Sounds of sensibility

Judaism, Wntr, 1998 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Klezmer music has become the sound of particular forms of identification, as can be seen in Svigals's "Manifesto." Whether defined positively (queer Yiddishism, socialist Jewish past, serious approach to the music) or negatively (no nostalgia, no "tourism of the past," no cuteness, no apologetics, no fetishizing of authenticity), "the identity music of Jewish American youth" envisioned by Svigals articulates distinctive sensibilities and their sounds. While the scene (actually several interlocking scenes) has many of the features associated with youth subcultures, as Svigals shows, it is also intergenerational, a feature that London specially values.

London, who is now drawn to "the secular, social activist Yiddish song tradition," did not start out that way. Quite the opposite. Klezmer music initially captured his interest because it is "good, just on its own terms." It is one of many kinds of music he plays. When he says of his first experience with the music that "It really started in the middle of nowhere," he is describing what it is like to engage with music that is literally separated from its source.(64) Recordings make it possible to circulate the sounds of music without circulating the musicians. This disjunction not only heightens the experience of "nowhere" that London describes, but also his sense that "one can study and assimilate the elements of any musical style, form, or tradition by ear," a legacy of the historical avant-garde.(65) This aesthetic practice is intensified by the situation of music without memory - or, in some cases, in spite of memory.

If London could play any kind of music then anyone could play Jewish musicand they did, though doing so was not so straightforward. As Don Byron explained, "I've played klezmer music since 1980. But it hasn't been easy to feel entitled to play it. A white man plays world music, and no one questions the ethnic connection. But not too many brothers are playing music from Bulgaria. I spent hundreds of hours transcribing Katz's records: I feel entitled to the knowledge, entitled to participate. But what amazes people is that I'm a black guy doing the music of people who are supposed to be white."(66)

London says he played this music despite, not because, of the fact that he is Jewish. Being Jewish was actually an obstacle because his experience of growing up with Jewish music had left him feeling that it was corny. When he embraced klezmer music, London was also refusing "all the shlock, all the shmaltz, all the things about Jewish music that never interested me, all the Israeli music, all the Yiddish theater music, about all that sentimentality." Not roots and heritage, but technical challenge, fun, and the market drove his initial interest in the music, much as it did his captivation with jazz.

It is precisely this disjunction - music coming out of nowhere - that allowed London to engage klezmer music at all. Not only had the music been detached from its historical moorings, but his generation could come towards it with a detached attitude, an attitude they had willed and cultivated. "Nowhere" is a space of abstraction where sounds unmoored from other times and places can be engaged as sound for its own sake. In that place called nowhere, musicians can play anything. They do so in the "theme concerts" London describes. Jewish was a theme. It was resolutely not an "identity" or "heritage."