Genre-bending performer Ben Caplan brings klezmer-influenced folk music to the virtual Chutzpah! stage
The booming baritone will perform songs off his concept album Old Stock at the fest’s opening night concert
On-stage, Ben Caplan is known for leading a “collective descent into chaos”.
Ben Caplan performs via livestream on November 21 as part of the Chutzpah! Festival (November 21 to 28).
AN OFFENSIVE EXPRESSION by a former prime minister helps explain the title of musician-singer-songwriter Ben Caplan’s album Old Stock. The disc was adapted from Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, a multidisciplinary piece the genre-defying Halifax-based artist co-created that is based on true stories of two Jewish Romanian refugees who came to Canada in 1908.
In 2015, Stephen Harper used the term “old stock Canadians” during a national debate while discussing health care for refugees. While no less insulting today, the phrase is a mild version of the kind of hateful language Donald Trump has woven into everyday speech in the U.S.—making Old Stock feel all the more relevant.
“When we started working on that play in 2015, we were thinking about the way Syrian refugees were being talked about and the way people from North Africa and across the Middle East were being talked about and being treated,” Caplan says by phone. “As we continued to develop the work, we began to hear same rhetoric about Mexicans and we began to hear the same rhetoric about people of various ethnicities around the world.
“This xenophobia has deepened in our culture,” he says. “And for that reason, the work continues to resonate and unfortunately become more and more important.”
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story has been striking a chord with audiences ever since it opened in 2017 in Halifax, with Caplan in the lead role. It has toured throughout North America and beyond, earning critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in New York (where it nabbed a New York Times critic’s pick and six nominations for the Drama Desk Awards).
Caplan—who, as a performer, is a cross between a southern preacher, mad scientist, and Tom Waits-like musical genius—will perform songs from Old Stock and other tunes at the 2020 Chutzpah! Festival in a livestream solo acoustic concert that kicks off the fest on November 21. He was originally scheduled to appear in person for a physically distanced show at the Norman Rothstein Theatre, but recent health restrictions thwarted those travel plans. The performance will be streamed from his Ottawa studio and feature a live interview with festival host Iris Bahr (in her Shosh character).
Ben Caplan began exploring the music of eastern Europe in the Jewish tradition after a chance encounter in Antwerp.
Co-created by playwright Hannah Moscovitch and director Christian Barry, with songs by Caplan, Barry, and Vancouver-based accordion player/singer-songwriter Geoff Berner, Old Stock touches on sexuality, loss, and religion. Caplan comes at the theme of the immigrant experience from a very personal place. One of his grandmothers fled Poland around the late 1880s, a time when Jewish people faced tremendous violence all across eastern Europe and in the western reaches of the Russian empire. “My family would have been fleeing the kind of violence that Old Stock addresses,” Caplan says.
To describe Old Stock as “klezmer music”, however, would be to simplify things. While certainly informed by eastern European music in the Jewish tradition, Caplan’s style doesn’t fall into any one, tidy category.
He was familiar with the tonality and melodies of klezmer music from going to synagogue as a child, but during his musical awakening as a teen, he was drawn to the likes of Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. He can pinpoint the “profound transitionary moment” in his life, musically speaking, to his own travels throughout Europe in his 20s.
“I was trying to catch a train in Antwerp and was wandering through the city and came across this Balkan brass band that was playing in front of a cathedral,” Caplan says. “There was something so foreign but so deeply familiar that it began an awakening to begin an exploration into the folk traditions from across eastern Europe.
“A lot of the orchestration and arrangement of my songs lean heavily into that aesthetic and draw on those traditions,” he says. “But certainly, when one thinks of a classical sense of what klezmer is, I’m more of a folk singer-songwriter.”
The charismatic multi-instrumentalist (who plays banjo, guitar, accordion, clarinet, saxophone, violin, drums, and more) is known for a commanding stage presence. With his booming baritone voice, wild hair, and even wilder beard, he’s the ringleader for what he calls a “collective descent into chaos”. Even virtually in the pandemic era, he aims to create a powerful mood.
“For me, it’s very important to play the room that I’m in,” Caplan says. “Performing live is a different medium than an online concert, so there are different instincts and different aesthetics that inform my work. But it’s been really joyful having this forced challenge of trying to translate my work into a new medium. It’s not what I would have chosen, but it certainly is a rich experience to be challenged.
“It’s certainly been a rich time for me to pull back a little bit, to slow pace of life down and have the opportunity to re-examine my priorities,” eh says. “I would say that despite the horrible context of it all, I am grateful for having been forced to take this time.”
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