meet the beets!
Burikes (boo-rri-kess, meaning “beets” in Yiddish), is a six-piece band based on Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc land in so-called Northampton that plays klezmer, Balkan, and Eastern European folk musics. Rooted in a love for Yiddish language and diasporic cultures, Burikes brings communities together to dance and sing with driving rhythms, lush harmonies, and lyrics to welcome in a besere velt (the world to come!).
Along with playing for simkhes, festivals, and mutual aid fundraisers around the valley, Burikes can be found organizing klezmer workshops and jams and parading through the streets with the People’s Puppet Parade, a community-based, devised spectacle theater production exploring radical histories and communal expressions of grief and joy. Members of Burikes also organize KlezCummington, an annual Jewish cultural festival dedicated to the creation and deepening of Yiddish diasporic music and cultures.
As Emma Goldman never said (though we firmly believe), “There better be some good dance music at the revolution.” Burikes is on it.
ADAH HETKO
Vocals, Guitar
Adah Hetko is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, and dance leader based in Somerville, Massachusetts. She first fell in love with Yiddish song while attending KlezKamp Yiddish Folk Arts program in 2013. In 2018, Adah graduated with an M.A. in Jewish Studies from Indiana University after defending her thesis, “Contemporary Yiddish Women Singers and their Development of Yiddish Identity.” From 2018-2019, Adah worked as a Graduate Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst MA, where she conducted research about Yiddish culture for upcoming exhibits and contributed to Asya Vaisman Schulman's forthcoming Yiddish textbook, In Eynem. Adah also performs with the Yiddish song duo Adah and Allison, and currently serves as Multidisciplinary Programs Coordinator for KlezKanada's 2020 Laurentian Retreat in Lantier, Quebec.
ARIEL SHAPIRO
Accordion, Vocals
Ariel taught herself accordion in 2011 while living on a collective farm in Missouri without electricity. She started playing klezmer music on flute a few years before that in the Brown University klezmer band (Yarmulkazi), but switched to the accordion to be able to play all the parts at once. Now, luckily, she has five other amazing bandmates to play with, but still enjoys getting to switch back and forth between chords, melody, harmonies, and bass lines! She also enjoys adding vocal harmonies and is starting to experiment with foot percussion. When not playing accordion, Ariel can be found tending many community garden plots, biking around town (sometimes while hauling trailers of trash/recycling/compost), cooking large amounts of food, working on community conflict transformation projects, and creating pottery, block prints, and art of all kinds!
CLARISSA LYONS
Clarinet
In 1981, inspired by the reedy and breath-taking possibilities of jazz and jazz manouche, a clarinet was purchased that eventually ended up nestled between two guitars in a closet. Decades later, a ten year old Clarissa opened that case and assembled a clarinet for the first time. She joined the fourth grade band, and started dreaming of the music she would play and the people she would play with. She played in school, started learning folks tunes from her dad, and as a teenager took her first klezmer lessons. She went to college, where she played in the University of Massachusetts Symphony Band, the Smith College Orchestra, and also began experimenting with free improvisational music with two different collaboratives at Hampshire and Smith Colleges. In 2015 she rode her bike from Savannah, GA to New Orleans with a friend, singing songs, playing music, and volunteering with various food access projects. Since then, she has continued learning tunes and singing songs, a path that led her to the backyard foot stomping start of Burikes in 2018.
MATTHEW THORNTON
Cello
Matthew enjoys making noise, playing with cats, and making children say "woah, cool" (like, organically, he doesn't coerce them into saying those exact words). He doesn't enjoy dentists, writing about himself, or thinking about how he's a fragile meaty tube. He is proud of his noisy prog duo Fuzz Puddle's 2019 album Speciecide which was named "one of the best local records of 2019" by a person who is not his mum (The Valley Advocate's Chris Goudreau), his 5 year stint playing with Scottish rock band The Dark Jokes including a surreal tour in Brazil, and his own songs which will be released on an album some time in 2020... probably.
RACHEL LEADER
Violin
As a giddy 5 year old with a bowl-cut growing up in Western Mass, Rachel convinced her parents to purchase her a quarter size violin, envisioning the shear cool-ness of carrying around a black instrument case. At 13, a very nervous Rachel bowed her first klezmer tune Yoshke Yoshke at her own Bat Mitzvah, clueless as to where Jewish music would take her in the future... Although Rachel grew up with the familiar sounds of her uncle and cousins fiddling and stomping to old time tunes in Vermont, it wasn’t until college that she put aside her classical violin chops and was introduced to the banjo, her folk-music gateway instrument! From there, Rachel exploded down a path of bringing community together through folk music, exploring styles including old time, country, cajun, bluegrass, klezmer, Balkan, and Yiddish song. Rachel can nearly always be found rallying together friends to pick tunes by a fire, kick around a soccer ball, or share in nourishing food - on rooftops, gardens, porches, and anywhere she could find a solid perch to share what brings her joy.
OZZY IRVING GOLD-SHAPIRO
Ukulele, Vocals
Ozzy Irving Gold-Shapiro is a curious historian, Yiddishist, musician, and raconteur. They fell in love with Yiddish in 2013 while traveling through (today’s) Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania as a participant on the Helix Project and have continued to work in the Yiddish world, tinkering around in both dusty & digital archives at the Yiddish Book Center. They believe that the past is alive and always changing and love looking in new places for old answers. Outside of Burikes, they have been involved as a researcher, translator, and performer in a number of archival Yiddish-based performance projects that seek to destabilize traditional historical narratives including Jenny Romaine’s “The Revival of the Gravediggers of Uzda,” (a spectacle theatre piece about the oft overlooked neighborly relationships between Yiddish-speaking Jews and Muslim Tatars in Belarus) and “Vu bistu geven?/Where Have You Been?” (a film about the history of the land where Klezkanada takes place.) (Romaine is the a founding member of Great Small Works and the musical director of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok.) They have witnessed the power of music and theater in struggles for liberation, and love forging connections, building community on and off the stage, and creating joyous and raucous occasions for local mutual aid work.