Sounds of sensibility

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

In the hiatus between the old and the new players can be found keys to changes of sensibility that have made today's scene possible. Whatever their ostensible subject, the essays in this issue sound the sensibilities specific to the klezmer phenomenon of the last twenty-five years. They show "klezmer music" to be a powerful index of what Raymond Williams has called changing structures of feeling. Williams distinguishes feeling ("meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt") from ideology ("formally held and systematic beliefs"), noting that they are of course interrelated in practice: "Methodologically, then, a 'structure of feeling' is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements [affective elements of consciousness and relationships] and their connection in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence."(3) The essays gathered here provide rich evidence of just such "affective elements of consciousness" and their historical location.

My essay explores the historical formation of the klezmer phenomenon in terms of changing structures of feeling. I begin by considering arguments over terminology - not only the term klezmer, but also the word revival - and how these debates situate klezmer music within a larger musical landscape. I then relate the klezmer phenomenon to what Haim Soloveitchik has called the end of self-evident Jewishness.(4) While stringent orthodoxy is one outcome of the tension between tradition and ideology, the klezmer revival is another. There follows an analysis of the fault lines of sensibility in the period immediately preceding the klezmer revival. While the popularity of old-time Jewish wedding music declined and an incipient heritage orientation to it can be detected within the Jewish music world of the time, this music was notably absent from the folk song and music revivals of the fifties and sixties. To better understand this absence, I contrast the musical sensibilities of Theodore Bikel, an international folk singer who specialized in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian songs, and Mickey Katz, who performed English-Yiddish comedy and musical parodies for a largely Jewish audience. Seen not as a musical wasteland, but as a plenum of shifting sensibilities, the fifties and sixties hold clues to the emergence of the klezmer revival in the seventies, its efflorescence in the nineties, and its changing character in the United States and in the "Jewish space" of Europe today.(5)

The Klezmer Phenomenon

What to call this scene and how to characterize the music are matters of ongoing debate. As Williams writes of keywords more generally, the term klezmer is tangled up with the phenomenon it is being used to discuss.(6) While klezmer music, klezmer musicians, and klezmer revival are commonly heard terms, Andy Statman recently said that the music he plays is not klezmer but Hasidic, and Giora Feidman has declared that "Klezmer is not Jewish music."(7) Some take issue with the term revival. Members of a young Swedish band, Vurma Klezmer Orkester, insist on two revivals, not one, and see themselves as part of the "second renaissance" of the music, the first one having occurred in the late seventies.(8) Others reject the term revival. Either they argue that Jewish instrumental music never "died" or they insist that what today's musicians are doing is not revival, but something utterly contemporary.

Most would agree with Frank London, in his essay in this issue, that "klezmer . . . has gone from an underused term to being overgeneralized." In 1981, before klezmer music was an established category, the jacket for The Klezmorim Metropolis carried the following instruction: "File under: Folk or Jazz."(9) Since then klezmer music has become not only an identifiable genre, but also a highly differentiated phenomenon. It is now not possible to speak generally of a klezmer revival, a klezmer scene, or a Jewish music scene as if there was a single entity. "Klezmer" or "klez" (it is not even necessary to specify "music") circulates within a vast musical landscape. Part of the success of the music in today's popular music market stems from the strategic placement of the music. As Joel Lewis notes in his review of a Klezmatics concert in 1995, they play "the Ashkenazic Jewish folk music known as klezmer" but "have a broad enough appeal to fit equally into the programs of folk, jazz and world music festivals."(10) They aren't "trapped inside a musical 'shtetl.'"(11)

Not only is klezmer one of several kinds of Jewish music on a Sunday morning music show that features "Israeli/Jewish/Klezmer/Yiddish" music.(12) Klezmer has also become a kind of "world music." The Klezmatics describes itself as "the planet's radical Jewish roots band," Klezmos plays "World Klez music," and Rubinchik's Orkestyr features "Old-Word Beat" (a pun on Old Word and world beat).(13) The music of Brave Old World has been described as "world-Jewish," Ben Brussell identifies the format of Klezmania! (San Francisco) as "definitive world music." In order to tell the many klezmer bands apart, musicians and critics identify ever more eclectic and specific musical alignments and orientations. The Cayuga Klezmer Revival band characterizes its style variously as "folk/roots/electric/acoustic/" and "jazz, rock, swing, folk ska, and reggae" and identifies its repertoire as "a mixture of traditional Eastern-European tunes, Ladino, Israeli, and original tunes."(14) The British group Souls of Fire performs "klezmer-roots-worldbeat-dance." HaLaila calls its music "tribal Jewish funk, or depending on our mood, 'acid klez.'"