An insider's view: how we traveled from obscurity to the klezmer establishment in twenty years

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Frank London

Assorted theme concerts were organized, including a concert of Jewish music. Hankus Netsky invited me to join in an ensemble performing a few klezmer and Yiddish vocal tunes. I was already playing salsa, Balkan, Haitian, and other musics. Why not Jewish? It's interesting; people assume there's some connection, I must have been brought up Jewish-no, no. My parents spoke English. Any association I had with Jewish music was corny.

As was the usual practice of the day, all the band members received cassettes of the songs-repertoire or "rep" tapes-from old 78s whose level of surface noise made the task of learning parts akin to deciphering hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone. It was insane, but you get through it. The concert was a smash! We, a group of students with a shared repertoire and knowledge of three-count 'em, three-Jewish tunes, were besieged with offers to perform at concerts, parties, and weddings. Newly named the Klezmer Conservatory Band, we rolled up our sleeves and got down to the serious work of learning the style and nuances of klezmer and Yiddish vocal music. It really started in the middle of nowhere: no search, no anything, three songs, a few gigs, you learn some more songs, and then we slowly became aware that we were part of a "scene," dubbed "the klezmer revival" by the media and others, with groups and individuals who had been researching and performing all aspects of Yiddish music, including Kapelye, the Klezmorim, Andy Statman, Zev Feldman, Giora Feidman, and others. More often than not, they had come to Jewish music after playing other American or East European folk musics. It's interesting that twenty years later, many of the newer bands contain alumni from that first generation of bands.

I believe that for myself, and many of my peers that I've spoken to, our focus was on trying to play the music, trying to play it well, trying to get better on the nuances, and others were saying, "Oh, that's not why you were trying to do it; you're carrying on your ancestors' legacy, you're reigniting this torch that went out" - they were getting very heavy about this. But no; we were trying to play some music, make some money, and have some fun. Many of the musicians who were doing klezmer music weren't Jewish, so they weren't discovering their roots. A lot of them were in it for technical reasons, particularly the clarinetists, as in the case of Don Byron. Here was a music that was technically challenging, fun to play, and there was a market for it.

There seemed to be an unquenchable thirst for Yiddish music, as if it could fill the void created when American Jews divested themselves of their ethnicity in order to assimilate into the mass culture. Much of our work was playing weddings for young Jews who, in the wake of Roots and the rise of identity politics, were seeking to redefine their own cultural and religious heritage. They were alienated aesthetically and politically from an American-Jewish tradition that seemed overly shmaltzy, dominated by Israeli culture and ideas, and unrelated to the rest of their lives. This "klezmer music," played by people to whom they could relate, perfectly fit the bill.

A little over twenty years has elapsed since this scene and its first recordings emerged, and now there are dozens if not hundreds of bands playing Yiddish music. "Klezmer" is Jewish music; it has gone from an underused term to being overgeneralized. Now young people come up to me after a concert and say they grew up with klezmer music. This means their parents are basically my age, and listened to our recordings for the last seventeen or twenty years, so they grew up actually listening to klezmer music, a statement that used to apply only to people over sixty whose parents were from the "old country" and who grew up hearing Yosele Rosenblatt and Molly Picon 78s. Now "growing up with it" refers to collegeage people who are as familiar with Yiddish music and culture as I am with the rock and roll and hippiedom of my youth. They feel comfortable radically reinterpreting their identity: writers create queer Jewish 'zines and thrash bands deconstruct holiday songs. I worked with a writer whose poetry used the word "klezmer" as a metaphor, a symbol as rich and intoxicating as "jazz" was for the beats. Yiddish culture has become one very strong, visible component of our postfeminist, postmodern artistic/musical/cultural/political environment.

One of the best aspects of the klezmer scene is its intergenerationality. At weddings today, the music forms a new bond between the oldest and youngest members of the family. Klezmer concerts forge an unlikely alliance between seniors and punks in rock clubs and formal concert halls. It's not unusual for a contemporary klezmer recording to feature older Jewish musicians who have been performing this music for over fifty years alongside rock guitarists, Latin or African percussionists, and Gypsy accordionists. Many of today's bands have had mentor relationships with older klezmer musicians: Kapelye with Sid Beckerman and the late Leon Schwartz, The Klezmatics with Ray Musiker, Andy Statman with Dave Tarras, Brave Old World with the late Ben Bayzler, Joel Rubin with Max Epstein.