Wolf Krakowski in conversation with Jeff Janeczko

Once described as a “Kerouac-inspired cult hero” Wolf Krakowski is a self-taught musician who has served diverse and variegated musical apprenticeships with the Original Upper Canada Ragtime Mama Jug Band, with the Winnipeg bar-band legend Stork McGillivray, and with the late Delta bluesman Big Joe Williams. Krakowski takes a highly personal approach to traditional Jewish folk song that has been described variously as “Yiddish Willie Nelson,” “Fiddler on the Roof laced with Bob Dylan,” and “Yentl as done by Leonard Cohen.” But none of these appellations fully capture the sound and spirit of a self-described luftmensch whose professional titles have also included carnie, luthier, carpenter, and cameraman. Krakowski has released two albums on Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series: Gilgul/Transmigrations (2001) and Goryl/Destiny (2002), both recorded with the Lonesome Brothers.

Jeff Janeczko is the Curator of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music and a Visiting Researcher with the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he has taught courses on Jewish music and ethnomusicology. His UCLA dissertation explored Jewish music and identity in the Radical Jewish Culture recording series on the Tzadik label. In 2021 Oxford University Press published his essay, ‘Curating the Virtual Museum: Public Facing Ethnomusicology and the “Curationist Moment”’, in the volume, Voices of the Field: Pathways in Public Ethnomusicology.