Detroit-born expat troubadour Daniel Kahn’s music mixes Yiddish, English, Russian, German, klezmer, punk, and folk. His projects and groups include The Painted Bird, Brothers Nazaroff, Semer Ensemble, The Unternationale, and Bulat Blues. He was the original Perchik in Folksbiene’s hit Fiddler and Yosl in Amerike. He played Biff in NYR’s Death of a Salesman, the Badkhn in the Netflix series Unorthodox, and was featured in Carnegie Hall’s From Shtetl to Stage. The Ashkenaz Foundation named him the inaugural Theo Bikel Artist-in-Residence, and in 2018 he received the Chane and Joseph Mlotek Award for Yiddish Continuity. The videos of his Yiddish versions of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Woody Guthrie songs have received millions of views. His celebrated new analog solo album, “word beggar”, released on Oriente Musik, is an intimate program of his translations and settings of revolutionary, modern, and heartbreaking poems and songs from such 20th Century luminaries as Gebirtig, Brassens, Molodowski, Dylan, and Cohen, adapted into and out of Yiddish. He is currently harboring in Hamburg.
“Kahn’s great and artful songwriting follows in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits”- DPA
“While many artists in Klezmer (and folk music generally) are concerned with preserving the past, Daniel Kahn seems determined to bend it to his will. . .Without exaggeration, it’s some of the best songwriting I’ve ever come across.” -Jon Patton, Driftwood Magazine.
“Spotlighted on the stage and dressed in black, Kahn sang through a megaphone and switched between accordion, piano and ukelele as he chewed up stereotypes and spit them out in an almost in-your-face challenge to the audience.” -Ruth Ellen Gruber, Ruthless Cosmopolitan
“Everyone’s bouncing and drinking and Kahn sings of revolution, whisky and Zion, inner emigration and parasitism. He ends with the Yiddish folk song ‘Dem Milners Trern,’ known from the Coen brothers film ‘A Serious Man.’ Daniel Kahn, at once moralist and anarchist, is also a man who means it all seriously.'” -Maik Brüggemeyer, Rolling Stone [German] (live concert review)
“He’s like the Jewish Bob Dylan!” -a real old lady at a concert
Hallelujah