Klezmer by Seth Rogovoy

author of “The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music” (Algonquin Books)

The klezmer music we hear today – a style that encompasses everything from the acoustic, Old World elegance of Budowitz and Khevrisa to the big-band Yiddish swing of the Klezmer Conservatory Band to the rock-fueled sound of the Klezmatics to the funky, second-line rhythms of the New Orleans Klezmer all-stars and the shtetl-metal dissonance of Naftule’s Dream – derives its characteristic flavor and sound – indeed, its very soul -- from the music played by 19th-century musicians of Eastern Europe.

It is undoubtedly that haunting, Old World quality, combined with a fresh, contemporary outlook, to which listeners respond when hearing the music of violinist Alicia Svigals, clarinetist Andy Statman, vocalist Lorin Sklamberg, or trumpeter Frank London. These university- and conservatory-trained musicians, raised on rock and roll and well-versed in jazz and ethnic folk musics, have steeped themselves in the sounds of the Old World klezmorim. What comes out when they write and play is, therefore, an ecstatic fusion of old and new.

Klezmer music is often defined as something like “the Old World, instrumental wedding music of Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews.” While this definition hints at the origins of the music we call klezmer, it doesn’t begin to capture the rich diversity of the music, and it overlooks a century’s worth of the evolution and development of klezmer in North America – the period and place most responsible for giving birth to klezmer the way it is heard and played throughout the world today.

Klezmer’s happy, upbeat, frenetic quality can be traced back to its origins as a party music and as a functional music intended for the highly-codified, ritualistic dancing that made up a large part of the Old World wedding ceremony. But it wasn’t all just about dancing. At least a third of the Old World klezmer repertoire was music meant for listening -- poignant music that expressed and enhanced the serious religious and spiritual aspects of the event. Taken as a whole, klezmer was the soundtrack to an event – one which often lasted several days or even weeks -- which included a broad range of activity and emotion, from the most reflective and introspective moments to the most active and extroverted.

It was also in Eastern Europe -- in the Pale of Settlement, the territory including parts of the Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, Bessarabia, and Ukraine to which Jews were consigned -- that the klezmorim met and exchanged riffs with non-Jewish musicians -- Gypsies, Bessarabians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Turks, Greeks, etc. -- thus contributing a fertile, multicultural influence to the music in a world where exchanges between Jews and their indigenous neighbors weren’t always so harmonious. Klezmer, as we know it, is the by-product of these particular exchanges, and a reflection of the particular experience of the largest Jewish diaspora population in history.

Yet for all the “borrowings” of klezmer, for all the Romanian dance rhythms and the haunting melodies that some attribute to the music’s Gypsy flavorings, there is something essentially Jewish that separates klezmer from Gypsy or Romanian music. This is partly due to its close connection to the Yiddish language, spoken by Jews. It is also demonstrably a technical question of phrasing or ornamentation – those krekhts, or achy moans that are characteristic of klezmer violinists and clarinetists, along with the tshoks, or laugh-like sounds, and kneytshn, the sob-like “catch,” which are all directly borrowed from the characteristic vocal ornamentation of the khazones, the prayer melodies of the synagogue cantors. But even more than any of these specific cultural influences, there is something more intangibly Jewish that gives klezmer its distinctive flavor, that makes it different from other closely-related Balkan folk musics.

As important as klezmer’s Old World roots are, equally important are klezmer’s roots in America. Along with the millions of Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th-century, so too came klezmer. Immigrant-era bandleaders like I.J. Hochman and Abe Schwartz and soloists like clarinetists Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein combined their Old World roots music with sounds they heard in their newly-adopted country – including ragtime, marching-band music and jazz -- creating the classic, swinging klezmer sound of the 1920s and ‘30s that still inspires contemporary musicians in the same way that Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington continue to inspire jazz musicians today.

Since the klezmer revival of the 1970s, the “Eastern European” aspect of klezmer has given way to a whole host of other influences, American and otherwise, so that the klezmer of the contemporary renaissance finds itself, rightly or wrongly, grouped as a subset of any one of a number of contemporary, “world-beat” fusions.

The term “klezmer” itself, as applied to a specific style of music, is in fact something of a relatively recent construction. The term “klezmer” is a Yiddish contraction of two Hebrew words: kley, meaning vessel, and zemer, meaning song. Hence “klezmer” meant “instrument” or “musician,” as in “vessel of song.” When Eastern European Jewish dance music was revived as a cultural and musical artifact in the late-1970s, it needed a name. With two of the original, Yiddish-music revival bands calling themselves “The Klezmorim” and “The Klezmer Conservatory Band,” and with Andy Statman’s first album called Jewish Klezmer Music, you had the makings of a revival of some sort of music, and “klezmer” stuck.

Thus, today, klezmer is one of the most thrilling, vibrant, new styles of music currently being played. Several of the most innovative and experimental-minded musicians of the jazz and classical avant-garde, Jew and non-Jew alike, find in klezmer a deep wellspring of creative resources. What other single genre of music could boast personalities as wide-ranging as Israeli-born classical violinist Itzhak Perlman, African-American clarinetist Don Byron, bluegrass-fusion pioneer Andy Statman, and downtown avant-gardnik and free-jazz maven John Zorn, all in the same basket?

Klezmer, ultimately, is a music of possibilities. Like folk and classical music, it is based on rigorous, highly-stylized forms, with rules regarding tempo, meter and modes. But like jazz and rock music, klezmer allows for – if not wholesale improvisation – an inordinate amount of personal expression. Klezmer, like jazz, is a performer’s music, and in the hands of a true artist, there’s nothing greater than the musical, mystical ecstasy conjured up by the klezmer soloist.

By Seth Rogovoy author of “The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music” (Algonquin Books)

Klezmer:

A lively, vital genre of modern concert and folk music – primarily instrumental but also including vocals – that builds upon traditional, 19th-century Jewish wedding music from Eastern Europe and the music played by early-20th century Jewish immigrants to the United States to create a contemporary fusion expressive of its players’ backgrounds and the sensibilities of modern audiences.

Yiddish:

The everyday language spoken by pre-Holocaust, Eastern European Jews, derived from High German dialects with additional vocabulary drawn from Hebrew and Slavic languages, written in Hebrew characters and reflective of the unique culture of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement to which Jews were consigned for most of the 19th century. Still spoken by pockets of Jews in Eastern Europe and in the U.S., especially in deeply religious communities with Eastern European ancestry.

The full article is on our website at www.jewishmusic-jmd.co.uk