$20 cover / $15 students (NOTAFLOF) / 3:30pm doors / 4pm start
Celebrate the release of klezmer and Eastern European folk trio Baymele's debut album Sapling, along with special guest Adah Hetko!
Baymele ("little tree" in Yiddish) is a klezmer band rooted in the Bay Area, featuring Matthew Stein on fiddle, Dmitri Gaskin on accordion, and Misha Khalikulov on cello. Baymele's debut album Sapling celebrates the idea of new growth from old roots. A celebration of diasporic Jewish folk music, the album also features Baymele’s deep study of Polish folk music and their attempts to blend the two styles. Drawing from rich historical sources — including the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine and Oskar Kolberg's collections in Poland — Sapling reimagines beautiful melodies that have traveled centuries and continents, often leading to more questions than answers. While many of these sources are light on biographical detail, they offer a glimpse into what life was like for the people who played and heard this music.
Adah Hetko is a Yiddish singer/songwriter, dance-leader and educator based in Boston, MA. Several of her compositions are featured on the album Levyosn’s Lullaby, recorded with her ensemble Levyosn (Ashkenazi Hebrew for “Leviathan”), and released by Borscht Beat in June 2023, and on the ensemble’s forthcoming second album. Adah has developed her knowledge and skills in many ways, including completing an ethnographic study of contemporary Yiddish women singers (and completing an MA in Jewish Studies at Indiana University in the process), performing with Yiddish song trio Soloveychicks, studying Yiddish song and dance-leading with veteran artist Judy Bressler, and teaching Yiddish songs to students ages 5-95. Adah served as Multidisciplinary Programs Coordinator at KlezKanada for the exciting years 2020-2021, and she is a regular faculty member at Yiddish New York.