Album Notes

A Detroit area native, Daniel Kahn attended the University of Michigan where he studied acting, directing, playwriting and poetry. After finishing his studies he lived, played music, recorded, acted, directed plays and composed theatre music in New Orleans, Detroit, New York and Ann Arbor. He has received awards for his playwriting, poetry, acting, and composing.

In summer 2005 Daniel moved to Berlin, and has became an integral part of the international yiddish and klezmer scene, playing in different groups and musical projects. He soon formed his own band, featuring a rotating roster of some of Berlin and New York's best young players.

"The Painted Bird" concocts a mixture of Klezmer, radical Yiddish song, political cabaret and punk folk, kept together by Kahn's amazing abilities as a songwriter, translator and performer; telling stories of outrageous incidents, poetically dark, tragically humorous and politically incorrect.

"The Painted Bird" has brought "Yiddish Punk Cabaret" to rock clubs, theatres, festivals and shtetls, from Berlin to Boston, Leningrad to Louisiana. The band has been called "The Yiddish Pogues," and Kahn was once described as "someone between Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits - but yiddish." On tour premiering his new album of old and original songs in Yiddish, English, German, and Russian, "Partisans & Parasites," Daniel Kahn challenges the borders between radical & traditional, lyrical & political, east & west, folk & punk, mama loshn & loshn hora.