Every now and then an album embeds itself so firmly into your daily life that to hear it years later will transport you back in time. One of these life soundtracks, for me, was Oi Va Voi’s Laughter Through Tears.
It’s 20 years since Oi Va Voi erupted on the music scene with their debut album, bringing the unlikely fusion of klezmer, soul, jazz and club beats to the masses.
It won them two BBC Radio 3 World Music awards, and took the London 20-somethings on a tour of festivals and stages around the world.
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Oi Va Voi (Photo: handout)
But things were never quite the same after that album made them the darlings of world music. Their violinist, Sophie Solomon, left to pursue her own career.
And their singer, KT Tunstall, was catapulted to solo stardom, leaving the band to redefine themselves — just as they had peak momentum. And they parted ways with their record label.
“A lot of things went against us,” percussionist Josh Breslaw says, any bitterness seemingly behind him as he recalls heading towards making a follow-up album as an instrumental band, their identity in tatters without a singer to define them.
“We had to find a new singer to fill the hole left by KT Tunstall.” As the drummer, Breslaw points out, he was never going to be the face of the band.
Tunstall’s honeyed vocals were so hard to replace, that the band auditioned “half the singers in London”.
Eventually they found Alice McLaughlin. But she left, too.
“We were a really good breeding ground for singers, which can be a problem,” says Breslaw, wryly referring to their reputation for finding great singers but not keeping them. “It’s always been the most difficult thing to maintain.”
A great first LP is a double-edged sword for any band, leading to the well-documented Difficult Second Album.
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Oi Va Voi (Photo: handout)
The expectations of fans, and the band’s overthinking of whether to write more of the same, or progress and risk losing support, takes away from the unfettered creativity with which they began.
And for a band such as Oi Va Voi, whose debut is a melting pot of genres, it’s even harder to settle on a sound.
With the “freefall lack of clarity”, they weighed up their options: to continue down the world-music route or go more mainstream, to stick to their klezmer roots and Jewishness, or bring in other cultures — which indeed they did, featuring the Middle Eastern sounds of the Nazareth Orchestra.
“There were five different perspectives, so there was a lot of disagreement,” Breslaw says. “Without a singer who stamps an identity on things, or one main songwriter, it becomes a battle.”
And with the nickname “Hoo-ha”, he owns his part in that. Illness also added to the turmoil. In 2005, after 18 months of touring, trumpet player Jonathan Walton (who goes by the stage name Lemez Lovas) was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Needing a change of scenery after his treatment, he moved to Jerusalem. It was a tough time for everyone, but Breslaw brought the band to Israel to record the second, self-titled, album.
He was proud of the result, not least “the fact that we actually somehow made it,” he says. “I was trying to hold it together.”
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Oi Va Voi (Photo: handout)
At the same time, the band’s close friend and collaborator, the accordionist Jim Marcovitch from She’Koyokh, had been diagnosed with the same cancer. Walton continued touring, then had another scare. He pulled through; tragically, Marcovitch did not.
“Trying to make sense of it all, I somehow associated the stress of touring with the cancer,” recalls Walton. So he quit. “I was heartbroken, but couldn’t see any other way.” Although he left the band “hurt”, he respects Breslaw and clarinettist/vocalist Steve Levi-Kallin for “not only keeping the band going, but making it thrive”.
The band forged on with its shrinking lineup. Eventually, Breslaw and Levi-Kallin were the only remaining founding members.
And now, in celebration of that seminal release, all original members, KT Tunstall included, have reunited for a special anniversary show, revisiting those songs which so poignantly explored identity and asylum — and Jewish music.
With band members now scattered from London to Brighton to Croatia, we conduct the interview over Zoom. Technological issues and the incompleteness of the line-up present —Walton, Levi-Kallin, bassist Leo Bryant, and Breslaw, who acts as moderator (Solomon and guitarist Nik Ammar could not attend) — make for a frustratingly stop-start interview that seems to mirror the dysfunctional history of the band.
Although Breslaw says his initial proposal to reform was met with instant enthusiasm, from everyone.
“However things went, six of us created something that we’re all super proud of,” says Breslaw. “It’s not something we could celebrate or mark in any way without them.”
And the sense that they should celebrate Laughter Through Tears was magnified by the many messages they’d received from fans, about how significant the album had been.
Mine included. “It’s funny,” Breslaw says with a smile, “because you got in touch with me to say that it had been 20 years before it was even announced.”
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Oi Va Voi (Photo: handout)
Given that they last played together in 2005, they were, understandably, trepidatious. “If you’ve worked together closely for five years, there’s going to be some wistfulness and regrets,” says Breslaw.
“When I walked into that room, it was a heart-pumping moment.”
But they had a group hug, and discovered that they were the same as ever, albeit “a little more eloquent and self-aware”. As maturer versions of themselves, and now in their forties, they were able to laugh about the songs that were once fiercely contested.
“We’ve all really enjoyed playing together again,” says Breslaw. “It was amazing how quickly [we felt that] musical connection.
"From the moment me, Nik and Leo played, it felt right. I’ve played with scores of bassists and guitarists since, but nothing quite feels like playing with those two.”
Walton, too, shows palpable pride for what they achieved, and how far the band has come since.
“It’s thanks to their hard work and talent that we have the chance to play these songs again together,” he tells me later. “We did something really beautiful together, and these last few days’ rehearsal remind me just how special it was.”
The album didn’t just make the six members momentarily famous. It also set them on a journey towards discovering their own Jewish family roots, through music.
“The fact that klezmer needed to be a voyage of discovery for each of us, speaks volumes about how obscure it was,” Bryant points out. For Walton — who attended West London Synagogue, loved jazz and hip hop and thought Jewish music was Fiddler on the Roof — it was an eye-opener.
“It was about discovering what Jewish music was. It was a huge revelation,” he says, detailing his already deep interest in gypsy, Hungarian and Russian music. But his lack of klezmer knowledge was lacking, he says, because “it died out when everyone was trying to be as British as possible.
"I remember someone said, ‘It’s great that you play Hungarian, gypsy, and Russian music, but what about some of your own?’ And I was like, ‘I’m not sure what that is.’”
It sparked a period of research for the whole band. Off they went to a klezmer workshop in America, to learn from musicians who had been part of a revival in the 1970s. And then they tracked down bands such as The Klezmatics.
Meanwhile, Levi-Kallin had grown up going to an Orthodox synagogue, where he sang at the services. “It was a good way of learning how to sing in public,” he reflects on how his religious youth prepared him for a career in music.
And those “tugging-at-the-heartstrings, yearning melodies” made their way into Oi Va Voi’s repertoire. As a classical clarinettist, he had never envisaged playing in a band.
“The idea of playing the clarinet in a band in a venue that wasn’t a synagogue was amazing,” he says. “I didn’t know any bands that did that.”
Meanwhile, Breslaw, who had a secular Jewish upbringing and a jazz-musician father who was “dismissive of any klezmer”, was the last to complete the original lineup.
“There wasn’t much of a Jewish aspect to my life before then,” he says. “And then it became that.”
He remembers his first session with the band. Although his drumming stemmed from hip-hop, he found that the beats in klezmer weren’t so far removed.
“They started playing this eastern European music and I didn’t know it at all, but immediately it seemed to speak to me.”
With their different backgrounds, it is natural that they were interested in playing a more experimental form of klezmer that united their various influences. And so, Oi Va Voi began as an instrumental band.
And their sound caught on. By the time they had toured the album, the wave of gypsy music popular across Europe had taken off in the UK, with the rise of Gogol Bordello, and the arrival of genre-blending Israeli band Balkan Beat Box, who formed in 2003.
They also found audiences across eastern Europe and Turkey, which Bryant suggests was thanks to a “sense of novelty that this band from the UK were doing something new with trad instrumentation”.
Meanwhile, Western audiences were enticed by their fusion of unusual instrumentation with rhythms and references from contemporary music.
“The thing which I found really interesting is how people around the countries related to this particular blend of sounds, which touched them, and they felt like it was from their home country,” says Walton.
As they come together to return to this album, it’s also clear just how relevant it remains today, not least its opener, Refugee.
“It stuns me how you can be a member of a Jewish community and not be 100 per cent behind supporting refugees,” laments Walton. “That short-term memory still stuns me.”
What “outraged” Walton at the time was discovering that the home secretary pledging quotas for immigrants and asylum seekers, Michael Howard, was himself of Romanian-Jewish heritage.
“I remember having a moment of cognitive dissonance. How can you disrespect your own family and your own history to such an extent that you’ll publicly disavow their experience and their suffering?”
Twenty years later, little has changed. “The world was obsessed with five millionaires who got stranded on a submarine, and was it the day before that dozens of people died? I’m disgusted.”
When the band had graduated to vocals, it was a turning point in enabling them to ask, ‘What do we stand for?’
“So we’re not just taking old melodies and making them sound groovy, but they’re also things we want to talk about.”
The album allowed them to explore what it is to be British-Jewish, and the theme of identity has remained at their core.
“It’s about feeling like an outsider,” says lyricist Levi-Kallin. Walton adds: “I would be happy if Oi Va Voi music can be for people who feel like they don’t quite fit in.”
For their fans, misfits or not, the show will undoubtedly be a celebration of heritage, humanity and the intoxicating mix of sounds that is Oi Va Voi.
“It’s great to have lots of people who identified with that record celebrate it with us,” says Breslaw. “We can’t ask more than that.”
Oi Va Voi play EartH, in Stoke Newington, London, on Saturday July 22
