Berkeley Balkan Bacchanal!

Ezgija is Santa Cruz’s newest band, serving up our favorite dance tunes from the Balkans, Anatolia, and beyond! With Shireen Nabatian’s sweet vintage vocals and soaring violin, we explore themes of love, loss, and celebration—presenting forgotten gems from the archives alongside fresh material from her yearly travels in Türkiye. Jonathan Kipp’s accordion playing is fierce and explosive, laced with a moody edge. Hossein Shoiaee adds unexpected twists and textures that keep things electric and genre-bending on guitar. And Evan Stuart holds it all together on bass, with warmth and heart at the core of every tune. Whether it’s a smoky love ballad, a rowdy wedding song, or a mournful lament, EZGIJA brings the spirit of these traditions to dance floors around the Bay Area and beyond with joy, soul, and a lot of sass.

Krekhts: A krekht (קרעכץ) is a crack – a shrill cry of the clarinet or a break in the voice. An imperfection, but one which comes straight from the heart. Krekhts is a rough and ready Berkeley psycho-klezmer band that sifts through the deep drawers of Klezmer history — from the factory floor to the cheapest seats in the Second Avenue cabaret, to the Borscht Belt and the Yiddish radio. They play frenetic bulgars and soul-wrenching ballads in mameloshn (Yiddish), medineh-loshn (English) and loshnkoydesh (Hebrew). Mike Tal (guitar), Binya Kóatz (vocals), Atid Kimelman (clarinet), Aaron Goldstein (drums/vocals), Daniel Goldberg (alto sax), Ilya Kreymer (accordion) and Seng Chen (bass) forge gelt from the Yiddish past to pave the way towards the joyously liberated Yiddish future.