Black Ox Orkestar formed in the summer of 2000, four musicians playing together in Montreal, looking into our common Jewish heritage for sounds that could speak to us today. We started listening to archival recordings of Jewish folk music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, recordings made mostly between the wars, music that sounded strange, old, harsh, rhythmic and dark. We wanted to play music with the same rawness and emotional intensity we heard on those old 78s.
We also had an interest in the Yiddish language, a unique mixture of German, Russian, Polish and Hebrew that for centuries was the everyday speech and literary language of Eastern European Jews. Jewish music had been around since childhood, either filtered through generations of singing relatives or coming at us from modern New York groups. But nothing quite seemed to equal the music we heard on those old records, and the sounds we imagined in our heads.
All four of us grew up playing punk rock, jazz, and experimental music, and now play in bands like A Silver Mt. Zion, godspeed you! black emperor and Sackville. Scott Levine Gilmore, drawn to the history of the Jewish anarchist and labour movements, had studied Yiddish, and had already played in a Montreal klezmer (Yiddish music) group called Luftmensch Farayn (Union of Impossible Dreamers).
As Black Ox worked on learning traditional Jewish and Balkan instrumental tunes, we started to create original song-settings for Yiddish-language folk ballads, which usually were sung a cappella. We got inspired by groups working in other Eastern European/Balkan traditions, like Musikas, Taraf de Haidouks or Kocani Orkestar, as well as by some groups coming out of the klezmer revival scene.