AAJ: Are you still active with klezmer bands?

BG: Klez-Edge is the small group I'm doing now. It's an offshoot of my band Klezmokum. As Klezmokum, we were not often popular probably because we were, are a synthesis of jazz with klezmer, Sephardic, and Hasidic music, which was not known or respected at the time. We got some gigs in the 1990's because klezmer was in. We were part of a trend for a while. It was interesting. We were playing weddings sometimes and still played creatively rather than commercially, maybe because the people who hired us for weddings were not Jewish and were curious. We played more for non-Jewish people.

AAJ: What kind of trend was that about the klezmer music in the '90s?

BG: It was just in to do that. It was often Protestant people hiring a klezmer band. I've always combined jazz with klezmer and other Jewish music. But for the Jewish festivals, we were too jazzy and when we tried to get on the jazz festivals, we were too klezmer. The box, it always has to do with the box. This is always the fight in my life. What I didn't know at the time: The Black history along with the Jewish history was combined, it was together, for centuries. I didn't know it, so I couldn't defend myself. Then, at my most recent recording with Klez-Edge, I worked with Alex Coke [saxophone, flute], a wonderful blues shouter from Texas; he is not Jewish, but he has a good feeling for the music and had played with Austin Klezmorim, a Jewish band in Texas where he comes from. Among others we recorded two pieces of old klezmer origins. Well, one piece didn't come on the record. I'll put that on a record the next time. This is a piece written in 1911 or even earlier, with jazz elements, by the Joseph Frankel's Orchestra, called "Zikhes" or "Ancestry." It's one of the first modern recordings of klezmer music. That piece has jazz elements in it; for me it was easy to play a jazz interpretation on that. And then another piece on that is called "Yiddish Blues," from the same time. So, there was always Jewish musicians working with jazz.

AAJ: When it comes to touring, is there any change from the '70s to now?

BG: Back in the '70s, where I had 75, 80 gigs a year, that was a great time. There was much more backing for contemporary creative music and socialism going on. Now I'm lucky to get 15-20 gigs a year, even though I feel my music is much deeper, more widespread, yet more focused than it was back then.

AAJ: But you are still touring the US with your music.

BG: Once every year or two, about 7-10 gigs or so. Of course, this is all on hold now thanks to the coronavirus.

AAJ: What music are you playing currently?

BG: I had that fight to get gigs with the jazz klezmer, and I still have that fight. I go on when I can with Klez-Edge. It's my roots, you know. What I'm doing now is rainbow music, a kaleidoscope. It's all kind of things. You can hear all kind of stuff in it. I've used a lot of compositions by a friend—Silke R?llig, a composer from Cologne, Germany. She uses all kind of elements, jazz, klezmer, music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. She gives me melodic lines and I orchestrate them and extend them with free improvisations.

AAJ: What projects are you working on currently?

BG: Actually, it's several things that I'm working on: A duo with flautist