A New Hot One

"A New Hot One" finds clarinetist David Krakauer doing what he does best: dragging klezmer out of the wedding hall and into a sweat-soaked, genre-blind future. Krakauer, a leading figure in the Radical Jewish Culture movement that orbited John Zorn's Tzadik label, treats the Eastern European Jewish tradition not as a museum piece but as living, combustible material. His clarinet is the engine — wailing, bending, growling through the instrument's altissimo register with the rawness of a blues harmonica and the ornamental cry of cantorial song. The arrangement throws klezmer's freylekhs and bulgars against funk grooves, downtown avant-jazz, and the propulsive backbeat of a band that clearly came up loving James Brown as much as the old Yiddish 78s. There's joy here, but it's a wild, slightly unhinged joy — the celebratory abandon of a dance that knows what it survived. The track has no vocals and needs none; the clarinet does all the testifying, careening between euphoria and lament sometimes within a single phrase. This is festival music for the adventurous, equally at home in a contemporary jazz club or a cross-cultural arts program. Krakauer's achievement is to make heritage feel urgent — proof that a centuries-old folk language can still throw off sparks when handed to a virtuoso unafraid to break it open.