Avram Patt shifts his straw hat and announces that the next song will be Wild Night in Odessa. Then he goes back to his drums, and all hell breaks loose. The six-member Nisht Geferlach klezmer band erupts into the raucous, sometimes haunting music that one member describes as "Dixieland meets Eastern Europe." Patt, 37, the soloist, explains every song in English before singing in fluid Yiddish, his language of record as a boy in the Amalgamated cooperative houses in the West Bronx.
Nisht Geferlach, which roughly means "no big deal" in Yiddish, wafts into the thick summer night from the steps...
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