S3E48 Can Americana Music Be Jewish? (Mark Rubin)
Welcome to The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture (previously The Genesis).
Mark Rubin is a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, bassist, tuba player, bandleader, producer, and educator whose work sits at the crossroads of American roots music and Jewish culture.
Mark has spent more than three decades moving across musical boundaries: bluegrass, country, western swing, Tex-Mex, polka, klezmer, Roma brass, Cajun music, punk, and old-time American string-band traditions. His own shorthand for his recent work is "Southern Americana from a Jewish POV."
He first became widely known as a co-founder of the Austin-based Bad Livers, one of the defining bands of the 1990s alternative bluegrass/proto-Americana scene. Mark helped create an old school rootsy sound with punk energy. Rubin has been described as a "legend from back in the alt country days," known for his pioneering work with Bad Livers in Austin, a band that helped usher in a generation of alternative bluegrass and acoustic bands.
Mark and I talk about how his Americana punk creativity feeds his Jewish identity and vice versa.
Alongside his Americana work, Mark has built an equally substantial reputation in Jewish music, especially klezmer and Yiddish cultural revival circles. He has performed and collaborated with major figures and ensembles including Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars, The Other Europeans, and Andy Statman, and he spent two decades on the faculty of KlezKamp. He has appeared as a performer and teacher at many significant major Jewish and klezmer festivals, including Toronto's Ashkenaz Festival whose Director, Eric Stein, appeared on this podcast back in season two - episode 23.
Over the last decade Mark Has stepped forward under the moniker Mark Rubin, Jew of Oklahoma. That project brings together the strands of his career: Southern roots music, Jewish memory, political protest, gallows humor, and personal identity.
Mark and I talk about his being the Jew from Oklahoma - both in terms of his personal biography and how it's relevant to his worldview, but also as an in-your-face stage name and what that has to do with his own personal brand of Jewish expression.
Parts of Mark's story as a Jewish artist are very much particular to his experience as a Southern Jew. But as you'll hear, he is working through, overcoming and singing about the kinds of challenges faced by so many Jewish artists all over the world, especially after October 7th.
I had a lot of fun talking to Mark, and I hope you enjoy listening to this person who the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History has called him "one of the great American Jewish musicians of our time."
Finally, if you like what you hear on this podcast, and especially if you are a regular listener - please give back just briefly by going to our show to follow or subscribe and even better - offer a comment about what you appreciate. It helps us broaden our audience and supports the work we do at Art/Lab. Thank you.
The Art/Lab Podcast: Conversations About Jewish Arts and Culture is conceived of and created by Rabbi Josh Rose, and is a program of Art/Lab: Jewish Arts and Culture. Theme music by Rabbi Josh Rose.
Links:
Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture artlabpdx.org
Mark Rubin's Website: https://www.jewofoklahoma.com/
The Weitzman page on Rubin: https://theweitzman.org/events/mark-rubin-concert/ [https://theweitzman.org/events/mark-rubin-concert/]
Mordecai Gebirtig: https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1076
