The Kosher Red Hots open the rich treasury of Jewish music—whirlwind Eastern European klezmer dance tunes, Yiddish musical theater, swing, cabaret, and Spanish flavored love songs of the Sephardim. The band has inspired dancing in the aisles from Reno's Artown Festival to Alaska's Inside Passage on a cruise with Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home companion.

The Kosher Red Hots bring you a spirited clarinet, a powerhouse accordion, a master bassist and guitarist, and an adventurous vocalist who sings in Yiddish, Ladino, and English. Together they play music that turns from rollicking to tender while they weave tales, humor, history, and just plain fun into each concert.

The Kosher Red Hots are committed cultural educators with post-concert talks, workshops, and master classes. This red hot group has been honored with a Washington State Folk Arts Fellowship and a Washington State Music Teacher of the Year Award.

Get ready for dancing in the aisles!

Appearances

Concerts and Festivals

Artown Festival, Reno, NV (2007)

Spokane Symphony Education Series (2007)

Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA (2007)

A Prairie Home Companion Cruise to Alaska with Garrison Keillor (2006)

Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, Langley, WA (2006)

Peninsula College, Port Angeles, WA (2006)

CenterStage World Music Series, Spokane, WA (2004)

Art on the Green, Coeur d'Alene, ID (2000)

Radio

NPR (National) A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

KUOW (NPR Seattle) The Beat feature interview and live studio performance (2006, 2007)

KBCS (Community Radio Bellevue) live festival broadcast/Northwest Folklife Festival (2006)

KBCS (Community Radio Bellevue) The Old Country hour-long program on Popular Yiddish Music (2005)

Theater

The Life and Times of Molly Picon, Yiddish Theater Legend

A Hanukah Party in Eight Unorthodox Acts (2001, 2006)

Seattle Fringe Festival Yiddish Erotika, A Musical Cabaret (2003)

Sheila Fox

vocals, clarinet, percussion

Sheila has toured the United States and Russia performing Yiddish theater and folk songs, rarely heard Ladino romanzas, jazz, and klezmer, the music her great grandfather played. Her innovative CD collaboration, Our Songs, has aired on NPR. Sheila Sheila is the recipient of a 2007 Washington State Arts Commission Folk Arts Fellowship Award. Her passion and commitment make her an excellent cultural educator with interactive workshops for public school educators and organizations such as Seattle's Middle East Peace Camp for Children.

“Sheila Fox is a great verbal communicator. A wise storyteller and a Betty Boop with a huge voice. She takes joy in every note.”

—Sandy Bradley's Potluck

Sheila has studied Yiddish with NEA National Heritage Fellow Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, jazz with award-winning vocalist Greta Matassa, and Ladino with local Sephardim. She has worked with New York Yiddish greats Zalmen Mlotek of New York's Folksbiene Theater, Clare Barry of the Barry Sisters, and Adrienne Cooper. Having grown up in Santa Fe, New Mexico with its Crypto-Judaic heritage, Sheila experienced first hand the Ladino tinged Spanish language, music, and customs that have survived from the Conversos of the 1600s.

Liz Dreisbach

clarinet, saxophone, recorder

Liz was hooked early on by the folk clarinet, fueled by a father's obsession with German oom-pah and a Slovakian grandpa who urged her to play the polkas that came out of his Victrola. Liz Her broad musical interests led her to intensive clarinet study and to an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. Later, she worked for Seattle's Northwest Folklife Festival programming over 1,000 multi-ethnic music, dance, and storytelling performances at the country's largest free folk festival presenting the wealth of cultural communities in the Pacific Northwest.

“The standing-room only audience adored clarinetist Liz Dreisbach's introduction to klezmer music. Rightly so. She was funny, she was smart, and she played like. . . well, a slightly crazy klezmer clarinetist.”

—Spokane Spokesman Review

Liz has played at the Hong Kong Folk Festival, the Vancouver Folk Festival, for can-can girls, aerialists, and jugglers including The Flying Karamazov Brothers, and at bunches of dance halls across the country and in England. Liz also directs The Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band, whose cult following loves the enthusiastic Americana of classic marching band music complete with sedentary majorette.

Eugene Jablonsky

double bass and guitar

Eugene's love for all kinds of music began early with his grandmother and pianist mother's household mix of Yiddish songs, Cole Porter, Chopin, and chamber music parties.

After graduating in double bass performance from the Curtis Institute of Music, his diverse musical talents have taken him to England, Austria, and Hungary with the Spokane String Quartet and to back road Wild West honkytonks in Utah and Montana.

Eugene gets around. He has played with jazz pianist Marian McPartland, A Prairie Home Companion's Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, Gunther Schuller and The New England Ragtime Ensemble, swing violin legend Johnny Gimble, jazz violinists Darol Anger and Johnny Frigo, the Spokane Symphony, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, and The Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra.

Laurie Andres

accordion and piano

Laurie is a defining force in American old time community dance. He has played New England contra Laurie dance and British Isles dance music at most major dance events in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He was a featured performer at the Carrefour mondial de l'accordéon in Montmagny, Quebec.

Along the way, he was captivated by Yiddish folk music—part of his musical DNA since childhood when his grandmother read her Yiddish poetry to him. He has worked with many traditional musicians including klezmer clarinetist Margot Leverett; NEA National Folk Heritage Fellow Bob McQuillen, and with Yankee fiddler Rodney Miller.