A life in rhythm
David Licht has spent half a century making rhythm his trade. Born in Detroit in 1954 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 1978 met the guitarist Eugene Chadbourne at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, and in 1985 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.
Then, in 1986, he 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 2006 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.
