Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird

Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird (c) Yoni Goldstein

Daniel Kahn was born in 1978 in Detroit. Since studying theatre and music he has lived and worked in New Orleans, Detroit, New York and Ann Arbor and has made a name for himself as a bar pianist, at bluegrass jams and punk circus parades, and as a director and actor.

In 2005 he formed the Klezmer band The Painted Bird in Berlin. The group has released four albums on the renowned Berlin label Oriente Musik. They play what Kahn calls “distorted Klezmer”, a mix of Klezmer, radical Yiddish songs, political cabaret and punk-folk. The texts are partly written by Kahn, but are often adaptations of poems and songs by Jewish writers. He sings in English, German and Yiddish, often mixing several languages within the same song.

“Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird are for Klezmer what the Pogues were for Folk. They ramp up the dance music of the Eastern European shtetl with a good dose of Punk,” as Volker Schmidt wrote on ZEIT.de. And, “He's like the Jewish Bob Dylan!”, one very old lady is supposed to have said at one of his concerts, and she should know.

Discography:
The Broken Tongue (2006, Chamsa Records; 2009, Oriente Musik)
Partisans & Parasites (2009, Oriente Musik)
Lost Causes (2010, Oriente Musik)
Bad Old Songs (2012, Oriente Musik)