Golems of the Red Planet's "Surf Masada"

You might think that no thread could possibly connect surf music, John Zorn, and Northern Ohio. But you’d be wrong. Start with the hijaz scale, common to Arab, flamenco, and Ashkenazi Jewish music – and surf rock. Add the knowledge that genre-bending composer Zorn played in a surf band as a teen. 

Since 1993, Zorn has composed 613 instrumental pieces – his three Masada songbooks -- inspired by Ashkenazi music. They’ve been performed as jazz (so authentically that original Masada Quartet bassist Greg Cohen got a gig with Ornette Coleman for his trouble), chamber music, hardcore, acapella, salsa, and Afrobeat. 

Now, Golems of the Red Planet – an Akron, Ohio, quartet that drank from the same well of inspiration as Devo and Pere Ubu, and recently played their first-ever live date at Jilly's Music Room in the Rubber City -- dare to perform the Masada songbook as surf rock, with a cello (and live, a violin) to lend Zorn’s melodies special poignancy. You’ll never hear great Jewish music the same way again. It's available digitally now, out on vinyl on Heyday Again Records June 12.

Golems are the brainchild of bassist Mark Allender (The Pointless Orchestra), who runs the Zorn-themed Masada World website. To help realize his vision, he recruited cellist Matt Reese (Trial of Lucy), moonlighting jazz drummer Bob Ethington (Unit 5), and Bob's Tin Huey bandmate Harvey Gold on guitar and keys. (In the '70s, Tin Huey were prog rockers in new wave clothing who made the mark early Pere Ubu strove to hit.) More recently, Harvey was part of an aggregation Nuggets garage rock compilation curator/longtime Patti Smith sideman Lenny Kaye assembled to play a Nuggets anniversary show at Cleveland's Beachland Ballroom.

Golems' arrangements and approach provide a more highly individuated approach to "radical Jewish culture" than, say, ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky's Klezmer Conservatory Band, or even clarinetist Don Byron's African American take on the masterwork of Cleveland-born klezmer Mickey Katz. Surf Masada opens with an almost prog-rock take on "Hadriel" that gallops its way into a full-on, feedback-laden psychedelic maelstrom. "Mehalel" juxtaposes Gold's percussive picking, his notes slathered in chorus and delay, with Reese alternating counterpoint and unison lines on cello. It's a potent mixture.

On "Hutriel," Ethington takes a tricky and surprising approach to subdividing the beat while Reese states the theme, then Gold applies a fuzzy tremolo, giving way to a raga-like section where the drums play tabla-like accompaniment. What sounds like radio transmission noise (but proves to be a text from surrealist theorist Andre Breton) intrudes on the hauntingly spectral opening to "Paschar/Tzofeh," before the drums kick off a propulsive beat behind the theme statement. "Ziphim" starts with a nervous-sounding cello line; myriad dynamic shifts accompany the theme and variations, culminating in a series of descending, Who-like chords over a thundering drone before the recapitulation.

"Damam" opens with an intro straight out of a James Bond soundtrack, and includes a brief but memorably clanking, melodic bass line worthy of Roy Wood of Move/ELO/Wizzard fame (who made such a hallmark in his heyday). Pick to click here is "Hazor," with its catchy, repeating three-note hook, but "Re'cha" is no slouch either with its mutant Bo Diddley beat. 

What can one say? In a moment when weird instrumental music seems to be in vogue -- I'm looking at you, Angine de Poitrine, Khruangbin, and LA LOM -- these Buckeye boys might just have what it takes to make it. If not to Carnegie Hall, at least to Brooklyn.