Black Ox Orkestar
Biography
Black Ox Orkestar is a Montreal-based quartet that formed in 1999 to play European Jewish folk music. Filtering traditional Klezmer tunes through a sensibility shaped by indie rock and free jazz, Black Ox infuses these pieces with a highly original approach to arrangement, freely borrowing from Turkish, Balkan and Greek folk idioms along the way. The band strikes a perfect balance between faithfulness to sources and extrapolation from contemporary influences, offering a challenge (both musically and lyrically) to modern Jewish political orthodoxies along the way.
The music Black Ox plays is the fruition of influences that have grounded the various players in their other projects and can be heard as an uncovering of sources and structures affecting other Constellation artists as diverse as Silver Mt. Zion and Sackville. Musicians from both these groups are members of Black Ox: Jessica Moss (violin, bass clarinet) and Thierry Amar (contrebasse) both play in Mt. Zion, and Gabe Levine (clarine, guitar) was chief songwriter in Sackville. Scott Levine Gilmore (vocals, mandolin, cymbalom, drums, etc.) rounds out the core band, while the record also features guest musicians on piano and accordion.
