Bagels & Fraylox Klezmer Band: News

If you have a taste for some klezmer music and good food, plan to be at the Corner Pocket restaurant in Williamsburg's New Town at dinnertime on Thursday, Aug. 27. Bagels & Fraylox will play on the patio from 7-9 p.m. as part of the restaurant's popular summer series of dinner concerts. We've done this for the past couple of years and always had good crowd and good time. We're all looking forward to the evening, and hope to see you there!

The address is 4805 Courthouse St.
Williamsburg, Virginia and the website is www.thecornerpocket.us For reservations, call (757) 220-0808

Check our calendar page for details of concerts coming up this fall and winter!

Bagels and Fraylox Klezmer Band is hosting a party to debut their new CD “O Daddy!” at Squires Gourmet Deli on Saturday April 18th from 7 until 9PM. The band will be performing selections from their new CD which features band member Roger Schultz’s debut as a Yiddish vocalist.

Squires is located at 6610-K Mooretown Road in Williamsburg, opposite the Sentara Williamsburg Hospital. Directions can be found at www.squiresgourmet.com/ . Squires will have available their outstanding fare of carefully chosen imported and domestic fresh and prepared foods, beers, wines and cheeses as well as their simple but elegant gourmet sandwiches, soups, salads, and accompaniments.

We're celebrating our new cd, "O,Daddy!," with a party April 18, 7-9 p.m., and concert at Squires Everyday Gourmet, a wine shop and cafe near Sentara Williamsburg Hospital. There'll be live music by us, special cd-purchase deals and other fun stuff. Check back here for details.

Check out our "links" page for links to three YouTube videos taken from our Williamsburg Library Theatre concert in November.

Our new cd "O,Daddy" is now available online at CD Baby. You can link to that site from our "buy" page on this website. But if you live anywhere near Williamsburg, Va., please come to our upcoming cd release party and buy it there in person. Information about that event is coming soon to the Calendar page of this website.

Our brand new cd, O,Daddy!, has arrived just in time to be on sale for the first time Wednesday at our First Night Williamsburg performances (see calendar). Recorded at a great studio in Richmond and at the Williamsburg Library Theatre, the new disc sounds great, looks great and is a wonderful snapshot of how we sound now, after 11 years playing together. We hope to see many of you at First Night.

Even if you can't be there, please check out the photos link on this website. We've uploaded a bunch of moments captured from a video of our recent Williamsburg Library concert.

And there's also a shot of some so-far-unidentified fans who made their own Bagels and Fraylox T-shirts and wore them when we playing in Newport News on the first night of Hanukkah.

Enjoy!

Thanks to all of you who came to our concert Sunday at the Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre. We had a great crowd and a great time. We're eagerly waiting to hear a rough mix of the recording we made in preparation for our next cd. We may include some live cuts from the concert along with material we plan to record later this month at Richmond's Minimum Wage Recording studio. If you can't wait for the cd, you can see us Saturday, Nov. 22, at the Williamsburg Farmers Market in Merchants Square. Let's all hope for warmish temperatures.

Thanks to Nikitov, a fantastic band from the Netherlands, and the phenomenal Klezmer Conservatory Band for helping us work up a great Yiddish drinking song for our upcoming concert at Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre. The inspiration to do the song came from a wonderful gypsy-jazz-inflected cd by Nikitov. Their arrangement is so good that we adapted it for our instruments and enlisted our clarinetist, Roger Schultz, to sing the lyrics for his debut as a klezmer vocalist. Since the tune is a rollicking drinking song, we wanted to understand the lyrics in English. A translation was elusive, but an Internet posting by accordionist David Gussman got a response from Klezmer Conservatory founder Hankus Netsky: the booklet for one of their cds contains a nice translation. Turns out the words -- by the late Yiddish poet Yoysef Kerler -- are as cool as the Nikitov arrangement:

"When I take a little drink of wine,
Everything sparkles and shines.
I throw away the empty bottle
And start dancing.

Oy, Oy, sweet as honey
Take my hands.
It's as if my feet are braiding bagels
And my soul is on fire!

You can find Nikitov's version on their "Vanderlust" cd (Google the band and the cd name to find a source to buy it as well as the band's website). A very different arrangement of the same tune -- and all the lyrics -- are on the Klezmer Conservatory Band cd "A Taste of Paradise."

And please consider checking out our take on this wonderful song November 9 at the Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre.

Thanks to all who filled the tables last night at the Corner Pocket patio. We loved having lots of friends in the audience for our lazy, hazy, crazy hot time on the last night before Labor Day.

Thanks to all of you who came to our show at the Williamsburg Farmer's Market on May 24, 2008. There were hundreds of people-- and nearly as many well-groomed, klezmer-loving dogs! Thanks also to Dave Scherer for snapping a nice photo, which we've added to the photo gallery on this website. We hope to see just as many folks at Yorktown Farmer's Market in July. See the calendar for details.

Hi everyone. If you want to hear how we sound, please click the Music button to the left. There are now actual links to big chunks of our greatest hits!

In case you missed it on the calendar, we're playing in Merchants Square this Saturday, May 24, 9 a.m.-noon.

Hi everyone! Welcome to our new website. The music clips aren't quite operable yet, but we're told they'll start to work soon.