Star with lunch at Kadar's in Klauzal ter. What kind of Real Jewish Budapest experiences? Oh, just the normal ones. Geoff arrived early on Friday, and so we took the man out for some real Jewish Budapest experiences.
![kaizers orchestra whiskey rabbi kaizers orchestra whiskey rabbi](http://www.volxmusik.net/bands/BobDylan.jpg)
a recurring theme in Geoff's songwriting career as the Whiskey Rabbi) and the "Official Theme Song for the 2010 Vancouver / Whistler Olympic Games (The Dead Children Were Worth It!)" (a merry little march tune in referrence to a Britich Columbia medical program for investigating inexplained children's deaths that was defunded in order to make more money available for the Olympic developement in Whistler, BC.) If you took Steve Earle, Moshe Dayan, Clifton Chenier, a squirrel monkey and put them all in a molecular transporter in Winnepeg with a faulty circuit and flicked the "on" switch, you'd get Geoff Berner. He managed a song about Odessa gangster life, an English translation of Mikhl Gordin's "Di Mashkes" ( The Whiskey. The set was impressive - Geoff's thing is to take Jewish and Klezmer folk themes and regurgitate them through the semitic processor of his Canadian-Hebe brain and see what comes out on the other end. Last Friday, Geoff showed up in Budapest to play a supporting set for Norwegian rockers Kaizer's Orchestra. It turned out to be one of the best road trips I ever had in my life, madly cruising the pot-holed roads of Maramures along with Geoff's drummer Wayne Adams and his fiddler Diona Davies, collecting music, drinking way too much, and giving impromptu concerts in peasant yards and Gypsy bars. At first I was wary - I have had too many off experiences traveling the backwoods of Romania with eager greenass folk music tourists in tow, but finally agreed when Geoff offered to rent a car and haul me and Fumie around for two weeks. Geoff and I met a few years back when he asked me to drag his ass around Romania in search of the last generation of Jewish and Gypsy musicians who had first hand knowledge of the music that gets labeled "Klezmer" in the modern world. Geoff Berner is a Canadian singer and songwriter based in Vancouver, BC, who is known in certain parts of the world (Canada, Europe, not too much in the USA) for his sharp, witty songs accompanied by his trusty low-tech accordion.