Tumbling Into Light (continued...)
We still have faith in a just peace, a homeland for everyone. That someone will let fall a million billion slivers of utopia onto the desert and that they'll sink in to the sand without crushing anybody. But sometimes it seems impossible and we get shaky in our faith and the terrible night of monsters seems to stretch into the next day and the next, into forever.  But if you play hard enough, anything can break. And we can tumble through into light.

This record is all about that long night and how to get through it. It's about wrestling in the dark and trying to stay warm until we can rise above. It's about empty songs and obfuscating clouds of language. It's about shattering and not necessarily rebuilding. And finally it's about the marvelous encounter that's about to happen.

David Buchbinder and I started talking about this project a long time ago. We began in a non-musical, impulsive place, throwing around a kind of narrative idea together, kind of exploring our obsessions, mutual and otherwise, knowing that the music would flow in later. It was a brand new, very  inspired process and it brought out, I believe, some really honest stuff from us. When we finally brought the songs to the band, it all ended up sounding an awful lot like who we are;  6 people, spending our lives in music of huge diversity and range, combining all the elements into a rough whole. It's full of contradictions and confusions, but who really likes it smooth these days? The lines aren't perfectly straight, some of the stuffing is spilling out, but the feeling is there.
And we're proud to present it to you now in all its troubled serenity.

Tumbling Into Light
Now that an entity called something like The Flying Bulgars has been foisting our musical mayhem on brave souls for over a fifth of a century (!), it's time for some gentle stock-taking and some deepish introspection. What's it all about? Where have we landed after so long a flight? Why are we making yet another recording?
The answers come with contradictory, confusing faces.

We are still a Jewish music-infused ensemble, in love with traditional sounds and styles, but we're also in perpetual love with surprises, ecstatic art and those ephemeral moments of spiritual connection that quicken our hearts and brains. The pull of the old and the tug of the new have never lived in us so intensely, simultaneously.

We still love the pleasure/pain matrix of the Yiddish language, which communicates so well in the visceral sense, but we have come to a place of needing to communicate with an audience more completely, that is, by creating in the language of our particular diaspora; English!

We still love the timeless ache of older songs of the Ashkenazi in their various guises. There's so much that's genuine, glorious and uproarious in the folk songs and theatre songs and union songs and love songs, but we want to do something with our contemporary passions. Yes, we have THINGS WE WANT TO SAY. Scary, for us and our audience, perhaps, but so what? It's good to say what's on your mind sometimes. It can clear the air and bring everybody a little closer. Careful, though, it might lead to dancing.