Album Notes

Think of Davka as a Jewish Shakti.

-Jerry Karp, SF Chronicle
------------------------------------------------------

The wildest, most unhinged live drum solos I have ever witnessed were delivered by the percussionist in a Jewish klezmer funk band. He looked like a younger, disheveled version of Martin Mull. We were all hanging out at Temple Israel in Alameda, wedged between the softball field, the pool, and some sort of daycare center. The fifty-odd folks in the audience sat quietly, upright, in pews. The opening act was a mom-aged women's choir. And here comes Not Martin Mull doing his best Animal-from-The-Muppet-Show routine, thwacking all hell out of his dumbeq and zarb (hand-held bongo-esque drums) and cajon (essentially a box that he sat on) with his fingertips, like that annoying guy sitting next to you in tenth-grade biology who relentlessly drummed on his desk and drove you absolutely bonkers and probably ended up in the army or Dunkin' Donuts or prison.

Or, in this case, Davka. Delightfully overcaffeinated percussionist Kevin Mummey stole the show at Temple Israel, but all four dudes in this Bay Area outfit shredded like the respective Jimi Hendrixes of the violin (Oakland bandleader Daniel Hoffman), bassoon (Paul Hanson), cello (Moses Sedler), and the, you know, zarb (Mr. Mull).

The almost entirely original music this bombastic din generates demands absurd overuse of hyphens -- it's some sort of klezmer-folk-jazz-fusion thing. "It's really a hybrid," Hoffman says over the phone the following day. "Hyphens are the best I can do. The latest thing I put up on my Web site [Davkamusic.com] is -- this still doesn't really cut it -- classical Middle Eastern Ashkenazi jazz."

If this all feels like nitpicking, though, holy-freakin'-shit will suffice.

- Rob Harvilla, East Bay Express.

------------------------------------------------------

"Daniel Hoffman has gracefully engineered an unlikely cultural feat in the celebrated band Davka, merging Eastern European Jewish musical forms with Middle Eastern rhythms and cadences." -Andy Gilbert, San Jose Mercury News