“The playing is tight. The imagination is solidly ephemeral. Catch them if you can!”- Ari Davidow, KlezShack
 

“Nope, definitely not your Zayde’s klezmer – more like Frank Zappa woke up one morning and discovered his Jewish roots. With a nudge & a wink, Bubbeleh takes Eastern European immigrant music into the 21st century, freilaching all the way. If hipsters had bar-mitzvahs, this would be their soundtrack.” - John Schneider, KPFK
Global Village
 

“This band is SO Jewish!” - Andy Dick, comedian/actor
 

“What a great band! I could not stop listening to it! I recommend it highly!” - Johnny "Vatos" Hernandez, Oingo Boingo/Food for Feat

 

Bubbeleh fearlessly (and shamelessly) invents intersections between traditional Jewish folk music and their musical collective unconscious. Mixing bulgars and horas with blistering odd-meter grooves and extemperations. Bubbeleh takes the music of Frank Zappa, The Klezmatics, Tom Waits, Charles Mingus, and Meshuggah, throws it into the crockpot and three days later serves it on some rye bread with an egg cream.

 

Performances from Bubbeleh may slide between moments of sublime bliss to sprawling noise-bent freakouts to simply playing the hora straight into the ground and back again. While they tend to stick to originals, arrangements of traditional music and other assorted popular tunes may randomly appear at a moment’s notice. The band has performed extensively throughout California and Nevada.

 

Bubbeleh was formed by Max Kutner (Lead Guitar Grandmothers of Invention w/ Don Preston) and Philip “Simcha” Rankin (keyboard) in the summer of ’11 while students at the California Institute of the Art.  There they were deeply immersed in the music of many different cultures, especially the music of eastern europe. Which they studied with Miroslav Tadic. It was their shared goal to explore their Jewish heritage filtered through a number of diverse musical and stylistic interests. The result is a wild, often unpredictable beast of sound which bears no resemblence to anything which has come before it.

 

When Max and Philip formed Bubbeleh, they decided to seek out the most adventurous, open-minded performers available. The band features Andrew Conrad on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Lauren Baba on violin, Greg Zilboorg on trumpet, Rusty Kennedy on electric bass and Colin Woodford on drums.