Sam Sadigursky's 'The Solomon Diaries': Beautiful Debris

At the Brooklyn club Barbès on Sunday afternoons, clarinetist Sam Sadigursky and accordionist Nathan Koci play music that leaves their listeners curious. "This was nothing like what I expected to hear," people tell them after shows. When Sadigursky mentions his duo's instruments, most listeners jump to conclusions about klezmer music. But as he notes, Jewish musical elements are just one part of what they create.

Sadigursky works best in this undefined space. His project, The Solomon Diaries, borrows from the Jewish resort culture of the Catskills (the "Borscht Belt") but avoids simple nostalgia, using these references as framing devices, not documentary sources.

"I've never wanted to be somebody who looks backward in the music I'm making," Sadigursky says. "I wanted to take these sounds and styles and bring myself to them, filter them through my experiences and the music I love and play."

Sadigursky grew up with music. Born to Soviet immigrant parents who were classical musicians, he started with piano lessons from his mother before discovering the saxophone in his school band. Jazz captured him as a teenager. "It occupied the majority of my musical world, if not all of it," he recalls.

His early teacher, Vince Trombetta, shaped his approach through practice rather than theory. Instead of focusing on scales and patterns, Trombetta assigned his student to write solos and saxophone quartet arrangements, building improvisational skills through direct creation.

"There has to be some theory in teaching music," Sadigursky says, "but the theory for him came out of creating and doing, not an academic approach."

This practical method still defines how Sadigursky works. When writing music with Jewish elements, he doesn't study the tradition extensively first: "I just start writing things that sound Jewish to me and see where they go, picking up information along the way."

After moving to New York, planning to be a jazz saxophonist, he found himself taking on diverse projects. During the past fifteen years, he's shifted toward the clarinet while working in various contexts: Broadway shows (including The Band's Visit, which won multiple Tony Awards), synagogue performances, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and projects with composers like Darcy James Argue.

"I just said yes to everything for so many years," he says about his time in New York, "and went in a lot of fun directions I'm grateful for."

Music and family blend together for Sadigursky. His parents shaped both his early training and current musical thinking. He remembers his father, also a clarinetist and accordionist, turning up the car stereo whenever a clarinet solo played—something he now does with his own kids.

His father's influence runs deeper than these habits. Before leaving the Soviet Union, his father supported his family from age fifteen by playing wedding gigs for Soviet elites. These events lasted up to two days, with musicians swapping instruments to rest. The performances required an enormous repertoire, making his father "an incredible encyclopedia of Russian and Eastern European folk music" who knew more melodies "than almost anybody ever."

Sadigursky's work reflects this heritage in various ways. His newest album includes "VNP Horror," written on the first anniversary of his father's death when he couldn't attend the unveiling of his father's grave marker. The title comes from his father's piano technician shorthand for especially pleasant clients: "VNP"—Very Nice Person.

Sadigursky also inherited actual musical materials: a handwritten book of folk tunes his father wrote down, plus collections of sheet music by little-known Soviet composers—works of "very high level, modern twentieth-century writing" almost undiscovered in the West. He hasn't fully explored this collection for his own compositions yet but plans to someday.

Sadigursky found the inspiration for his major project by chance. While waiting for his young son at a synagogue preschool, he picked up Marisa Scheinfeld's photography book The Borscht Belt, showing the ruins of once-busy Catskills resorts. The images sparked something in him.

He connected not with the usual focus on Jewish American entertainment from these places but with what they said about how quickly things can disappear. "I think of it as a metaphor for how fast things can disintegrate around us," he says. "Things we think will always be with us can vanish so fast."

As someone whose parents immigrated to America, Sadigursky related to the Borscht Belt story and how these resorts went from cultural centers to abandoned buildings. They represented places where Jewish communities gathered while slowly becoming part of mainstream America. That very success in assimilation eventually made the resorts obsolete as younger Jews didn't want to vacation in what felt like a "Jewish ghetto."

The Solomon Diaries started as a quartet with percussion and guitar, but became a duo with accordionist Nathan Koci during COVID. Recording during lockdown forced them to adapt, using found audio recordings to replace the texture that additional musicians would have provided.

After restrictions lifted, they started regular performances at Brooklyn's Barbès, inviting guest musicians who later joined them on recordings. The project grew beyond its first three albums, with Sadigursky finding the duo format worked well for practical reasons too. "It's much more sustainable budget-wise and organizationally. It's much easier than making a large ensemble record," he says.

People often assume Sadigursky plays klezmer music because of his instruments and background, but his relationship with that tradition isn't straightforward. "I have colleagues like Michael Winograd and Frank London who've really investigated and researched that tradition and know it deeply," he says. "I don't have that knowledge at all."

His music lives in the spaces between established styles. This middle ground has become central to his work, especially since joining the Philip Glass Ensemble, which changed how he thinks about musical development.

"As a jazz player, you're always trying to add vocabulary," he explains. "You're always like one diminished lick away from being the player you dream of being." His work with minimalism taught him to get more from less material—different from modern jazz, which he thinks "moves too fast and doesn't extrapolate enough from all the material it's using."

The push-pull between simple and complex shapes how he writes. "My goal every time I write is to write something really simple," he admits, then adds that "most of my catalog is a journal of failure because I end up writing way more than I intended."

As The Solomon Diaries grows, Sadigursky thinks about going back to basics and removing overdubs to focus just on clarinet and accordion together. Meanwhile, his work with Koci has grown deeper, with Koci now writing music for their albums. "Secondhand" and "Home Theme," two Koci pieces on their newest release, are what Sadigursky calls "incredibly special."

Both clarinet and accordion work by moving air—one through human breath, the other mechanically—together creating something organic that defines their sound beyond any genre. It is in this flow of air and sound that Sadigursky has found his place: somewhere between jazz and classical, klezmer and contemporary, memory and invention, making music that, like the Catskills resorts that inspired it, connects cultural history with inevitable change.

Visit Sam Sadigursky at samsadigursky.com and follow him on Instagram. Purchase The Solomon Diaries from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice.