gila Flam back in 1985 and presented in her book “Singing for Survival” (U. of Illinois Press). These songs are already amazing in themselves, incredible evidence of people’s ability to resist spiritually when every other form of resistance was impossible. Especially the songs of Yankele Herszkowicz are filled with learned and biting double-entendre, black humor, and stubborn resistance. But our CD is not a “historical” CD, instead we weave
our own music in and out of the Lodz repertoire to create a kind of
collage/montage like an audio film. The music as a whole makes a kind of suite which moves back and forth between pre-War Poland, the present, the Lodz Ghetto, and so on, like a dream-filled night when you’re obsessed with something and keep coming back to it over and over again. It’s why the CD is called “Song” and not “Songs” of the Lodz ghetto – ultimately it is Brave Old World’s song of and to the Lodz ghetto. The recording itself is typical of Winter & Winter’s famous high sound quality and the cover design is beautiful and chilling. I believe that this CD captures Michael Alpert’s singing better than any other I know of, and the rest of us play pretty well on it, too, if I may say so myself (even though I had just come down with whooping cough the day of the recording!) All in all, this is our most ambitious CD yet, and, as I already said, I’m extremely proud of it. I hope that many of you will check it out and help spread the word. We’ve updated the BOW website and you can download 30-45 seconds of all the titles, although that will give you only a glimpse of what happens on the CD. Thanks to all of you for reading my long message about this! Best
wishes to all, Alan Bern