The Unexpected Unity Under Accordion: Uri Sharlin and the DogCat

“If you look in the New York jazz scene,” says Uri Sharlin, “there are a lot of Israeli musicians. I think it’s because we were forced to be more flexible in our listening. We grew up on Russian songs translated into Hebrew, then Arabic music that had been translated, and then so many other things, all mashed up. We don’t hear music in one way.” It’s an openness, a sensibility, and what he brings to Back to the Woods (to be released October 29, 2013 on Folk Dune Records), the debut CD from his band, Uri Sharlin and the DogCat Ensemble.

It’s not an album he originally expected to make. Fifteen years ago, Tel Aviv native Uri Sharlin had a plan. He was set to move to New York to study jazz piano. He’d taken accordion lessons for a year when he was young, then set it aside. But life had a few twists and turns in store for him. He found himself playing piano in a cumbia band. “They kept playing me these incredible vallenato records,” Sharlin remembers.

It made him think that perhaps he had unfinished business with the accordion. On his next trip home to Tel Aviv he ran into his old accordion teacher, who sold him an instrument for $200. Once back in New York “I was gigging the next week. There weren’t many accordion players around then. There was always a new band or theater production. I’m really self-taught on accordion. I had to learn onstage.”

But the instrument proved to be exactly what he needed.

“It forced me to find my voice,” Sharlin explains “I listened to a lot of different things that often contradicted each other. After all, Colombian and Bulgarian music are so different. The only thing in common was the accordion.” As he absorbed more music from around the globe, he wanted a place to put all his influences together. “The only way to make it all work was to compose my own material.”

That was in 2008, and the birth of Uri Sharlin and the DogCat Ensemble. Some of the songs on Back to the Woods, like “Night Swim,” date back to that period, although Sharlin says, “they’ve gone through many forms since then.”
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