Sapling by Baymele

Baymele's debut album, Sapling, embodies the idea of new growth from old roots and is a celebration of diasporic Jewish folk music. The album also features Baymele’s deep study of Polish folk music and their attempts to blend the two styles. Baymele ("little tree" in Yiddish) is a klezmer band rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, featuring Matthew Stein on upper strings, Misha Khalikulov on lower strings, and Dmitri Gaskin on accordion.

Sapling draws from a plethora of historical sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish, providing the group with beautiful melodies but more questions than answers. While many of these sources are light on biographical detail, they offer a glimpse into what life was like for the people who played and heard this music.

One such character, featured in the collection of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, is Motl Reyder. Very little is known about Reyder, only that he was a klezmer violinist from Dubno, Ukraine, who was 70 years old when he shared his music with folklorists. Rather than attempting an unsolvable mystery, Baymele imagines Reyder and his melodies as a canvas on which to paint their interpretation (tracks 4 and 6).

Sapling also draws from the work of Oskar Kolberg, a 19th-century Polish priest and ethnomusicologist who, alongside his team of musicologists and ethnographers, transcribed tens of thousands of melodies and songs. They also recorded copious notes about folk life in Poland: what people ate, how they dressed, what jokes they told, what words were specific to their region. Kolberg published their findings in an 80-volume series entitled Lud ("Folk"). While Jewish music was not Kolberg's primary focus, he did collect quite a few Jewish tunes. From Kolberg’s collection, Sapling features melodies which are explicitly marked Jewish (track 3), melodies that while not marked Jewish are almost certainly Jewish (track 11), and melodies that sound good to a Jewish ear (tracks 1 and 2).