Les Yeux Noirs make music for a homeland of the mind

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      The imaginary community is a popular folk-music trope: consider the U.K.’s Imagined Village, in which morris dancers swing their staves to dubbed-up Caribbean rhythms, or banjo virtuoso Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project, a high-grade hoedown that links the African strains of the Georgia Sea Island Singers to the mountain music of the Appalachians. It’s not hard to see nouveau-klezmer band Les Yeux Noirs as a similar undertaking, with a reach that extends from Django Reinhardt’s hot Gypsy jazz to the plaintive folk melodies of the Balkans and beyond. In the case of brothers Eric and Olivier Slabiak, however, the zone they inhabit has its roots in a very real, if no longer extant, locale: the Jewish regions of Poland, as they were before Nazi blitzkriegs and concentration camps brought them to a lamentable end.

      “Our grandmothers’ and grandfathers’ parents used to speak and sing in Yiddish,” explains Eric, who formed Les Yeux Noirs with his sibling and fellow violinist in the early 1990s. “All this background influenced the way that we wanted to take when we were younger, my brother and I. It is the way we were inspired to play this music: by the family, by its cultural roots. We are Jewish, from Poland. Our grandparents were born in Poland, but we were born in France. We are the second generation born in France, and maybe we wanted to rebuild the country our grandparents left, through music.”

      It’s a typical immigrant story: hoping to spring them into their new culture, the elder Slabiaks enrolled their musically gifted kids in conser­vatory, but the boys had other ideas.

      “When we were around 15, we were not so happy to play classical music,” Eric reveals, on the line from Paris. “We love that music, but we felt it had to be very hard to hit the target; it had to be very long and hard. We always preferred playing music over rehearsing. I remember I used to put French songs and Gypsy songs and Yiddish music on the stereo, and I’d improvise with that music. That was the way I worked the best.

      “It’s maybe not easier than classical music, but it’s shorter, you know?” he adds, laughing. “A song or a traditional instrumental is around three or four minutes, and to learn it and create an arrangement was easier than learning a Brahms concerto or a Tchaikovsky concerto or Mozart. And I think we felt a better sensation. It was the element where we wanted to be violinists and musicians.”

      Another factor was that there’s no improving on the classical greats. Despite their disinclination to rehearse, the siblings wanted to create their own modern Jewish music, which they’ve done: about half of Les Yeux Noirs’ repertoire consists of original arrangements of traditional tunes, while the brothers compose the rest. And while fiddles and accordion are heavily featured, they’re augmented by crisp electric guitar, funky bass lines, and jazzy drumming.

      It’s clear that time doesn’t stand still in the Slabiaks’ homeland of the mind, although some things don’t change. “Our grandparents and our parents made a lot of the road for us,” Eric says. “Every family party was full of singing and playing instruments, so what we do is very familiar!”

      Les Yeux Noirs play the Red Room Ultra Bar on Saturday (February 28) as part of the Chutzpah Festival.

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