Five decades behind the kit — from downtown New York’s noise underground to the world’s stages.
Founding drummer of the Grammy-winning klezmer band The Klezmatics.
David Licht has spent half a century making rhythm his trade. Born in Detroit in and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina — where his father, Dr. Norman Licht, taught at Bennett College — he got his first kit at his bar mitzvah and learned from the jazz drummer Sammy Anflick. He came up in Greensboro bands — the Sentinel Boys, Tornado and the Swamp Cats — and the UNCG Big Band, then in met the guitarist Eugene Chadbourne at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, and in moved to New York City to help run the studio Noise NY — walking straight into the city’s downtown underground.
What followed was one of the more unlikely careers in American music. Behind the kit he powered the gleeful chaos of Shockabilly (with Chadbourne and Mark Kramer), the art-rock of Ann Magnuson’s Bongwater, and the Shimmy-Disc noise of B.A.L.L. and When People Were Shorter and Lived Near the Water — crossing paths with downtown players like Ned Rothenberg, John Zorn and Tom Cora.
He’d met the trumpeter Frank London within a week of landing in New York in ; in the two helped found the band that would define the rest of his life: The Klezmatics. Over two decades he helped reinvent klezmer for a new century — “Yiddish soul music,” as the band called it — touring the world, recording with Itzhak Perlman and Tony Kushner, playing Carnegie Hall, and in winning a Grammy.
He stepped back from the road that same year to be home with his family in New Jersey, where he has also spent the better part of fifty years as a painter and craftsman. The hands keep time either way.
A founding member of the Grammy-winning klezmer band that helped spark a worldwide revival — blending Eastern European Jewish tradition with rock, jazz and the avant-garde into something critics called Heavy Yiddish. With David behind the kit the band toured five continents — from New York’s Town Hall to the Jewish culture festivals of Kraków and Berlin — and made records with Itzhak Perlman, Tony Kushner, Chava Alberstein, Allen Ginsberg, Holly Near and Woody Guthrie.
The band David co-founded became the only klezmer act ever to win a Grammy.
David recorded and toured with the violin legend. The PBS Great Performances special won an Emmy and a Rose d’Or.
The Angels in America playwright wrote the liner notes; half the record scores his play A Dybbuk.
A feature film followed the band for three years, on stage and off (dir. Erik Greenberg Anjou). Watch free on Kanopy, opens in new tab
“As the drummer, my job was to keep one foot in the tradition and one foot in the future.”
Five decades of performances — from a club stage to complete Kraków festival concerts and a WNYC studio session. Click or tap to play.
Recent performances in chronological order. Short Kraków selections stay beside their parent event: five cards are excerpts of the full concert directly above them — two from , three from — while three more are separate Shalom at Szeroka performances.
David drums on all three complete studio performances, is introduced at 15:50, and speaks twice during the discussion of klezmer’s newest chapter.
“New revival.”
“Maybe it’s a renaissance.”
Complete live set, 10 tracks,
Tap any album to load it in the player. Open on the web instead, opens in new tab
List view keeps the grouped credits and notes; Covers offers a visual scan.
David’s drumming has been written up, photographed, and — twice — written by his own hand. A few of those pages are gathered here.
100 Years of Rhythmic Power and Invention
David wrote the “Hands On!” column — A Different Kind of Sweat.
Modern Drummer Publications, foreword by Chad Smith
Klezmer in Motion
Full-page portraits of David at the kit with the Klezmatics.
Photographs by Lloyd Wolf, intro Seth Rogovoy, preface Frank London
The Art of Playing Klezmer
David wrote Chapter 6 — “Drums” — the whole chapter, in his words.
Edited by Yale Strom
Around the World,
David is profiled on klezmer — photographed at the kit, in his own words.
Modern Drummer Publications
Record review,
Shockabilly’s Heaven reviewed — naming “percussionist David Licht.”
Spin magazine
“David Licht presides nervously over his drums as if restraining a pack of highly strung dogs with musical bark but caustic bite.”
David has spent half a century as a painter and plasterer in northern New Jersey — a trade he’s plied as David B. Licht Painting & Plastering since , by his own account, “in order to be able to play drums for a living.” The same patience and care, applied to a wall instead of a backbeat. Two trades, one pair of hands.
Painting & plastering