Live Music from 9pm

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Ace diasporist Klezmer band Doikayt play in their homeland of London, in a night featuring some celebrated and exquisite guests. It’s also Simchat Torah – a joyous Jewish festival of dancing and merriment. Special guest Rachel Weston will mark this renewal of Jewish ritual and literary time by leyning from the Torah as well as sharing some favourite Yiddish bangers. We will also be joined by Alevtina Parland, Celeste Cantor-Stephens and Flora Curzon.

NB: This is predominantly a standing event. Please contact us in advance if you require seating as an access need.

From Doikayt, a Yiddish word meaning hereness, Doikayt are a new ensemble of Klezmer musicians, dedicated to the celebration, preservation and continuation of Eastern-European Jewish instrumental music. Bringing together some of the UK’s leading exponents of the Klezmer tradition, Doikayt take their name from the long history of diasporic Jewish politics and culture: the concept of doikayt states that “wherever we live, that’s our homeland”. Through their music, community and activism, Doikayt stand in solidarity with Collective Liberation and the struggle for peoples everywhere to live in safety and peace.

Doikayt are:
Anna Lowenstein – fiddle
Daniel Gouly – clarinet
Josh Middleton – accordion
Yusuf Narçin – trombone
Oliver Presman – tuba
Simon Roth – drums

The band will be joined by the following brilliant musicians:
Alevtina Parland – trumpet & vocals
Flora Curzon – fiddle and bra?
Celeste Cantor-Stephens – trumpet
Rachel Weston – vocals

Alevtina Parland: Trumpeter and singer Alevtina is the leader of Istanbul Klezmer Kapelye and currently a PhD candidate at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with focus on Yiddish music and the Ottoman empire. Alevtina’s career as a klezmer trumpeter began at the age of thirteen when she was recruited to her local Helsinki Kapelye under the leadership of Eva Jacob, aka the Klezmer Mama. Alevtina’s artistic work is the subject of the award winning documentary Everyone here is a Don Quixote by Ekrem Çanak and featured in the upcoming PhD of Simone Salmon, UCLA. Parland woks internationally with the best of the best in the diasporic Yiddish music scene and has taught and performed at festivals including Yiddish Summer Weimar, KlezKanada, Tapis Vert Klezmer RDV. Alevtina’s residency in London is supported by the Nordic Culture Fund.

Flora Curzon: Flora Curzon is an award-winning violinist whose wide breadth of expertise and and interests stretches from baroque to contemporary classical music, Klezmer /Yiddish music to Transylvanian string music and experimental, improvised and live electronics. She is one-half of multi-award nominated string duo Fran & Flora (with cellist Francesca Ter-Berg) whose second studio album, Precious Collection was amongst The Guardian’s top ten folk albums of 2024. Other projects and credits include English Baroque Soloists, the OAE Teac Damsa / Michael Keegan-Dolan (NOBODADDY), Shobana Jayasingh Dance (Clorinda Agonistes). Flora also worked closely with MishMash Productions from 2017-2024 devising and performing in several fully staged ‘chamber-music-theatre’ shows for Young Audiences.

Rachel Weston: Rachel Weston is a cantor, educator, song collector and performer of Yiddish song and Khazones (Ashkenazi cantorial music). For the past fifteen years, she has coordinated and taught Yiddish song and niggunim workshop programmes for the Jewish Music Institute, SOAS, Kleznorth, Klezfest London, WOMAD festival, London and Brighton Yiddish choir, Limmud, Klezkanada, and Yiddish Summer Weimar. Rachel performs Yiddish song and Khazones internationally including concerts in London, Montreal, Toronto, New York, Philadelphia, Weimar, Berlin, Krakow and Chrzanow (Poland), Vienna, and the University of Yale’s School of Sacred Music.

Celeste Cantor-Stephens: Celeste is a trumpet-player, with a focus on the creative and exploratory, spanning a range of practices and traditions, from klezmer to free improvisation. She is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, teacher and activist. Her work is creative and scholarly — sometimes at the same time. Much of her work focuses on human displacement, migration and borders, education, (in)equality, and social change, and on the place of music within this.

The night will also be raising money through Tote Freedom: a mutual aid collective that runs family assistance and community distribution campaigns in northern Gaza City. As an independent fundraising project, 100% of all proceeds directly to the Gaza team.

Photo Credits:
Doikayt – Jamie Reibl
Celeste Cantor Stephens – Stephen Parker
Alevtina Parland – Ekrem C?anak
Flora Curzon – Jan Vaceanu-Staicov