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• 1 media/litvakus.jpg 2018-08-24T19:33:21-07:00 KLEZMER 149 The Music of Ashkenazi Jews and Its Extensions in the 20th/21st Centuries image_header 2025-02-19T07:33:39-08:00 Above: Litvakus is a Brooklyn-based klezmer band led by Zisl Slepovitch on clarinet. Photography: Misha Gulko, 2016. Used with permission.

   

  KLEZMER — INTRODUCTION

  Historically, klezmer refers to the traditional instrumental dance and party music of Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. The word klezmer comes from the Yiddish language, and originally referred to musical instruments. In the seventeenth century the term started to refer to the musicians themselves (klezmorim).  Today, klezmer is a generic term referring to the traditional music and its extensions. From its origins in the 16th century throughout much of the 19th century klezmer was almost totally an oral tradition played by itinerant musicians, mostly at wedding celebrations, and in secular contexts as well. In the twentieth century klezmer bands and orchestras began to be recorded, and klezmer underwent a process of Americanization. After World War II the genre nearly disappeared until it was revived in the 1970s. A further revival in the 1990s inspired a global interest in klezmer. Today a wide variety of klezmer bands perform in many countries around the world.
  
  *Yiddish is a Germanic language, fused with elements mainly from Hebrew, that originated in Eastern Europe in the 9th century. Yiddish was commonly spoken among millions of Ashkenazi Jews before 1939. In North America today, an estimated 150,000 Hasidim speak Yiddish as an everyday language. Yiddish has been making a comeback, inspired partly by new-found pride in Jewish culture among American Jews, and partly as a reaction to rising antisemitism.

  Antonio Olivo and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, "Amid rising antisemitism, the vivid language of Yiddish makes a comeback," Washington Post, September 23, 2023
   

  AMERICAN JEWS - OVERVIEW

  American Jews, or Jewish Americans, are Americans who are Jews, whether by religion, ethnicity or nationality.* The current Jewish community in the United States consists primarily of Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from diaspora Jewish populations of Central/Eastern Europe.  Ashkenazi Jews comprise about 90% of the American Jewish population.**  Most American Ashkenazim are US-born, with a dwindling number of now elderly earlier immigrants, as well as some more recent foreign-born immigrants. 
  
  Depending on religious definitions and varying population data, the United States has the largest or second largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel. In 2012, the American Jewish population was estimated at between 5.5 and 8 million, depending on the definition of the term, which constitutes between 1.7% and 2.6% of the total U.S. population.
  
  The metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami contain nearly one quarter of the world's Jews.
  
  Jewish migration to the United States increased dramatically in the early 1880s, as a result of persecution and economic difficulties in parts of Eastern Europe. Most of these new immigrants were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom arrived from the poor diaspora communities of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement  (modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.) During the same period, great numbers of Ashkenazi Jews also arrived from Galicia, at that time the most impoverished region of the Austro-Hungarian empire with a heavy Jewish urban population, driven out mainly by economic reasons. Many Jews also emigrated from Romania. Over 2,000,000 Jews landed between the late 19th century and 1924, when the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration. Most settled in the New York metropolitan area, establishing the world's major concentrations of Jewish population.
  
  Attribution

                                                                       

  Americans of Jewish descent have been disproportionately successful in many fields and aspects over the years. The Jewish community in America has gone from a lower class minority, with most studies putting upwards of 80% as manual factory laborers prior to World War I and with the majority of fields barred to them, to the consistent richest or second richest ethnicity in America for the past 40 years in terms of average annual salary, with extremely high concentrations in academia and other fields, and today have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the United States, at around double the average income of non-Jewish Americans.
  
  "American Jews," Wikipedia

  *The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey showed that “only 5% of American Jews consider being Jewish solely in terms of being a member of a religious group. Thus, the vast majority of American Jews view themselves as members of an ethnic group and/or a cultural group, and/or a nationality.” [Ira Sheskin, “American Jews” in Jesse O. McKee’s Ethnicity in Contemporary America: A Geographical Appraisal (2000)]
  **Henry Sapoznick stresses the origins of the Ashkenazim as those whose "language and basic cultural forms derive ultimately from the old German Jewish settlements." (The other major ethnic divisions of the Jewish diaspora are the Sephardic Jews who established communities in the Iberian peninsula and developed a distinctive culture which they took to Northern Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas when Jews were expelled from present-day Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century. The Mizrahi Jews are descendants of local Jewish communities in the Middle East from biblical times into the modern era.)

  ROOTS OF KLEZMER

  After the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, as an act of mourning religious authorities banned the rich instrumental music that had been part of Jewish liturgy. The most influential form of musical expression within the Jewish community became cantillation, the singing of prayers and scriptures by the synagogue kahzn (cantor). Cantillation had three decisive impacts on the klezmer: the use of the Ahava Rabboh mode; a florid, melismatic melodic style; and specific types of expressive vocal ornamentation.
  
  A mode (or scale) is a set of notes from which melodies are derived. Each mode is distinctive, and melodies derived from a mode share its characteristic sound. To hear the recognizable character of Ahava Rabboh, compare the standard melody of "Joy to the World" with The Klezmonauts' "Oy to the World" which recasts the melody using Ahava Rabboh. (This prayer mode is similar to the  maqam Hijaz in Arab music, and can be described in the Western system as Phrygian with raised third, or E F G# A B C D E.)
  
  A melismatic singing style is one in which a group of notes is sung to one syllable of text, in comparison to a syllabic singing style in which thre is only one note for each syllable of text. This elaborately ornamented type of cantillation is heard in this traditional version of "Shema Yisrael." This melodic singing stye carried over to the purely instrumental melodic playing in klezmer.
  
  A clear connection between the singing of khazonim and the sound of klezmer is most evident in the free-form doina, which combines the vocalization of Jewish prayer with Eastern European laments. In this genre we hear the krekhtsn, tshoks, and kneythshn  — "the achy, bent, and cutoff notes which we often hear as the 'laughing' and 'crying' quality of klezmer. This is the essence of klezmer ornamentation and is arguably the single most important characteristic of klezmer, both musically and in terms of its 'Jewishness.'" [Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer]
   
  The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble plays a doina followed, as is customary, by a fast dance tune. Klezmer adapted the slow, improvised doina from the Romanian peasant solo song of the same name, turning the melancholy vocal form into an instrumental improvisation. The Ahava Rabboh mode can be heard clearly in the doina on this recording. The dance tune that follows the doina is typical of a sirba, a fast Romanian circle folk dance named after the Serbs, and also popular among Ashkenazi Jews.
  
  Also important to the development of Old World klezmer were unaccompanied Yiddish folk songs, and nigunim, the wordless songs of  Hasidim, a religious sect founded in Poland in the eighteenth century that encouraged song and dance as a form of prayer, bypassing "the burden of words,"  to reach a connection to the divine. Alicia Svigals and Jeff Warschauer featured in Chabad 'Nigun Rikud' from the 2002 album Vodkazak. The wordless song of this nigun is here transformed into an instrumental piece.
  
  
  Lastly,  Sapoznik cites the songs of Yiddish theater, spearheaded by Abraham Goldfaden in Romania in the late 1800s, and still active as demonstrated by these excerpts from Goldfaden's The Sorceress by the National Yiddish Theatre.  Yiddish theater validated Yiddish as a language and brought Jewish folk song and dance to the public. Goldfaden traveled with his troupe to Ukraine, Russia, and finally New York where he died in 1908. The great migration of Jews in the late nineteenth century brought successive waves of Yiddish performers to New York, "some simply as artists seeking an audience, but many as a result of persecutions, pogroms, and economics crises in Eastern Europe." ["Yiddish Theater," Wikipedia] While klezmer was an exclusively instrumental form of music during the early 20th century, Yiddish song reemerged in the klezmer revival.

  OLD WORLD KLEZMER

  From the sixteenth century, Central European Jews who were expelled or who fled persecution gradually migrated eastward to areas controlled by Polish and Russian nobility. By the late eighteenth century the Jewish population of East Europe was confined to the cities and shtelts (villages) in the Pale of Settlement. Over the next hundred years, Yiddish-speaking Jews absorbed musical influences from surrounding cultures and developed kapelyes, instrumental bands whose music making was a necessary component of wedding ceremonies. Wedding celebrations lasted for days and included many ritual dances. Kapelyes also played at inns and taverns, marketplaces, and fairs.
  
  Klezmorim were confined by law to playing soft instruments.  As shown in the painting below of a traditional Eastern European Jewish wedding procession, early klezmer bands had few members, usually violin, clarinet, cello, and  tsimbl (cimbalom).* The most important melody instruments of klezmer are violin and clarinet because of their ability to mimic the human voice. The instruments of traditional klezmer were also portable, an important point since most klezmorim were itinerant musicians, traveling from town to town, and often playing in processions. A segment of the klezmorim were cosmopolitan musicians who played in cities and for wealthy patrons, became familiar with current fashionable non-Jewish European dance forms, and sometimes read music. 
  *The tsimbl demonstrated in the video is the instrument in the center. It is played by striking the strings with lightweight implements ("beaters") which causes the strings to vibrate.
  
  With few exceptions, the status and reputation of klezmorim was low:

  They were an irreverent, irreligious, and even immoral bunch — the very cliché of the dissolute musician. For all their efforts, they died without so much as a ruble to their names. They were a hereditary caste, with kapelyes sometimes consisting of members of one family, fathers and sons alike. [Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer]

  
  
  
  As prohibitions against Jewish musicians playing loud instruments were lifted in some areas toward the end of the nineteenth century, brass instruments and percussion instruments entered in Old World klezmer bands due to the conscription of hundreds of Jewish boys from 8 to 12 years old were kidnapped from the homes of poor Eastern European Jews and forced into tsarist military institutions. Those who did not die from fever on the forced marches to barracks in Siberia were required to serve for 25 years. They were prohibited from speaking their own languages, harshly disciplined, and forced to convert to Christianity.  The photo below shows klezmer musicians with clarinets, and with the brass and percussion instruments common in military bands.
   
  
   

  KLEZMER IN AMERICA—EARLY 20th CENTURY

  Seth Rogovoy identifies three stages in the history of klezmer in the United States. The first stage was the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when klezmorim such as Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein "carved their own musical niches at a time when jazz was popular, variously resisting and integrating American influences into their playing styles." The second stage is the 1970s roots revival of klezmer by groups like Kapelye, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. The third stage is the continuing hybridization of klezmer with rock,  jazz, avant garde music and other American musical genres and styles. 
  
  From the peak of emigration in 1880 until 1924 when the U.S. government slammed shut the doors on Jewish, Asian, Italian and other emigrants, some 2.5 million Jews came to America. Most ended up in New York's Lower East Side, one of the most densely populated places on earth during that period. 
  
  
  Klezmorim continued to lead lives as itinerant musicians for weddings, but these were now held in convention halls, and the quaint Old World customs were shed. Ceremonies centered on lively celebratory dances, especially the freylekh (Yiddish for "festive"). Here Dobranotch, a Russian klezmer orchestra, plays a freylekh, one originally recorded by the Abe Schwartz Orchestra in the early 20th century.
  
  The early twentieth-century recording industry produced thousands of "ethnic" records marketed to urban emigrant groups. Recordings made klezmer a listening music as well as a music for dancing. These early documents of klezmer by those close to the Old World tradition were also crucial to the revival of klezmer.
  
  Harry Kandel's Orchestra and similar klezmer bands in early twentieth-century New York were marked by their emphasis on ensemble playing. But "the introduction of a distinctive, lead solo voice was an innovation of Abe Schwartz [his band is heard in this recording, with Dave Tarras on clarinet]. Schwartz is perhaps best known for having hired and recorded a couple of virtuoso clarinetists who would go on to establish themselves as the most famous and influential klezmorim of the immigrant era, and perhaps of all time," Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras. 
  
  Naftule Brandwein, "Nifty's Freilach":
  Brandwein was born in 1889 and entered the U.S. sometime before 1920. Within a few years he had established a reputation as the "king of Jewish music." 

  A larger-than-life figure, Brandwein was noted as much for his wild behavior as for his virtuosity. He supposedly once performed dressed as Uncle Sam, strung with Christmas tree lights that nearly electrocuted him when he perspired…He was a shikker, or a serious drinker, and the very stereotype of the Old World, unreliable lowlife. Nevertheless, he was much in demand for playing parties, weddings, and hotel gigs in the Catskills until his death in 1963.  [Rogovoy]

  
  
  
  Tarras was born in Ukraine in 1879. By his teens he had mastered the playing of multiple instruments. At eighteen he was drafted into the Tsarist army where he led an elite military music ensemble. With the Russian Revolution came chaos and anti-Semitic pogroms. Tarras fled to New York City in 1921 where his music reading abilities opened up jobs playing Greek, Russian and Polish music, and in New Yorks' burgeoning Yiddish theater scene, one that rivaled Broadway. Tarras recorded hundreds of records beginning in 1925.

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  Efforts to introduce klezmer into jazz were spotty and superficial. There were some smash hits though. The most successful novelty hit was The Andrews Sisters' recording of the Yiddish song "Bei Mir Bist du Sheyn" which topped the pop charts in 1932.
  
  The song was recorded in 2008 by the Budapest Klezmer Band in an interesting version that transitions from an Old World Yiddish manner to a cool jazz arrangement and ends with a verse in English. And in 1939 the top song went to "And the Angels Sing," originally a klezmer melody that trumpeter Ziggy Ellman arranged for Benny Goodman's Orchestra, with added lyrics by Johnny Mercer (Ellman's solo begins at 1:45). Bandleader Sam Musiker also tried to push Tarras into a Swing-klezmer fusion, but by the 1950s/60s rock & roll and rock had all but killed klezmer. 

  DECLINE OF KLEZMER

  Klezmer as a popular music slowly declined during the 1920s as American Jews became assimilated and enamored of Big Band music and Broadway. The Great Depression and the rise of radio brought the recording industry to a virtual halt in the 1930s. World War II and the post-War world resulted in the near extinction of klezmer. The war brought large-scale destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. European Jewish communities that remained after the Holocaust were particularly fragile, and post-war Soviet policies suppressed Jewish life and culture. In the U.S., the 1950s witnessed the rise of the Jewish middle class and a large movement of Jews to Brooklyn. Yiddish declined as a spoken language, being associated with the Old World and the past. Many American Jews wished to leave European Jewish culture behind and to begin a new life following the horrors of the Holocaust. In his biography, klezmer musician and comedian Mickey Katz recalled asking the manager of a radio station why he wouldn't play his music.

  I asked him why he wouldn't play my records. He said, "Because some of our listeners are offended."
  I asked, "Who, besides you?"
  He said, "I don't think that's any of your business."
  I answered, "I think it is my business because this is how I make a living. You play Italian records, you play Polish records--"
  He cut me off. "I will not play any record with Yiddish in it. Yiddish is the language of the ghetto."
  "My friend," I said, "Yiddish is the language of our forefathers."
  "I do not care to hear it."
  "Then why don't you play some of my instrumental records? They're some of the greatest music in the world, played by some of the greatest musicians in the world—Ziggy Elman, Mannie Klein, Nat Farber--"
  Again he cut me off mid-sentence. "There will be no Yiddish spoken, or Jewish music played, on this station."

  In contrast to the Old World, the establishment of Israel in 1948 represented a forward-looking Jewish identity. Israeli Jews were pioneers and soldiers. Modern Hebrew replaced Yiddish. Klezmer slipped under the cultural radar. It became a  nostalgic remnant depicted in Fiddler on the Roof.

  THE KLEZMER REVIVAL

  The rediscovery and revitalization of klezmer among young American Jewish musicians in the 1970s has been attributed to several factors. Among the most important are a growing sense of ethnic pride and search for identity among Jews, spurred by the effects of the civil rights movement; interest and participation in the American folk music revival among young Jewish musicians; and "the passage of time since the horrors of the Holocaust caused American Jews to repress or ignore painful reminders of Eastern European Jewish culture." (Rogovoy).
  
  The Klezmorim
  
  The Klezmorim gave the first public performance of a klezmer revival band in 1976 in Berkeley, California, and produced the first recording of the klezmer revival, East Side Wedding, the following year. Like many klezmer revivalists, the founding members Lev Liberman and David Skuse had a background playing ethnic folk music. "Heyser Bulgar" is a version of a tune created and recorded by Brandwein in the 1920s and has been recorded many times since. The Yiddish title means "hot bulgar," and refers to the distinctive rhythm of the bulgar, a Moldovan line dance. Seth Rogovy notes that The Klezmorim "were among the first new players to take klezmer out of the folk and Jewish ghettoes and onto stages at theaters, concert halls, jazz clubs, and on radio and TV." The Klezmorim's 1981 album Metropolitan is the only klezmer album to be nomninated for a Grammy Award. 
  
  Kapelye
  
  Kapelye was formed in 1976 by Henry Sapoznik and Michael Alpert in New York. Both were children of Jewish immigrants and native speakers of Yiddish whose deep knowledge of Yiddish-American culture distinguished the band throughout the 1980s revival period. Both were also steeped in other forms of folk music. Sapoznik was obsessed with old-time American music, and Alpert was a multi-instrumentals and vocalist who sang Irish, Russian, Serbian, and Balkan folk music. Sapoznik was important in researching thousands of recordings of early 20th-century Yiddish popular music at the YIVO Institute in New York, and produced the first re-issue of klezmer records, Klezmer Music:1910-42. Kapelye was the first American klezmer band to tour Europe, bringing the music back to the Old World, and inspiring a worldwide renaissance of klezmer. The inclusion of Yiddish songs on Kapelye's albums marked an important step in expanding klezmer from a purely instrumental music. "In Shtetl Nikolaev" is a Yiddish folk song from Kapelye's first album of 1981, Future & Past. It tell the story of Surele, a young woman from a  falls hopelessly in love with a shoemaker in a Jewish shtetl (literally, "small town"). The shoemaker gets drafted into the Tzar's army. Surele cant get over it and commits suicide by poisoning herself.
  
  The Conservatory Klezmer Band
  In 1980 Hankus Netsky, a professor at Boston's prestigious New England Conservatory of Music, assembled a band of music students to play his arrangements based on recordings from the golden age of American klezmer. The following year the Klezmer Conservatory Band produced their first of eleven albums of remakes of classic klezmer tunes, popular Yiddish theater tunes, nigunim, immigrant ballads, novelty numbers and more. Unlike the earlier revival groups, the KCB incorporated numerous players on a variety of instruments for Netsky's arrangements. "Tzatski Kozatski" is such an arrangement of a hyperactive song recorded in 1948 by Mickey Katz and His Kosher Jammers.

  
  THE KLEZMER RENAISSANCE

  Klezmer is now transnational, with hundreds of bands in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa. Its roots are kept alive by educational and research institutions and through participation in klezmer camps, even while the traditional music is considerably stretched by hybridization with other forms ranging from jazz improvisation to reggae. For some it is a way to connect with Jewishness, while for millions of people it is enjoyable music with no cultural affiliation. Two bands that were essential in spurring new approaches to klezmer and encouraging marketing to a wider audience are Brave Old World and The Klezmatics.
  
  Brave Old World
  

  The Klezmatics
  
  

  REFERENCES

  Phil Alexander, Sounding Jewish in Berlin: Klezmer Music and the Contemporary City, Oxford University Press, 2021.
  
  Phil Alexander, "Klezmer Music: History and Contemporary Practice Around the World" Phil Alexander https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQrAxQDRpnY&ab_channel=DAVARBristol (2021)
  
  Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
  
  Zev Feldman,  Klezmer: music, history and memory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  
  Seth Rogovoy, The Essential Klezmer, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000.
  
  Joel E. Rubin, New York Klezmer in the Early 20th Century, Boydell & Brewer, 2020.
  
  Henry Sapoznik, "Klezmer Music: The First 1000 Years" in the Music of Multicultural America, Kip Lornell and Anne Rusmussen (eds.), 2016. 
  
  Henry Sapoznik, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, New York: Schirmer Books, 1999.
  
  Mark Slobin, "Under the Klezmer Umbrella" in Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World, Oxford University Press, 2003.
  
  Mark Slobin (ed.), American Klezmer, Its Roots and Offshoots, University of California Press, 2002.
   
  BBC Klezmer! Parts 1 - 5, video (2012)
  
  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cantonists
  
  Milken Archive of Jewish Music
  
  Additional records with tsimbl, both historic and modern, can be heard here.

  GROUP TOPIC

  The presentation discusses the music of Brave Old World and The Klezmatics, and goes further in exploring the  klezmer as an international phenomenon, including a survey of contemporary klezmer bands.