Detroit-born, Hamburg-based troubadour and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Kahn and New York master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment have been playing, traveling and making music together for nearly twenty years, carrying Yiddish music into new territory – drawing on klezmer, folk, punk, poetry and a tradition that has never stopped evolving.

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After years of collaboration in bands and projects including The Painted Bird and Brothers Nazaroff, the two join forces for Umru/Unrest. Drawing from their recent albums, Kahn and Shulman-Ment pair new music with Yiddish renditions of songs by the troubadours and bards who have shaped Kahn’s musical imagination – among them Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Woody Guthrie and others. 

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In their hands, Yiddish becomes a kind of broken mirror, reflecting despair and repair, exile and ecstasy, loss of trust and wanderlust. Old songs encounter new ones, familiar words become strange again and music crosses languages, borders and generations.

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Umru means “unrest” in Yiddish – an apt name for an evening of songs that refuse to sit still.

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Daniel Kahn is a musician, songwriter, translator, poet and theater artist whose recent trilogy includes the solo album Word Beggar (2021), The Building & Other Songs (2023) with Jake Shulman-Ment and UMRU – unrest (2025) with Shulman-Ment and Christian Dawid. With his band The Painted Bird, Kahn has released numerous albums exploring the intersection of Yiddish song, klezmer, political cabaret and punk folk; Lost Causes received the German Record Critics’ Award in 2011. His other musical projects include The Brothers Nazaroff and The Unternationale.

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Jake Shulman-Ment is an internationally acclaimed klezmer violinist, composer and bandleader whose recordings include A Redele (A Wheel), The Ternovka Sessions and, with violinist Abigale Reisman, the 2025 album Two Strings. His debut solo album, A Redele, was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award. A Fulbright scholar who studied and documented traditional music in Romania, Shulman-Ment received a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Folk/Traditional Arts and has performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and festivals around the world. He has also appeared onscreen in HBO’s Succession, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and the documentary Soul Exodus.

Presented as part of the SF Leonard Cohen Festival and in partnership with KlezCalifornia.

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Also join Daniel for a special workshop for musicians on Friday, November 6, at 11 am.