What is Meshuggenismo!?
Meshuggenismo! is a salsa band that plays Jewish wedding and bar mitzvah music. Or a klezmer band that plays the most Afro-Cuban-sounding Jewish weddings you have ever heard.
If you’re an Afro-Cuban music aficionado, it’s not really a salsa band, and if you know your klezmer you can tell it’s not really that either. What Meshuggenismo! does is rework familiar Jewish party music into a wide range of Afro-Cuban styles, such as son, cha cha cha, danzon, rumba, bolero (and bolero-cha), mozambique, guaracha, and so on. (Plus merengue, which is not an Afro-Cuban style at all but a product of the Dominican Republic. Quibblers be gone.)
Each of these is its own separate genre in Cuban music, with its own origins, traditions, practitioners and lore. Salsa, to the serious fan, is a historically specific method of interpreting and combining all of those styles that emerged in New York and Puerto Rico in the mid-1960s and hit its peak (in our very subjective opinion) in the middle to late 70s with such brilliant jazz-pop syncretists as Larry Harlow (”El Judio Maravilloso”), Willie Colon, Eddie Palmieri, Rafael Ithier and so on.
Cuba is our promised land and the clave our convenant, and Meshuggenismo! is indeed all about all dance music all the time, so you could be forgiven for calling it a salsa band. But maybe it’s more accurate to describe it the way Moshe Levin does: “Afro-Cuban-Klezmer-Latin-Jazz fusion,” or something like that.
Meshuggenismo!’s brief does include a lot of the same standards you will hear on Klezmorim or Maxwell Street records: “Di Grine Kuzine,” “Araber Tanz,” “Papirosn,” “Firn Di Mekhutonim Aheym,” etc. However, we are a party band; hence what we call “Havana Gila,” and a very Willie-Colonesque “Bashana Haba’a,” and in season, “Ocho Kandelikas,” none of which is precisely klezmer repertoire, even though klezmer bands frequently play them.
And you need a gray area for tunes like “And the Angels Sing,” which Benny Goodman recorded in 1936 from a chart that trumpeter Ziggy Elman (an old klezmer guy) adapted for him from a Jewish standard.
So Meshuggenismo! is about mixing up two almost incomprehensibly mongrelized traditions to come up with something even more mongrelized: kind of new, kind of old, kind of confusing, and hot as hell.