Music
Press
"Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience." - - Ruth Ellen Gruber, Ruthless Cosmopolitan
"When it's comes to wicked freaky Klezmer music, the Americans were always way ahead. Daniel Kahn, born in Detroit, living in Berlin, belongs to this caste of Yiddish music agitators. An absolute must for lovers of unusual, intelligent, challenging, exciting folk music and a blast at every instant." - , - Klaus Halama, Sound & Image
"Everyone's bouncing and drinking and Kahn sings of revolution, whisky and Zion, inner emigration and parasitism. He ends with the Yiddish folk song 'Dem Milners Trern,' known from the Coen brothers film 'A Serious Man.' Daniel Kahn, at once moralist and anarchist, is also a man who means it all seriously.'" - - Maik Brüggemeyer
Discography
The Broken Tongue (Chasma Records 2006;[2] re-release Oriente Musik 2009)
Partisans & Parasites (Oriente Musik 2009)
Lost Causes (Oriente Musik 2010)
Bad Old Songs (Oriente Musik 2012)
Photos
Bio
Daniel Kahn is an award-winning singer/songwriter, theater artist, writer, teacher, composer, Yiddishist, translator, and multi-instrumentalist.
He has worked as a journalist, lectured and taught workshops on songwriting, translation, performance, politics, and poetry in the US, Germany, Canada, Poland, and Russia. He is a regular faculty member at KlezKamp, Klez Kanada, and Yiddish Summer Weimar, and director of the Klezmer Bund in Berlin.
Background
A Detroit area native, Daniel attended the University of Michigan where he studied acting, directing, playwriting and poetry. He was awarded the coveted Hopwood award three times for his writing.
After finishing his studies he lived, played music, recorded, acted, directed plays and composed theatre music in New Orleans, New York, and back home in Michigan. Between 2001 and 2005 he co-founded the Earthwork folk music collective and produced four critically acclaimed solo albums.
The Painted Bird
In 2005 Daniel moved part-time to Berlin and formed the band "The Painted Bird. Named after Jerzy Kosinski's novel, the band has been called the Yiddish Pogues. Their music, something Kahn calls Alienation Klezmer, is a concoction of traditional Klezmer, Kahn's original songs, translations of Yiddish songs, Brechtian political cabaret, and multi-lingual punk folk. His primary engagement with Yiddish song as a translator, adaptor and performer is to re-contextualize traditional material into contemporary frameworks.
Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird have released four albums to near universal critical praise. Their third album, Lost Causes won the German Record Critic's Prize as record of the year in 2011. Their latest album, "Bad Old Songs", released in January has already won a spot on the quarterly "Best List" for 2013.
Touring
Performing throughout Europe, Russia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, and North America, Daniel has performed at most major Jewish and world music festivals and has regularly worked and collaborated with artists including Michael Winograd, Dan Blacksberg, Jake Shulman-Ment, Michael Alpert, Alan Bern, Adrienne Cooper z''l, Steve Greenman, Sarah Gordon, Frank London, Vanya Zhuk, and Psoy Korolenko, with whom he has the polyglot politpop agitprop project The Unternationale.
Links
