The Klezmer Craze
reprinted from Reform Judaism, Spring 1996

by Robert Eshman

In the tiny hillside chapel of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church by San Francisco Bay, Jerry Garcia's body lay in an open coffin, flanked by the Grateful Dead's lightning-bolt logo done up in a riot of red and white roses. Among the 250 close friends and family present were dozens of musicians who each in turn played songs to accompany their friend into the world-to-come.

David Grisman, a colleague of Garcia's, approached the mike, tuned his mandolin, signaled the other members of his band, and the strains of "Shalom Aleichem" wafted from the altar.

That an ancient Jewish melody like "Shalom Aleichem" would escape the amps at the funeral for a rock & roll hero says little about Garcia—he had no choice in the matter—but loads about the current state of Jewish music. Everywhere you turn, there you find it.

The klezmer resurgence that began in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the sixties' folk music revival has just kept surging. Like the opening tease of a lively and joyful freilich, it has steadily gathered momentum, spinning gloriously out of control. Klezmer ensembles span the country; Europe can't get enough of it; recordings from the classic to the cutting edge are being released each month; and klezmer's popularity has encouraged musicians like Grisman to explore other styles and traditions of Jewish music, creating a bull market in Jewish "roots music."

Grisman originally recorded "Shalom Aleichem" on "Songs of Our Fathers," an album he released on his Acoustic Disc label. The album has already sold 13,000 copies—a bonafide hit in the world of independent label folk music.

Performed by Grisman, Andy Statman, and a handful of top studio musicians, "Songs" combines classical klezmer with tunes by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, of blessed memory, 19th-century chasidic melodies, and even a Cossack Kazatski. It's state-of-the-art Jewish music—instantly appealing to contemporary tastes but reflecting an exacting sense of musical tradition. "Songs," wrote one critic, is "the mother lode, the bedrock" of contemporary Jewish roots music.

That's high praise, considering how rich that vein runs these days. Just as in the old country, klezmer bands now blanket North America, from Berkeley's pioneering Klezmorim and the Klezmer Conservatory Band in Boston to New York's Hot Pstromi, Brave Old World, Klezmatics, and Kapelye to Chicago's Maxwell Street Klezmer Band. There's also Chicago's Modem Klezmer Quartet, Albuquerque's New Shtetl Band; the "intercontinental klezmer" of Portland; Oregon's Oomph; the Austin Klezmorim in Texas; the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band in Toronto; and in Seattle, the Mazeltones, whose latest album is entitled "Latkes & Lattes."

The list doesn't do justice to the variety of styles. Los Angeles' Ellis Island Klezmer Band relies on a core of Eastern European klezmer musicians to deliver the authenticity of greats like the Epstein Brothers and Leon Schwartz. Tuba-player Don Butterfield, who spent the early 1960s playing with Charlie Mingus, now riffs uptown jazzy klezmer with New York's West End Klezmorim. Soloist Don Byron brings the jazz tradition to klezmer composers like Mickey Katz, while New York's New Klezmer Trio uses klezmer's bent notes and augmented second to infuse its riffs with a dead can dance by way of Byelorussia feel. The Klezmatics whose latest album is "Jews With Horns," call what they do "Yiddish world beat fusion." Michael Alpert's Brave Old World wants to make klezmer into a "living music"—he has a haunting composition, "Chernobyl," with lyrics in Yiddish. Giora Feidman, one of the world's great clarinetists, meanwhile plays the standards with a teary, joyful expressiveness. Musician and composer Leopold Kozlowski, subject of Yale Strom's 1994 documentary "The Last Klezmer," brings classical training to klezmer. And even violin maestro Yitzhak Perlman has gotten into the klezmer groove. "In the Fiddler's House," a documentary and audio recording of Perlman's performances with Kozlowski, Brave Old World, Kapelye, the Klezmatics, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band, proved a holiday bestseller on CD and videocassette, and a top pledge-raiser for New York public television.

In addition, dozens of releases of non-klezmer Jewish roots music are being churned out each year. Almost half of the Manhattan-based Global Village Music's 120 or so releases are Jewish music, according to company president Michael Schlesinger. The increased output has something to do with the ease of modem recording, but there's no lack of demand, both here and abroad.

In North America, Jewish music has become yet another facet of the world music craze, which to its snidest observers allows cocooning Yuppies to exercise their wanderlust with nothing more than a comfy armchair and a CD changer. Klezmer plays to sellout crowds from folk festivals to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, where both Giora Feidman and Andy Statman have performed.

In Europe, Jewish music enjoys a popularity bordering on the ghoulish. When the Ellis Island Band played at the week-long Jewish Festival in Krakow, Poland two years ago, thousands packed the ancient streets near the center of the old Jewish quarter. Germany has become a vibrant center for klezmer music performance and publishing, in part because Berlin is now home to clarinetist and researcher Joel Rubin, formerly of Brave Old World.

A clue to the broad appeal of klezmer music may be in its historic and geographic origins. "If you want to understand klezmer," says Barry Fisher, leader of the Ellis Island Klezmer Band, "You have to know where they put the Jews." The Pale of Settlement, where Eastern European despots pushed their Jews, was a no-man's-land separating the Ottoman from the Austro- Hungarian empires. In these crossroad areas, Jewish musicians—called klezmorim from the Hebrew words k1eizemer, or musical instruments—fused Slavic, European, and Oriental musical styles and instruments.

"A klezmer was the type of man you didn't want your daughter to marry," recalled one old-time clarinetist from Byelorussia. Moving from place to place, klezmers played the proverbial wedding/bar mitzvah circuit, living a precarious hand-to-mouth existence.

But like those other itinerant musicians, the Gypsies, klezmorim played at all sorts of functions—town markets, Christian weddings, taverns, and fancy recitals. Their musical style had to incorporate not just Hebrew melodies, but waltzes, quadrilles, and light classical pieces. Necessity spawned klezmer music's rich variety, and the repertoire was often passed down through generations of a single family.

The old Jewish musicians took klezmer with them in the great migrations to America, where Abe Schwartz, Harry Kandel, Naftule Brandwein, and Dave Tarras carried on the tradition. Beginning two decades ago, Henry Sapoznick, the Klezmorim, and Andy Statman learned at the knee of these greats, and a new generation of Jewish and non-Jewish, traditional and avantgarde klezmorim sprang forth.

But today's wild fecundity is not without critics. "There's been a lot of capitalizing on the popularity of klezmer," says Fisher. Musicians who are loathe to go public with criticism of their colleagues—rate some of the new Jewish music from excellent or "very jazzy" to "obnoxious" or 11 schmaltzy." Not surprisingly, the battle over the soul of Jewish music pits purists over innovators, the orthodox, if you will, versus the modernists. The purists swoon over remastered Dave Tarras 78s but tend to look down at groups pushing klezmer into late 20th century techno-sample. "People who don't invest the time and commitment into learning the traditional klezmer style haven't earned the right to create new klezmer," says Statman. "It's a definite style," agrees Grisman. "Like any style. And you have to study it."

 Studying it for serious musicians means all but ignoring contemporary recordings and going straight to the source. Not surprisingly, Grisman, Statman, Fisher et al. spend their listening hours playing the wide variety of remastered 78s of classic klezmer from 1900 to 1939. Sapoznick, who created an Archive of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, released a classic klezmer anthology called "Yikhes" on the Trikont label in Germany, and other archivists have followed suit. Thus the music of wandering minstrels has settled down for serious enthusiasts to study and build upon. As old-time klezmer Ben Baisler told Michael Schlesinger, "If I knew this stuff would be so important, I would have taken better notes."

 Ultimately, though, klezmer, like any soul music, is a lot more than cross-cultural history or notes on a page. Grisman, whom many consider the finest mandolinist of his time, knew this when he turned to long-time friend Statman to help him produce and arrange "Songs of Our Fathers." "Andy oozes emotions out of his playing," says Grisman, "and I'm not so bad either." Grisman, 47, gave Statman, 45, his first mandolin lessons when the two were 17 and 15 years old. Their lives carried them in different directions— Statman, who is Orthodox, lives in Flatbush, Grisman in Mill Valley, California—but Grisman called his old student out West to record the album. After the first run-through of "Shalom Aleichem," Grisman found himself weeping. He looked to the other musicians and saw tears in their eyes as well.

Those who love and perform this music are at a loss to explain the genre's enduring power. Some attribute it to the sound of the violin and the clarinet, two standard klezmer instruments that mimic the cries and laughter of the human voice. Some pin it on nostalgia, but Statman has another idea: ultimately, he says, it is about God. If rock 'n' roll is the language of sex and the flesh, then klezmer is soul set to music. "You associate all this music with the past," says Statman, "but the reality is you're alive now and this music is touching something deep inside you."

 When his music evokes tears in his audiences, Statman knows something beyond nostalgia is going on. "What they perceive to be a longing for the 'World of Their Fathers' is really their Jewish soul that wants to fly." That explains why, when Grisman broke the dreadful silence at Jerry Garcia's funeral with "Shalom Aleichem," the mourners found themselves weeping and swaying, the parade of meditative notes wringing out long-forgotten memories, a depth of joy and sorrow they, perhaps, didn't even know they felt.

 "You can compare the heart in general and the Jewish heart in particular to a violin with several strings," wrote the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. The brilliance of klezmer is to play precisely those strings.