For Vox Tablet, Fruchter and Jeremy Brown, Pitom’s violinist, played a stripped-down version of the track “Neilah,” and they explained to host Sara Ivry why a jazz-metal-rock take on the Day of Atonement seemed like a good idea. [Running time: 15:09.]

With due respect to Mr. Hentoff and Amazon’s hive mind, though, Tablet Magazine has long been on the case. In November, music columnist Alexander Gelfand reviewed the set. “It’s enough,” he wrote, “to give you some sense of the tremendous diversity of Jewish cultural expression during the 78 era, which stretched from the late 19th century—a full 25 years before the advent of radio—to the early 1950s, a span that saw the efflorescence of Yiddish theater, the rise of ‘hebe’ dialect humor, and the eager engagement of a rapidly assimilating immigrant community with American culture at large.”

And last month, Marissa Brostoff noted that one of the singers featured on the set, Moishe Oysher, is having a moment of his own.

Listen to an excerpt from “Chasidic in America” from the collection. Yes, the dude is singing, “Oy vey!”

Klezmer Comp Makes Amazon’s Top 5 [Variety]
Time-Travelers From a Golden Age [WSJ]
Related: Treasure Trove [Tablet Magazine]
Singing Sensation [Tablet Magazine]

• Foreign Minister Lieberman invited his European counterparts to Gaza. [Ynet]

• The Jewish World Cup will be played Sunday on Randall’s Island, between Manhattan and The Bronx in the East River. The soccer tournament will involve New York-based Jewish players hailing from 15 countries. [JTA]

• Once strong Zionists, the Irish now tend to find themselves in the Palestinians’ corner. Why? [Foreign Policy]

• Ess-A-Pickle, late of the Lower East Side, has officially opened at its new digs in Boro Park, Brooklyn. [Forward]

• Kalmen Opperman, “the elder statesman of the clarinet,” died at 90. [NYT]

I’ve never seen it described this way, but you tell me that the house band at the Mos Eisley Cantina doesn’t sound like some sort of klezmer-jazz fusion.

“I don’t know how to do Jewish music,” Malkiel told me; which is ironic, because he seems to know how to do everything else, from straightahead jazz to Middle Eastern music and salsa. (A mainstay of the Latin music scene in his adopted city of New York, Malkiel has been called “el virtuoso judio del bombardino”—“the Jewish virtuoso of the euphonium.” Shortly after we spoke, he played in the Seventh Annual Encounter of Colombian Musicians at El Museo del Barrio in Harlem.) “What’s Jewish music anyways?” he asked, posing a question that is often raised but never really answered.

For Water, Malkiel decided to take the long view. “Jewish people live all over, and everywhere they live, their culture is mixed with the [local] tradition.” In other words, everything is fair game—from the music he inherited from his parents, who immigrated to Israel from the Moroccan city of Meknes, to the Egyptian and Lebanese songs he heard growing up in Jerusalem, and the jazz, classical, and Latin music he has studied and played professionally.

It’s an eclectic mix, but hardly a scattershot one. Malkiel doesn’t just throw all of this stuff together helter-skelter; he obviously knows a lot about each genre, and he has a knack for combining them without sounding gimmicky. No matter how often Water switches stylistic gears, the whole thing remains tied together by a guiding musical intelligence—one that expresses itself in sophisticated arrangements, carefully modulated changes in texture and dynamics, and catchy melodies that never seem to resolve where you expect.

And did I mention the water?

“Drink of Spring” begins with the sound of something wet pouring into a glass, only to be followed by Malkiel’s best shot at “a klezmer band from New Orleans.” (To me, it sounds like early Duke Ellington with a Yiddish accent.) “I was thinking of an old Polish Jew who’s had a few drinks, and he’s stumbling,” Malkiel says. “I told the musicians, ‘Play like you’re drunk,’ and they said, ‘No problem!’ ” There’s nothing sloppy about the performance, though, which segues smoothly into a fast, odd-metered bit that’s meant to evoke a Bulgarian Jewish wedding.

“Waves,” meanwhile, opens with a sample of the surf lapping against the shores of Tel Aviv, then slides into a duet for tenor saxophone and clarinet that evolves into a full-blown neoclassical interlude for reeds and brass. (The ensemble that Malkiel assembled for Water includes bassoon, bass clarinet, trumpet, and flute, along with his own trombone, tuba, and euphonium.) The reggae tune “Eden Rain” is ushered in by the sound of a rainstorm. Only “Desert,” whose spinning melodic lines and Egyptian-derived rhythms recall the East-West fusions of the Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil, is completely dry.

Malkiel goes well beyond audio samples, however, and turns water into an integral part of the ensemble. On the joyous Afro-Cuban “Aguanile Mai” (the name comes from a Yoruba chant in honor of Ogun, the god of war and metal), you can hear the unmistakable sound of hands slapping water mixed in with the Latin percussion. And “Meet My Sweet Little Sea Monsters in Aguaphonium Land” features a watery instrument of Malkiel’s own invention.

Instructions for building your own aguaphonium: First, cut off a length of garden hose. Then, attach a mouthpiece to one end and a funnel to the other. Finally, stick the funnel into a tub of water and blow. “The recording engineer thought I was totally nuts,” Malkiel says.

And yet it worked. By overdubbing multiple aguaphonia in various ranges, Malkiel was able to create a kind of imaginary aquatic choir: a pod of fictitious sea creatures, burbling and bubbling to one another across the deep.

Given the symbolic weight that water carries in Judaism and elsewhere—the second verse of Genesis, the flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the emergence of “Kabbalah water” as a celebrity energy drink and radiator fluid—it’s easy to divine a grand spiritual theme at work. And the sequential pairing of “River Blue” and “Water Prayer” would seem to bear this out. The first, a slinky minor blues with a Middle Eastern vibe, begins with Malkiel playing cantor to the other horns’ chorus; and the second, in which Malkiel plays and sings at the same time, aims to capture the feeling not only of a muezzin’s call to prayer, but of a church choir, as well.

Left to Right: Benny Koonyevsky, Jack Glottman, Anat Cohen, Avishai Cohen, Daniel Freedman (hanging), Dave Hertzberg (big smile), Rafi Malkiel, Itai Kriss, Nestor Gómez , Gili Sharett, Chris Karlic, Mauricio Herrera, Pablo Mayor
Photo: Adeola Enigbokan

Yet for the most part, Malkiel had in mind the more general properties of water: its ubiquity and indispensability. “The cliché of water is of life. But it’s not a cliché, it’s a fact,” Malkiel says. “If someone is hurt, you give them water. You sweat, you cry—it’s water. There’s water in everything; let’s find it in music.”

And find it he does, even if he has to put it there himself. The results command attention, both because the sounds Malkiel invents are so unusual, and because his music occasionally becomes so deep, you can hardly see the bottom.

Even naked, the melody to “Eden Rain” would be lovely; clad in Caribbean rhythms, garlanded with countermelodies, it becomes utterly ravishing. On “Gilgool,” hints of Latin and Middle Eastern music give way to a middle section whose chromatic harmonies and groovy bass ostinato bring to mind the Dave Holland Quintet at its most mesmerizing. And the oriental theme of “River Blue” leads to a rhythm-plus-tenor jam that recalls the classic John Coltrane Quartet, with Chris Karlic’s solo veering from the incantatory to the incendiary. (Other improvised gems include Itai Kriss’ serpentine flute solo on “Desert” and Pablo Mayor’s startling piano turn on “Mai Eden.”)

Talking about his affinity for Latin culture—“Israelis and Latinos have a lot in common; it’s a similar temperament, similar weather, similar food”—Malkiel makes the point that Latin music “is not only intellectual, but very danceable, and very sensual.” He might as well be talking about his own music.

If he could just figure out how to bottle the stuff, he’d make a fortune.

Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry joins Gordon, Winograd, and Fruchter in Winograd’s bedroom-turned-studio to talk about their debut eponymous EP, out this week, and to play a little music on the fly.

That sanctuary, with its lovingly restored, ornately painted walls and sunlit stained-glass windows, in turn doubles as an occasional concert hall. On this particular Sunday, the first official day of spring, 150 people had turned out for a tribute concert to honor the late klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras. Tarras died in 1989, just three years after the Eldridge Street Project was formed to rescue the ruined synagogue building—and barely 10 years after Tarras himself was rescued from obscurity by the klezmer revival of the 1970s.

Some of those in attendance were, indeed, dancing. Not many—no more than five at a time, and occasionally just one, an older gentleman with a wild shock of gray, curly hair and very few inhibitions (it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to dance alone as a room full of people stares at you)—but some. And that was only fitting.

Klezmer music as we know it today is largely the invention of Tarras and contemporaries like Naftule Brandwein and Shloimke “Sam” Beckerman, all of whom were active during the period of intense American Jewish cultural ferment that occupied the space between the two world wars. Like his peers, Tarras had been a professional musician in the old country (he came to New York in 1921, driven from his home in central Ukraine by a wave of pogroms). His family members were wedding entertainers, and he likely grew up playing a repertoire that gelled sometime in the 19th century but whose roots stretch back to the 16th century.

At Eldridge Street, the clarinetist Joel Rubin and the tsimbl player Pete Rushefsky played a number of pieces from the same general pool—songs gathered by the Russian musicologist Moshe Beregovski (like “Tish Nign”) or performed by the early klezmer supergroup Belf’s Rumanian Orchestra (like “Dem Zaydn Tants”) that probably resembled the stuff that Tarras and his relatives played back in the Ukrainian region of Podolia. As interpreted by Rubin and Rushefsky, this material had the delicacy and slightly stiff-necked grace of chamber music, albeit with a persistent pulse. (If you want to hear the master himself play this repertoire, check out Tarras’s last studio recording, Dave Tarras: Music for the Traditional Jewish Wedding, re-released last year by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.)

Once in America, Tarras soon began reimagining his musical heritage. Immersed in the wildly diverse melting pot that was New York City in the 1920s, he folded bits and pieces of other styles—Romani music, Greek music, American jazz—into his work. The results were transformative: Tarras compositions like “Edinitzer Bulgar” and “Happy Birthday Dinele,” which Rubin performed at Eldridge Street with the drummer Dave Licht and the accordionist Art Bailey in the trio format that Tarras often used, have an altogether different feel than their Old World ancestors—louder, more rhythmically propulsive, more kinetic and raucous. This is no longer 19th-century folk music for small-town, semi-rural settings; this is urban music for a 20th-century crowd, and it exerted a powerful influence over a subsequent generation of American-born klezmer musicians.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long. Just three years after Tarras arrived in New York, the Anti-Immigration Act of 1924 choked off the influx of fresh Eastern European blood that had sustained the Eldridge Street Synagogue and fueled demand for klezmer music. The Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel, both of which turned American Jewish attention away from Europe and toward less conflicted sources of inspiration, put the final nails in klezmer’s coffin, and Tarras, like the synagogue, settled into decades of neglect.

Happily, both enjoyed a second act. The synagogue received a $20 million renovation and was reborn as the museum, a focal point for Jewish culture on a Lower East Side where new neighborhood arrivals are more likely to come from Fujian than Odessa. And klezmer was rediscovered by a new generation of American musicians, among them Rubin, a founding member of the seminal revival group Brave Old World. Though Rubin never met Tarras, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the subject of improvisation and ornamentation in the work of both Tarras and Brandwein; he also recorded an album of Tarras compositions and published a book of Tarras transcriptions. The two had plans to perform together, but after Tarras’s triumphant return to the stage in the late 1970s, his health declined precipitously, and the encounter never transpired.

It’s too bad; that concert would have been fascinating. Rubin, like many of his fellow revivalists, has an extremely broad and varied musical background, in which classical training rubs up against Greek, Turkish, and Balkan music, and much of the praise heaped upon Tarras—the liquid tone, the technical facility—applies just as well to Rubin’s playing. Listening to Rubin peel off one long, curlicued phrase after another, one can imagine what it must have been like to have heard Tarras in person, at his peak.

But Rubin is no clone. And when I asked him via email if he consciously used Tarras’s melodic ornaments during the Eldridge Street concert, his reply was instructive. “I suppose I used Dave’s ornaments as a starting point,” he wrote, “but I have a much freer relationship to the melody and the ornamenting of it at this point than he did (he pretty much did the same thing each time with minimal variations).”

That, in a nutshell, is why modern klezmer has avoided the stagnation that so often befalls repertory movements and instead has continued to develop and to expand, swallowing everything from avant-garde jazz to funk and hip-hop. (Clarinetist David Krakauer, another Tarras fan, recently released a nice album of klez-funk with James Brown’s old trombonist, Fred Wesley.) Just as Tarras responded to his new environment by creatively broadening the definition of Jewish music, so, too, have contemporary players like Rubin put their own stamp on a genre they helped bring back to life—honoring not only the music, but also the spirit, of Tarras and his colleagues.

It’s a fitting tribute indeed.

Ruzow’s 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, or 4WAKO, is just what the name implies: a band that combines Afropop with Eastern European Jewish music—though there are hints of other styles floating around in there, as well. Ruzow, who was a founding member of the avant-jazz Gold Sparkle Band, once co-led a klezmer ensemble called Mazel Tov Cocktail. Seven or eight years ago, he acquired a taste for the African pop produced by musicians like Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Thomas Mapfumo, and a year-and-a-half ago, he had the idea to fuse the genres. “It just came to me, and I wrote three tunes,” he said in an interview. He brought together a group of veteran Atlanta players to perform them, and soon he’d written a bunch more, resulting in East Atlanta Passover Stomp, 4WAKO’s debut album, released last November.

The first track, “Greater Lagos Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”—named for a tune by one of Ruzow’s heroes, the African-American bassist and composer Charles Mingus, who was himself known to work in a wide range of styles—is a traffic-stopping illustration of the group’s Afro-Judaic aesthetic. What begins as a silky-smooth, Fela-style Afrobeat groove, complete with drunken horns, suddenly segues into a jaunty arrangement of Harry Kandel’s klezmer classic, “A Nacht in Gan Eden” (“A Night in the Garden of Eden”). The 10-piece band proceeds to cut back and forth between the two like a DJ dropping the needle on two very different records, and while that might not seem like the best idea in theory, in practice, it’s great—at least, if you like both Fela Kuti and Harry Kandel (and really, why wouldn’t you?)

Something similar occurs on “Sweet Auburn Mishegas,” in which Ruzow alternates between an original, and slightly deranged, klezmer-inspired melody and another laid-back Afro-groove. On other tracks, however, like “Dolgo Horo,” he juxtaposes European- and African-derived sounds vertically rather than horizontally, supporting an Eastern European melody (in this case, a Balkan one) with West African rhythms.

Just as Mingus often imbued his work with a political subtext, so, too, does Ruzow. The band is named for Atlanta’s historically black Old Fourth Ward, which encompassed the once-affluent, then crime-ridden, and now-gentrifying Sweet Auburn district where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. The title “Sweet Auburn Mishegas” sums up Ruzow’s attitude to the way in which the area was redeveloped in the name of creating a “mixed income” neighborhood—a laudable goal, but one that he feels simply provided cover for razing a bunch of older, low-rent buildings and displacing their poor black residents. (He may have a point.) “A Nacht in Gan Eden” also has geopolitical significance. “Some people say that the Garden of Eden was in central Africa,” said Ruzow, who intended the tumultuous collision of klezmer and Afrobeat to represent “the strife and indignities occurring on the African continent.”

Strife is also a theme in David Chevan’s most recent recording, The Road that Heals the Splintered Soul. Since 1998, Chevan and pianist Warren Byrd have led the Afro-Semitic Experience, an ensemble dedicated to exploring the musical heritage of both Jews and blacks. Their repertoire encompasses synagogue and church music, jazz, blues, and material from the African diaspora. The ASE’s latest offering explores some of the more painful episodes in black and Jewish history, with an eye toward healing and forgiveness, and it draws on the group’s distinctively bifurcated pool of resources.

“Shout It from the Mountain” is based on “Run Daniel,” an old slave song from the Georgia Sea Islands with a rhythm that resembles a common klezmer pattern. “I have always been bothered by the lack of the slave voice in the Torah,” Chevan wrote in an email. “We read about Moses, but we don’t really hear the voices of the Hebrew slaves. And we certainly don’t have any of the slave songs that the Jews must have sung while working for Pharaoh. So I began to imagine what a Jewish slave song would have sounded like.” What he imagined includes elements of “Run Daniel,” supplemented by a klezmerish melody and some jazzy improvisation. Similarly, “Adon Olam,” which is sung both at Sabbath services and for the dead, gets a funk-jazz makeover; and the title track includes an impassioned, gospel-tinged vocal, along with instrumental nods to John Coltrane’s spiritually charged “A Love Supreme” and Nat Adderley’s hard-bop classic, “Work Song.”

The Afro-Semitic Experience and 4WAKO both move easily between tight ensemble playing and a looser, more ragged sensibility. The sense that things are sometimes falling apart lends added energy to these groups, ensuring that their explorations of different genres and traditions, though touching upon issues of race and class, never become dryly academic or polemical. Like good music everywhere, their work offers something for the mind, something for the heart—and something for regions further south, as well.

Those songs were the only Jewish thing that Cioma chose to bequeath to David and his younger son, Sascha. Like many survivors who lost their families during the war, Cioma’s feelings about Judaism were complicated. “He’s very critical of Jewry and consciously chose not to raise us as Jews, but a Jewish consciousness was always present,” said David. “He was absolutely convinced that being Jewish is what killed his parents. We grew up in a Christian milieu; our Jewishness was limited to stories and history.”

Stories and history, and those songs. Years later, when David, a bassist, and Sascha, a saxophonist, decided to pursue careers in music, they began to re-examine the music of their childhood. Before long, they had teamed up with the German violinist Andreas Wäldele to form a klezmer ensemble, Baith Jaffe; the name is a German transliteration of the Hebrew form of Schönhaus, or “pretty house.”

The quartet, which also includes pianist Niculin Christen, performs many of the tunes that Cioma brought with him from Berlin: classics like “Oifn Pripetshok“ and “Oifn Weg,” which became the title tracks of the band’s first two recordings; lesser known pieces like “Main Tairer Mann” (“My Dear Man”), which tells the story of a woman whose husband emigrates, never to be heard from again; and near-oddities like “Wie Ist Dos Gessele” (“Where Is the Street”), which Cioma sang in Russian—his own father had served in the Red Army, contributing more than a few songs (some of them X-rated) to the family repertoire—but which had been recorded in Yiddish during the 1920s.

The brothers dove into the same archival recordings that have served as touchstones for American klezmer revivalists, including discs by David Tarras, Naftule Brandwein, and Abe Schwarz. They listened to Andy Statman, the mandolin player and clarinetist whose work traverses bluegrass, Hasidic niggun, and late John Coltrane; they performed alongside the Epstein Brothers, one of the last surviving klezmer bands from the 1940s; and they collaborated with the late Marcel Lang, a Swiss cantor who taught them about Jewish music and religion before his death in June. “The band served as our entry point to Judaism,” David said.

Ultimately, David and Sascha arrived at their own version of Jewish roots music, one that draws on traditional Ashkenazi materials but also alludes to classical music, Russian folk music, and jazz—a mixture of personal and contemporary elements which comprises their family’s musical legacy. (They tend to tailor their approach to their repertoire, which means you can hear them get all Russian on “Katjusha”, or sort of jazzy and Americana-ish on “Andy Statman 17″, or unapologetically Jewy on the Epstein Brothers’ “Chassidic Medley.”)

Their approach appears to have struck a chord. David estimates that 80 percent of their European audiences are non-Jewish and says they always play to sold-out houses. They do the bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding circuit, play festivals in Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, and even venture to the United States, where they recently gave a series of concerts at Pacific Lutheran University.

And Cioma? “He has a very ambivalent view of our band,” David said. “On the one hand, he loves our music. On the other, he believes in creating a world religion in which Judaism no longer has a place. But he’s always supported us in our work, and is proud of our success.”

***

While David and Sascha have spent the last 20-odd years coming to terms musically with their family history, Kat Parra only recently discovered hers. Parra studied voice in college with Patti Cathcart, of Tuck & Patti. But life, in the guise of an early marriage, two children, and a divorce, interrupted her dreams of a musical career. She spent eight years waiting tables and another six working as a graphic designer for Cisco Systems while singing jazz, R&B, and salsa on the side.

Then three things happened: her youngest son graduated college, enabling her to quit her corporate gig and pursue music full-time; she discovered through a family-tree project that despite her Ashkenazi upbringing, her maternal grandfather had been a Sephardic Jew from the Iberian Peninsula; and she encountered Sephardic music on a trip to Spain. The result: a series of albums that have explored, in ever greater depth, “Sephardic world jazz”—an artful mishmash of traditional Sephardic songs and different forms of Latin music.

Parra’s latest release, Dos Amantes, includes a buoyant Latin jazz rendition of the old drinking song, “La Vida Do Por El Raki” (“I Would Give My Life for Raki”) and a sumptuously orchestrated version of “Fiestaremos” (“Let Us Celebrate”) set to the African-derived rhythms of a Peruvian lando. The disc benefits greatly from the work of several highly skilled arrangers, including Bay Area veterans Wayne Wallace and Murray Low, and from a gimcrack band that combines the delicate flute-and-violin instrumentation of a Cuban charanga ensemble with steely rhythmic precision.

Maybe Parra’s Sephardic grandfather would regard this reimagining of his cultural legacy with the same ambivalence as Cioma Schönhaus. Or maybe he’d just slip on his dancing shoes, toss back some raki, and join the party.

As a child, I thought this was a personal tic. Then, thanks to Chaim Potok, Robby Benson, and The Chosen, I learned that non-Hasidic Jews have long looked askance at their bearded, furry-hatted brethren. Still, I was surprised to find an example of musical Hasid-baiting dating back to 1929 on Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners 1905-1953: Classic Yiddish 78s from the Mayrent Collection, a new 3-CD box set on the JSP label.

That track, “Yidden, Loift Tzum Rebbin” (“Jews, Run to the Rabbi”), is one of 69 culled from the more than 17,000 sides owned by Sherry Mayrent, a klezmer clarinetist and associate director of Living Traditions, the organization behind KlezKamp and various other projects devoted to the dissemination of Yiddish culture. One of the vast number of “ethnic recordings” made for and marketed to everyone from blacks to hillbillies during the prewar period, it skewers the stereotypically sheep-like deference that Hasidic Jews show towards their miraculously endowed rebbes (“Bring it Jews, Hasidim/Hand the rebbe all your money/Come on women, don’t ask questions/He will brighten up your world”). The humor of “Chasidic in America,” recorded in 1938, is more subtle, as Moishe Oysher and Florence Weiss punctuate their jazz-inflected vocals with “oy veys” and “chiri biri bim boms.” It’s a wonder that the box set includes either, however, given that most reissues of archival Jewish material tend to focus on klezmer music, or cantorial singing, or some other institutionally recognized, “serious” cultural artifact.

Which is not to say that Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners—or the larger collection from which it is drawn (currently the largest accumulation of Jewish 78s in private hands)—doesn’t contain plenty of that, too. The CDs feature but a tiny fraction of what’s buried in the 9,000-odd discs that Mayrent has acquired on eBay (she picked up the first 100 for a mere $40) and from dealers around the world, and which Living Traditions is now cataloging, digitizing, and documenting. But it’s enough to give you some sense of the tremendous diversity of Jewish cultural expression during the 78 era, which stretched from the late 19th century—a full 25 years before the advent of radio—to the early 1950s, a span that saw the efflorescence of Yiddish theater, the rise of “hebe” dialect humor, and the eager engagement of a rapidly assimilating immigrant community with American culture at large.

Alongside the expected tracks by klezmer legends like clarinetist Naftule Brandwein and Kandel’s Orchestra and Jewish pop stars such as Sophie Tucker and the Barry Sisters, we find gems like a 1915 pressing of Sholom Aleichem reading from “If I Were Rothschild”; the first recording of Kol Nidre from 1924; and a cut from 1912 featuring Joe Hayman doing his “Cohen on the Telephone” routine, a surprisingly gentle bit of dialect humor in which a Yiddish speaker with a heavy accent has his first English phone conversation. The cantorial performances trace a clear arc from traditional Orthodox practice through modern Reform stylings, but they also include a couple of sui generis outliers like a recording of “Mi Sheoso Nisim” by Cantor Berele Chagy from 1919, which had me marveling, open-mouthed, at his melismatic ululations and eerie falsetto.

According to Henry Sapoznik, the executive director of Living Traditions and the man who got Mayrent hooked on 78s, the very scope of the larger collection distinguishes it from other archival holdings of Jewish material, as does the care with which the recordings have been transferred to digital form—a process that has resulted in some stunningly clear reproductions, like the 1913 side by Belf’s Roumanian Orchestra, a European klezmer outfit that enjoys iconic status among contemporary scholars of Jewish music but which has rarely, if ever, sounded so good to contemporary ears. A serious collector of Jewish material himself—he produced the first reissue of klezmer 78s in 1982, and his collection of Yiddish radio programs was recently acquired by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress—Sapoznik explains that Cantors, Klezmorim and Crooners is not an end unto itself. Rather, it’s meant to draw attention to the parent collection, which Mayrent hopes to make available online in its entirety, and to KlezKamp, which helped pioneer the use of archival recordings as a learning tool for aspiring performers of Jewish music.

Whether Mayrent and Living Traditions are ultimately able to make the whole thing free and open to the public online remains to be seen. Mayrent is currently negotiating with the University of Wisconsin at Madison to establish an institute of Yiddish culture that would serve as a permanent home for her discs, maintaining a searchable online database through which music-seekers could download every single recording. But the deal has yet to be sealed, and there remain tricky issues of copyright: the 78s were originally released by commercial labels such as Columbia and Victor whose catalogs have since been acquired by companies like Sony and Bertelsmann—companies that have become increasingly paranoid about online access to their property.

Still, Sapoznik is optimistic. Living Traditions has already transferred over 3,000 discs, and the first batch could go online within a year or two. In the meantime, we must content ourselves with the box set. It might fall far short of the wonder that is the full collection, but when it comes to legacy material that reveals the popular tastes of the Jewish community at a time of great cultural ferment, it is far better than anything else out there.

Listen to “Chasidic in America”

Listen to “Cohen on the Telephone”

Listen to “Mi Sheoso Nisim”

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry interviews Etkin at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, where he teaches, about his unusual musical trajectory. For information on his upcoming performances, go here.

I especially enjoyed the tunes with darkly appealing minor melodies, like “Ma Lecha Hayam,” or guttural Aramaic lyrics, like “Chad Gadya.” Of them all, “Ha Lachma Anya” (“This Is the Bread of Affliction”) was my favorite. So it might be nothing more than nostalgia that made me such a sucker for the jazzified version of the tune on saxophonist Idit Shner’s debut album, Tuesday’s Blues, flooding me with Passover memories at a time better suited to thoughts of the upcoming High Holidays. But I don’t think so.

Tuesday’s Blues is loaded with jazzed-up versions of Jewish and Israeli melodies, from “Lamidbar” to “Adon Haselichot.” But Shner, who played in the Israeli Air Force jazz band and earned a doctorate in saxophone and jazz studies at the University of North Texas (she’s now an assistant professor of jazz and classical saxophone at the University of Oregon), outdid herself with “Ha Lachma.”

For one thing, she recast it as a sprightly major melody, transforming the dirge-like original into something sunny and bright. She also installed a groovy descending bass line and punctuated the bridge with a couple of stop-time punches during which her backing trio drops out and she declaims the melody alone. It’s an old trick, and an effective one—the herky-jerky character of the bridge creates a sense of tension that is relieved by, and contrasts nicely with, the rest of the tune.

And then there’s the performance itself. Shner starts slow but by the end of her solo, she’s hammering away at the tune’s reinvented harmonies like a blacksmith beating hot iron, inventing little themes and throwing off showers of variations on them. Yet her rhythm section is so good—perfect, in fact—that you could tune her out entirely and still be left with one of the best trio performances in recent memory. Not that you’d want to, of course.

There’s yet more Passover material on tsuker-zis, the latest in a series of discs by trumpeter Frank London and singer Lorin Sklamberg that offer fresh interpretations of sacred Jewish music. Having already tackled nigunim and zemirot, the two long-time Klezmatics colleagues now turn their attention to Hasidic holiday songs, aided and abetted by electric guitarist Knox Chandler, Armenian-American oud player Ara Dinkjian, and North Indian percussionist Deep Singh.

Despite a few high-energy tracks—including a Chandler-driven version of an alphabetical acrostic Passover song (whose 25-word-long title lies beyond the scope of this document) that sounds pretty much the way a whirling dervish looks—the album as a whole exudes a mellow, meditative vibe: music to think about, or at least by. This might have something to do with Sklamberg’s light, reedy voice, with its intimations of emotional depth and fragility. Or it could be the result of the relaxed tempos and open, quasi-ambient textures favored on many of the tracks. But I suspect it is mostly the fault of Dinkjian, whose every pause and flourish threatens to take you out of this world and into another, far more interesting one.

The kind of musicianship displayed on both discs is wondrous to hear, and I have to admit that I tend not to expect it from singers, who, for all their talents, are often much less musically sophisticated than the instrumentalists who back them. That is most definitely not the case, however, with Ayelet Rose Gottlieb.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb

CREDIT: Jason Wu

Whereas her previous recording, Mayim Rabim, was based exclusively on the Song of Songs, her latest, Upto Hear from Here, draws on a much more varied and uneven collection of texts. Some of Gottlieb’s self-penned lyrics, like the ones to “Life Is a Structure That Is (Accept It!)” and “Pomegranate Man,” the opening track whose fruity subject does provide a tenuous link to the upcoming holiday season, recall the bullshit that Mike Myers used to spew when doing his caricature of a chain-smoking beat poet. Then again, Gottlieb’s “Venezia,” a Middle Eastern-flavored composition dedicated to her grandmother and delivered in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with what sound like home audio recordings woven into the mix, is absolutely heartbreaking. Elsewhere, Gottlieb borrows some intriguing lines from the likes of Rumi, John Cage, and Agi Mishol.

In the end, however, the quality of the lyrics is almost irrelevant. Words play second fiddle to sound here, and sound is where Gottlieb shines. She’s a singer who thinks like an instrumentalist, and you can hear that in the very first bars of “Pomegranate Man,” when she sings wordlessly along with trumpeter Avishai Cohen and saxophonist Loren Stillman, blending in like just another horn player. Whether dipping into straight-ahead jazz, rummaging through her bag of gospel, soul, and Middle Eastern licks, or tossing off an avant-garde gesture, Gottlieb is always an integral part of the ensemble. That she’s able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her bandmates in so challenging an idiom—one marked by constantly shifting rhythms, ambiguous harmonies, and constant allusions to disparate genres—makes it even easier to forgive her lyrical lapses. I don’t know if Upto Here From Here contains quite as many delights as a pomegranate has seeds, but it has enough to make up for the lousy poetry.

Poland is fertile ground for a fantasy like Nachman’s. So much Jewish history, so little Jewish presence. The country is underpopulated by Jews and overpopulated with Jewish ghosts, towns and cities once shaped by Jewish life and culture now haunted by specters of a melancholic and brutal history that hover over trampled cemeteries and begrudging monuments, or as you find in Warsaw, a shimmering office building of mirrored glass built on the ground where the Great Synagogue once stood and the Chinese embassy that, many believe, sits on dirt where the final, undiscovered milk can of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto documents is still buried.

In the early 1920s, Polish photographer Witold Chrominski took a panoramic shot of Szeroka Street, the central artery that leads into the main square of Krakow’s Jewish quarter, the Kazimierz. In the photo, the square is packed shoulder to shoulder with Jews, men in hats and long wool coats, women wrapped in shawls lugging stuffed shopping bags. It is a scene that bursts with life: you can hear the hum of conversations, the shuffling of weary feet, the shouts of vendors. Today, that same square bursts with a different kind of life and is mostly visited by tourists who’ve come to see the place that was once full of all of those Jews. It is a vibrant place these days, but when you stand in the middle of it and think of that photograph, the square’s enduring emptiness is stunning. The missing are everywhere. Instead of Jews, there are Jewish simulacra, walls covered with replicas of Jewish storefronts, kiosks selling wooden figurines of Orthodox Jews and Jewish violinists, “Jewish style” restaurants with names like Rubenstein and Babelstein, and Klezmer-Hois, a bohemian klezmer-themed cafe and hotel that sells old maps of Eastern Europe and vintage posters of Palestine and Israel. A restaurant that incredibly calls itself “Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz” advertises a trip “down memory lane” where you can eat your way back into a magical Polish past when Jews and Poles lived happily side by side. Under the seductive spell of selective post-Holocaust and post-Communist memory, Poland’s long, bitter history of anti-Semitism barely whispers its name in the sepia-toned shadows of vintage Judaica and colorful pre-Shoah nostalgia.

On our first day in Krakow—Roger Bennett, David Katznelson, Seymour Stein and I were in town for the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival—we were lucky enough to sit down in the garden of the Klezmer-Hois with Leopold Kozlowski, the iconic “last klezmer” of Poland and former musical director of the Jewish Theater in Warsaw who has preserved klezmer traditions from his pre-war days as a boy in the Ukraine through his post-war years as a Holocaust survivor. While Kozlowski spoke honestly of his ambivalence about the commercialization of Jewish memory in Krakow, he was also quick to emphasize just how important any shard of that memory still is to him. The Klezmer-Hois might not be an actual house for actual klezmers, but it’s still a place for him to sit in the breezy shade of trees, sip coffee, and pass on his songs and stories to new generations of Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Authenticity, he reminded us, is a complicated game in post-war Poland, and, at his age, knowing what he knows, a fake Jewish square can feel as real as anything else.

He told us that when he first came back to Krakow after the war he stood in the middle of the square and played his music for what he called the “mute stones” of Kazimierz. He wanted the stones to be reminded of the music they once knew, to ensure that memory would not fade into the silences of history.

The next day I visited Krakow’s Galicia Museum where an exhibition of paintings by Mayer Kirshenblatt, They Called Me Mayer July, was about to open. Among the work dedicated to memories of his Polish childhood in the ’20s is a painting of a “phonograph party,” in which a single phonograph blasts music from a living room window out to a town square full of people. When I spoke about the piece to the show’s curator—his daughter, the NYU professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who is also directing the new Jewish museum being built in the Warsaw ghetto—she immediately unraveled more stories of Poland’s “mute stones.” Who talks of Poland’s own Tin Pan Alley from the interwar years when Polish Jews wrote pop and jazz tunes in Polish for national audiences? Who remembers the dashing Jewish star of Polish musicals, Warsaw’s own Adam Aston crooning songs like “Nikodem” and “Panie Janie”? Who remembers the tunes of Henryk Wars, the Polish Irving Berlin, who later reinvented himself as Henry Vars in Hollywood, where he composed the theme music to Flipper?

Since the 1980s, modern Poland has been working hard to grapple with its repressions of Holocaust memory and its often stubborn and cruel refusals to touch the scars of national witness. Cities like Warsaw and Krakow have become sites of intensive recovery and reconstruction efforts where once-forgotten names like Aston and Kozlowski, where the names of the thousands in Chrominski’s photograph, might receive some sort of memorial recognition as Jews, even if it’s only in tourist gift shops, cultural festivals, death camp tours, or on the walls of museums.

A key piece in this process has been the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, mostly run by non-Jews for non-Jews, and which exists precisely to look memory in the face, to keep the stones from staying mute. The majority of this year’s performers came from the United States, where Jewish musical memory has long thrived alongside actual Jews, and historically the festival has, in a kind of reverse migration, imported Jewish music back into Poland. Which meant that familiar faces from the American scene like Frank London and Michael Alpert—leading New York lights of Jewish musical innovation and preservation—could play in Krakow’s only Reform synagogue on the same stage as both a crew of fellow New Yorkers (Sephardic-Mizrachi fusionists Pharoah’s Daughter, legendary Brooklyn cantor Benzion Miller, cantorial rock experimentalists The Sway Machinery) and The Other Europeans, a remarkable U.S.-Europe ensemble of Jewish and Gypsy musicians.

On the festival’s final night, Balkan Beat Box, the New York based band of Israeli brass devotees who manically meld Mediterranean and Gypsy styles through a hip-hop sensibility, commanded the coveted midnight slot. From the back of the Kazimierz square, you could barely see the stage. Well over 5,000 people had poured down Szeroka Street, dancing on cobblestones, cheering from balconies, and crowding restaurant tables. The square looked just like Chrominski’s old photo, packed and alive with people and culture not simulacra, only now the majority of the people were Poles who were not Jewish. Yet there they were, swept up in Jewish and Gypsy melodies, locked into the rhythms of history without presence, dancing with ghosts on top of mute stones.

Josh Kun is a co-founder of The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation and a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. With Roger Bennett, he is co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl (Crown, 2008) and co-curator of Jews on Vinyl, currently on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

J. Edgar Klezmer will be performed in New York City on June 4th at the Manhattan JCC.

There’s always plenty of speech-making going on at these things, everyone congratulating each other and themselves for thinking of the idea. In one of those dead zones, I got a chance to talk to Naomi Less, who performs under the moniker Jewish Chicks Rock.

Now, rocking is the kind of thing that has to be earned. Rock stars may very well be made, not born, but it isn’t the kind of thing you declare. If you shout “ROCK AND ROLL!” at an audience and wave your electric guitar at them, you’d better have the chords to back it up.

Naomi Less, though, owns the right to declare herself rocking. Not by way of force or bombast: live, both times I’ve seen her, it’s just been her and an electric guitar. What she lacks in backup band, she makes up in style, poise, and big chords. Her guitar playing is very 1980s—with that prefabricated, jangle-pop, big-band sound—but it’s also very ’70s in that it’s full of guitar-solos and tension-climbing drama. Her “Responsibility” is like a Pretenders song in every sense: its incredibly catchy guitar riff, the staccato breakdown, and the positive-message sing-along chorus: “I won’t keep this to myself, there’s something I’m trying to make you see/I won’t run from my responsibility.“ “Mishuga’at” (the female form of meshugah, or crazy) is a song about friendships between girls and not caring about peer pressure. “One Simple Thing (Hashkieveinu)” is Less’s token lighters-in-the-air song—a slow-dance beat, the ambiguous is-it-a-crush-or-is-it-God chorus made famous by Christian rockers (“Please comfort me/can’t you see/you’re part of me”) that is a glowing cliché.

Naomi Less

That’s the thing about Less, though. She writes songs like a teen novel: totally self-aware, and totally unapologetic about it. As she growls into the mic on “Responsibility, you can read between the lines of her lyrics: “I’m going to express myself, dammit.”

In fact, Less’s act doubles as the perfect teen program. She performs at synagogues and youth groups, playing music and talking about how (as per the recurring theme) girls rock. This might make Less sound like one of those cheesy roving Jewish educators with a Star of David t-shirt and an armful of sing-along Xeroxes, but the end result is somehow the opposite. Kids have a bullshit-meter with zero tolerance, and she passes every time.

Listen to “Mishuga’at” by Naomi Less

Over the years, Greg Wall, one of the main players in the jazz-klezmer ensemble Hasidic New Wave and a mainstay of the Lower East Side avant-garde scene, has grown more seriously interested in Jewish learning; at his last show, someone pointed him out and said, “Oh, you mean Rabbi Wall?” It wasn’t exaggeration; it was ordination.

One extension of Wall’s devotion is the new project Ha’Orot, in which he and Rabbi Itzchak Marmorstein take the work of another rabbi-slash-artist and get all San Francisco-cafe on him—Rav Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine. He was a kabbalist, a Lithuanian arbiter of Jewish law, and he was the author of Orot, a slim but dense volume of philosophy and theology. He also wrote some pretty kickin’ poems.

These days, Rav Kook is known more for his mystical teachings than his poetry, an omission that probably comes more from the poems’ esoteric nature than from a lack of quality. But Ha’Orot aims to change that. By placing his poems in a 1960s spoken-word context—crashing free-jazz piano, high-hat-intensive drums, words purred into the mic like Allen Ginsberg describing his latest otherworldly vision—Wall and Marmorstein recast Kook’s words in the context of a more contemporary poetry, effectively mirroring their religious journey in the other direction.

Not all of Ha’Orot’s catalogue comes from Rav Kook. Some lyrics are taken from psalms; others, one gets the feeling, are improvised or embellished on the spot. When Marmorstein first told me about the project, I asked him to send me a demo, and he was pretty firm with me: “You can’t get the essence of our project off a record. You have to see it.” Since then, though, the band announced a forthcoming full-length record on Tzadik. In the meantime, you can catch them live playing in synagogues around the West Village—just like Rav Kook would have wanted it.

Ha’Orot performing in New York City

A few months ago, the publicist at Numero Records asked me if I’d ever heard of this band Monotonix. “I don’t know if they’re up your alley, he told me, “but I just saw the weirdest band in the universe”and they’re Israelis.

Along with this note was a link to a YouTube video. Innocently, I clicked it, and what followed might have been the most intense two minutes that the computer at my temp job had ever seen—here, just watch it yourself:

Be sure not to miss the part where the audience is tearing apart the drummer’s drum kit, piece by piece, and he still manages to hit every beat.

Monotonix

Body Language, Monotonix’s six-song American debut, isn’t as chaotic as that, but it is equally unceasing in its aural assault—guitars out for blood, feedback cranked to 10. Yet it has moments of an almost cheesily feel-good buildup along the lines of old Elton John. The first song, “Lowest Dive,” opens with a repeated pounding of a snare drum in time with the strum of a drenched-in-feedback guitar. This simple sound fills the full first 30 seconds of the song, which then explodes into a fuzzy, lo-fi, catchy jam. “Dance for me/Oh, you should be dancing for me,” croons lead singer Ami Shalev, sounding like Alice in Chains by way of Tom Waits’ half-drunken nihilistic swagger. “Summers and Autumns” has all the angst of a good old-fashioned mosh pit song. “No Metal” takes familiar ’80s heavy-metal clichés—the long, loud guitar fadeout; the fast staccato vocals—and mixes it with a dance-floor sensibility and the sudden appearance of an organ in the middle. It’s bizarre and moody and, unexpectedly, loads of fun.

Listen to “Summers and Autumns” by Monotonix

I had gone to Austin, Texas, to read a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and seeing so many musicologists at close range only served to convince me that I no longer wanted to be one. Not long afterward, I left academia.

So it was with some trepidation that I attended “Beyond Boundaries: Klezmer Music in the 21st Century,” a symposium held at the City University of New York in December. Alas, much of that apprehension proved to be warranted.

People have been collecting and studying Jewish music for some time, but the modern klezmer movement is still very young, and much of what passes for research in the area amounts to a kind of “scholarship-lite” (all the verbiage, half the content). There are serious thinkers in the realm of Jewish music, to be sure, but few of them made it to this symposium. Instead, what we got was a mixed bag of genuine experts, mediocre performers, and cheerleaders. Several of the participants spent most of their allotted time patting themselves on the back and congratulating one another on the terrific job they’ve done reinvigorating Ashkenazi music.

There is some truth to this last claim. Klezmer was indeed once dead, and is now in rude health. But it was hard to listen to drummer Eve Sicular deliver an advertorial for herself, when her playing is so unresponsive and so devoid of stylistic nuance. And it was almost as hard to listen to violinist and one-man klezmer factory Yale Strom refer to himself as a balkulturnik, or “master of culture—both because it is embarrassingly immodest to make such claims in public, even when true, and because Strom demonstrates such poor command of his instrument. (He appears to suffer from what a colleague once described as “an unusual sense of pitch. )

Still, the event was not a complete bust, thanks in large part to the presence of violinist Alicia Svigals, clarinetist and ethnomusicologist Joel Rubin, and pianist and scholar Hankus Netsky—three highly knowledgeable and skilled artists who made most of the truly substantive contributions to the three-hour-long session. All had a lot of interesting things to say about the historical evolution of klezmer, its recent trajectory and the reasons for its enduring appeal.

Netsky floated the idea that klezmer enjoyed a successful comeback in part due to its long hibernation, suggesting that because it had “dropped out for 60 years,” the music had a frozen-in-time quality that allowed it to serve as a link to the past for those who rediscovered it—although, as Svigals pointed out, if klezmer seemed to return from the grave with its historic sound largely intact, that was because many early revivalists made a conscious effort to construct a canonical collection of melodies and performance styles from archival recordings. Successive generations of klezmer performers have taken an increasingly flexible approach to that canon, resulting in the efflorescence of creative klezmer hybrids that we see today.

Rubin, meanwhile, called attention to the increasing presence of religious imagery in klezmer since the mid-1990s. What was once an avowedly secular movement—“the new left,” as one audience member put it—now makes room for religious allusions in everything from CD cover art to pseudo-niggunim delivered in faux Hasidic style by non-observant Jews. This rising tide of musical religiosity jibes with the general trend toward heightened spirituality and observance among many American Jews, a correlation that was made explicit by writer Seth Rogovoy.

Rogovoy, who wrote The Essential Klezmer, asserted that “klezmer has a spiritual component at the DNA level.” As a result, once bitten by the klezmer bug, even listeners who were initially drawn to the music out of simple curiosity “will get drawn further in by the spiritual quality inherent in the music.

I happen to disagree with Rogovoy. I don’t think that klezmer—or any music, for that matter—is “inherently” spiritual; rather, I believe that spirituality is something that we invest in music, consciously or unconsciously. But I recognize that some performers do intentionally aim to give their audiences a spiritual experience, and that many people receive Jewish music in this way, regardless of the performer’s intentions. This may be one of the primary factors underlying klezmer’s contemporary appeal: it provides a convenient and painless means of establishing a connection to a religion, and a culture, that can otherwise seem unapproachable. (I don’t know about you, but I find that a nice freylakh goes down a lot smoother than a little one-on-one time with the Babylonian Talmud.)

This tendency to use klezmer as a means of approaching a great religious and cultural tradition goes a long way toward explaining why relatively mediocre artists can thrive on the Jewish music scene. With so many people looking for something that goes beyond mere sound, sound itself will sometimes suffer.

This does not demean the efforts of the many fine klezmer musicians out there who can really deliver the goods. But it does mean that, for the foreseeable future, they—like their scholarly counterparts—will have to share the stage with folks who can’t.

While the paths of Jews and Roma have diverged considerably since the war—the latter are now Europe’s largest stateless minority, plagued by poverty and lack of education—parallels persist. The Roma have their own advocacy groups; they have struck a balance between integrating into their host nations and preserving their distinctive cultural identities; and like their Jewish counterparts, Roma musicians are finding ways to preserve their traditions while moving forward, marrying their repertoires, instruments, and playing styles with those of other ethnic groups, and with the vast spectrum of rock and pop.

Kal

All of these themes came together during a rare US tour this fall by Kal, a Romani band from Serbia. The tour was organized by Voice of Roma, a nonprofit organization that runs educational and charitable projects, from cultural exchange programs to humanitarian and legal assistance for Roma refugees in Kosovo. (The Roma have fared poorly in the former Yugoslavia, where they were among the many groups who fell prey to ethnic cleansing.)

I saw Kal give its final performance of the tour at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and they tore the place up, combining absurdly up-tempo Romani dance tunes with blues and rock, rap and reggae. The audience included a sizeable contingent of Serbian Roma, many of whom engaged in loud, friendly conversation with the band between songs; a few women gathered by the stage, dancing and waving their hands in stylized gestures. After a month on the road, the musicians seemed as happy to see their homies as their homies were to see them; they responded with one of the most energetic sets I’ve seen in a long time.

Kal’s lyrics can be both poignant and cutting. Frontman and electric guitarist Dragan Ristic explained that the song “Radio Romanistan,” for example, was named for an imaginary radio service in an equally imaginary Romani homeland. Actually, the phrase he used was “promised land,” strongly evoking the shared longing of Roma and Jews. Except that the Jews now have a homeland, while the Roma probably never will.

Several other songs addressed the fervent wish of many Roma to leave wherever they are, and their concomitant preoccupation with visas and work permits. “Ding Dang Dong,” for instance, tells the story of a young Serbian Roma whose flush uncle in Austria promises him a visa, but never delivers. The kid eventually gets his own papers, makes his way to Vienna and rings the bell at his uncle’s house, but the uncle never answers; he just peers through the peephole as his nephew rings and rings and rings. Ristic—bald, goateed, with the physique of a professional wrestler and the delivery of a standup comic—aptly described this callousness and lack of compassion as “the tragedy of our civilization . . . ‘Ding, Dang, F*cking Dong.’”

Sometimes, political and social commentary merge with lighter themes, like love and romance. “This is story of 21, 22-year-old Serbian Rom and middle-aged American woman, aged 45,” Ristic said as he introduced “Frutti Tutti.” “Subtitle of this song is, ‘Honey, Give Me Green Card.’”

And sometimes there were no words at all, just dizzyingly fast dance tunes with circular melodies and hiccupping rhythms, some of them in the odd time signatures typical of the Balkans. (The very first tune of the evening was in 9/8, its beats carved up into a pattern of 2 + 2 + 2 + 3.)

When I first heard Kal on their eponymous 2006 debut CD—a groovy studio recording with touches of tango, techno, and bhangra that climbed to the top of the European world music charts—I could hardly believe how expressive and virtuosic violinist Djordje Belkic and button accordionist Dragan Mitrovic, were. Seeing them live hasn’t made them any less unbelievable, but it has helped me understand why Sani Rifati, the Roma activist who leads Voice of Roma, is so opposed to the popular image of “the happy, dancing gypsy.”

In part, that’s because there’s nothing happy about the plight of the Roma. There’s been a rise in scapegoating lately; just last May, Naples played host to an honest-to-goodness, let’s-burn-down-their-houses anti-Roma pogrom, fueled by the wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment washing over large swathes of Western Europe. And in part, it’s because these people aren’t just entertainers; they’re artists. (“Kal” means black in Romanes, and the name is not a coincidence: in terms of popular stereotypes and institutional racism, Roma and African-Americans have much in common. The “happy, dancing gypsy” is kissing cousin to the “happy, dancing Negro.”)

There are believed to be anywhere from 4 to 12 million Roma living in Europe today; at the upper end, that’s almost as many Jews as there are worldwide. Yet while Jewish music and culture are thriving, Romani music and culture are far less widely understood and appreciated. (Ristic and his brother run an annual program, the Amala Summer School, that introduces non-Roma, or gadje, to Romani language, music and dance. It resembles the many Yiddish festivals that have sprung up like mushrooms across North America and Europe, but on a far smaller scale.) Kal’s American tour was meant to help remedy that situation by providing foreign audiences with a glimpse of vibrant, contemporary Romani culture.

After getting a taste of it myself, I can only hope they’re as successful as their Jewish colleagues.

Alexander Gelfand is a writer and sometime jazz pianist. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and The Forward.

“Put a piece of chicken in front of me, and my wife starts to get sweaty if there are guests around,” Shapiro told me a couple of weeks after the show. “I sort of lose touch with reality, and before you know it, it’s all over the place. There isn’t much left on my plate except for some half-eaten bones. If there’s not enough napkins around, it can get very, very dangerous.” And not just for poultry. “I’m a great lover of food,” he says. “I’ve got a pretty wide palate, and I eat all kinds of ethnic foods.”

But Shapiro isn’t just a culinary gourmand; he’s a musical one, too. He’s even written a tune titled “Different Flavors” (“I like different flavors, yes I do…”) to express his love of variety in all things consumable, from soups to songs.

As a member of the Microscopic Septet in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shapiro was part of a small but vibrant community of jazz musicians who refused to submit to the narrow, neoconservative ethos of the day, and chose instead to celebrate the entire tradition, from early swing to the avant-garde. You can hear that joyous open-mindedness in all of Shapiro’s subsequent work, including his two previous albums for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Midnight Minyan and It’s in the Twilight, which subject traditional synagogue melodies to a variety of treatments, from rhythm and blues to modal jazz.

Paul Shapiro Band

Shapiro’s growing interest in Jewish music eventually led him to a pocket of repertoire from the 1930s and 1940s that occupies a fascinating middle ground between big band swing, Yiddish pop and early R&B. For the past several years, he has been presenting these finds, many of which take food as their theme, at Cornelia Street as part of his Ribs and Brisket Revue.

There are klezmer-inflected melodies like Benny Goodman’s “My Little Cousin” (based on the Yiddish tune, “Di Grine Kuzine”), and jivey, bluesy numbers like Henry Nemo’s “A Bee Gezindt,” which was sung by both Cab Calloway and Mildred Bailey”neither of whom, presumably, could resist a lyric that rhymes “Miller” with “schmiller”; Borscht Belt material like “Tsouris,” a shtick-laden Yinglish routine originated by the Barton Brothers, and the food-obsessed title track, a Billy Hodes bit that was later reworked by Lee Tully (né Kalman Naftuli), and which Shapiro tracked down among the 78-rpm records in the YIVO archives; and a couple of tunes by the late, great hipster Slim Gaillard: the frenetic “Matzoh Balls” and “Dunkin’ Bagels”, which Shapiro reworks as ultra-groovy new jack swing.

Many of these pieces illuminate the game of give-and-take that Jewish and African-American artists have played for generations, including “Utt-Da-Zay,” a Cab Calloway vehicle from 1938, which features mock cantorial gibberish by Revue singer Babi Floyd; and singer Cilla Owens’ earthy cover of blues singer Sophie Tucker’s Yiddishized cover of Jane Green’s “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” dating to 1923. “You listen to it and it’s very much a bluesy version, ’cause Sophie was really bluesy,” Shapiro says of Tucker’s rendition, which he also found at YIVO. “And yet it’s in Yiddish.”

The musical ancestry can get even more complicated. A couple of years ago, Owens brought in “Yes, My Darling Daughter,” a popular tune from the 40s sung by Adelaide Hall, among others. Audience members began coming to Shapiro between sets and telling him that the song was based on the old Yiddish tune, “Yuh Mein Tiere Tochter.” That was true, but it wasn’t the end of the story. “The funniest thing is, I played it last summer up at the National Yiddish Book Center, and [Jewish music scholar] Hankus Netsky was in the audience,” Shapiro says. “And he tells me afterwards, ‘Guess what — it’s really a Ukrainian folksong.’ That’s very typical; these melodies are popular and they get pulled into various musical families, and everybody shares.”

Shapiro casts many of these gems in the form of jump, a bouncy, jazzy precursor to R&B built on shuffle rhythms and boogie-woogie basslines that will be familiar to anyone who has heard Ray Charles’s early recordings or sampled the oeuvre of saxophonist Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five. He also weaves in bits of reggae and funk and bebop, all of which are deftly executed by pianist Brian Mitchell, bassist Booker King and drummer Tony Lewis. What stands out most, however”aside from the breadth of styles on display”is the consistent and strikingly well-integrated combination of serious musicianship and easy, lighthearted humor.

I have been to see the Revue more than once, and I have listened to Essen umpteen times, not just because of the novelty of the material or the intriguing relationships it reveals between various streams of American popular music; but because, as performed by Shapiro and his crew, it is endlessly entertaining.

Without committing to anything, Shapiro admits that there might be enough music for another album. To which I can only respond: Please, sir, can I have some more?

Listen to a clip of “Dunkin’ Bagel” by Paul Shapiro

Listen to an excerpt from Alexander Gelfand’s interview with Paul Shapiro

Listen to a clip of “Utt-Da-Zay” by Paul Shapiro

Alexander Gelfand is a writer and sometime jazz pianist. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and The Forward.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I”I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Sound familiar?

I recently stumbled across those lines by Robert Frost for the first time since high school. I don’t read much poetry these days; with a toddler in the house, my rhymes tend more toward the likes of, “Give a shout, give a cheer, let us know that you are here!”

So Frost’s poem got me thinking. The man himself said that it was a “very tricky” piece of verse, and I think that’s apt. You can read it as a celebration of the road less traveled, but the poem is ambiguous. (At least, that’s what all the poetry websites say. If Google had been around in the 1980s, I would’ve saved a bundle on Cliffs Notes.) Frost doesn’t so much say that the less obvious path is better, just that it’s different. Maybe.

Artists constantly face choices like this. No one has the time to explore every creative avenue available to him. At some point, you just have to choose one and stick with it long enough to see if it leads somewhere. Sometimes—often—things don’t pan out. But if enough people are willing to make brave and potentially stupid choices, you wind up with a lot of worthwhile experiments, some of which have very strange and unexpected relationships to one another.

Left: Omer Klein / Right: Frank London

“Dialects: Israeli Jazz and Klezmer,” a rather odd double-bill presented in September at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, seemed designed to illustrate this last point. The show, which was sponsored by the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation in honor of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel, featured Frank London‘s Klezmer Brass All-Stars and the Omer Klein Trio. At first blush, it’s hard to imagine two people with less in common, musically speaking. But upon closer inspection, London and Klein appear to be looking at Jewish music through different ends of the same telescope.

At this point in his career, London enjoys a reputation as an elder statesman of contemporary klezmer. When he joined the Klezmer Conservatory Band in 1980, he was one of a small group of young musicians who were intent on breathing life back into a dead musical language. Almost everyone who had grown up playing and listening to klezmer had either retired or expired. Things were grim.

Nearly three decades later, thanks in no small part to London’s work with the Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave, his music for theater and film, and his teaching gigs at KlezKamp and KlezKanada, klezmer is a lively and many-splendored thing. It has absorbed massive doses of other music, from rap to reggae; won fans all over the world; and acquired its own festival circuit. And large clumps of it are no longer easily recognizable as Ashkenazi dance music meant for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

The Klezmer Brass All-Stars have both real and pretend roots in early klezmer. The group, which includes a couple of trumpets, several trombones, tuba, clarinet, drums and electric guitar, is allegedly modeled after a dissolute band of 19th century brass musicians known as Di Shikere Kapelye (“The Inebriated Orchestra”), which London claims “gave birth to the soul of klezmer and gave klezmorim their imperishable bad reputation.”

Right.

In any event, the All-Stars take material that either comes out of the traditional klezmer repertoire or sounds as if it did, and pump it full of funk, dissonance, and extended improvisation. The result is a very postmodern gloss on traditional Eastern European Jewish music, part Harry Kandel and part Sun Ra. That inclusive, discursive approach can lead the ensemble from a relatively straight reading of a liturgical song like “Echad Mi Yodeah” into a bit of scatting (or is that a nigun?) by trumpeter Susan Watts, backed by swinging trombone riffs and a few wobbly chords from guitarist Brandon Seabrook that Bill Frisell would probably be delighted to stumble across.

If London is making old music sound new again, Klein is doing the opposite. The 26-year-old pianist is part of an Israeli expatriate community whose relatively small size belies its disproportionate prominence on New York’s music scene. A faction of that community has for some time been fashioning its own branch of jazz: one that takes its harmonic content and improvisational approach from canonical sources like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Keith Jarrett, but looks to Middle Eastern and North African music for melodic and rhythmic spice. Bassist Omer Avital, the de facto leader of this charge, holds up the bottom end of the trio; the other member is drummer Ziv Ravitz, who signals his intentions with a hybrid drum kit that incorporates Middle Eastern instruments like a round frame drum and a goblet-shaped dumbek.

I’m tempted to call the music they produce a fascinating mishmosh of borrowed musical elements—the formal rigor of classical music, the improvisational and harmonic insignia of contemporary jazz, the rhythms and drones of the Arab world—but that would suggest a lack of unity or integration, and these guys have plenty of both. An original composition with the cool precision of a Chopin etude might lead smoothly into a vaguely North African groove before breaking into quicksilver piano lines supported by lightly swinging bass and drums. A rhythmically complex blues with a loping bassline might instigate a hand-drum solo. Everything fits neatly into everything else, and there’s nothing incongruous about any of it.

That inspired approach to musical borrowing, along with a strong desire to blend the old with the new, unites London’s and Klein’s seemingly disparate visions. Both men are magpies, willing to steal anything that catches their fancy. But both have an uncommon knack for putting it all together in a satisfying whole, and for broadening the purview of Jewish music—whether drawing from the deep well of Arab music (the regional inheritance of Israeli Jews), or building on the foundation of klezmer (the cultural inheritance of many diasporic ones).

Neither has chosen a particularly obvious or easy path. London and Klein both make the process of combining different types of music seem simple, when in fact it can be very tricky. But their adventurousness and willingness to experiment is balanced in equal measure by their sensitivity and good taste. And that has made all the difference.

When I first began writing about Jewish music several years ago, I thought the job would be pretty straightforward. As a recovering ethnomusicologist, I’d had to deal with some pretty exotic sounds; how tough could the Jewish beat be?

Tougher than I could have imagined. Jewish music comes in as many varieties as the people, Jewish or otherwise, who make it. It has blended with, and borrowed from, a dizzying variety of other musical traditions. And the more I learn about it, the less I realize I know. What makes music Jewish in the first place? What’s the connection between new genres and old ones? What makes one style sound traditional, and another progressive?

I still can’t answer those questions to my own satisfaction, let alone anyone else’s. But wresting with them has made my mother very happy, and exposed me to a great deal of strange and wonderful music. I’ll continue to pursue them as I trace the web of connections, commonalities, and contradictions that links the music of the past to the music of the present, and Jewish music to the wider musical world.

Thirteen years ago I shared an office in the school of music at the University of Illinois with a fellow graduate teaching assistant named Kip. Kip looked like what Robin Williams, referring to fellow comic Martin Mull, once described as “Hitler’s wet dream”: tall, blond, and slender, with blue eyes and fair skin. His people came from Virginia, and he studied old-time string band music (he now plays mandolin in the Chicago-based bluegrass band Tangleweed), the kind of square-dancey, fiddle-and-banjo stuff that I had always associated with Hee Haw, incest, and that scene in Deliverance where Ned Beatty is forced to squeal like a pig. As a sophisticated urban Jew, I understood that this was music made primarily by and for hillbillies. Mountain mutants. Toothless wonders.

You get the picture.

Fortunately, Kip, who became one of my closest friends, had no idea what an ignorant, prejudiced jackass I was. In his kind, gentle, and infinitely patient way, he introduced me to rural American music, particularly the stuff that seeped out of Appalachia and into much of the South and Southwest, eventually giving rise to country music and bluegrass, a flashier, more virtuosic version of old-time string band music. At Kip’s suggestion, I read Bill Malone’s Country Music USA, which describes how the poverty-stricken descendents of Scots-Irish immigrants, when not scratching a living from the soil, created a style of dance music that was capable of expressing both great joy and sadness, sometimes at once. It made me think of the bittersweet music my own ancestors brought with them from the Old World to the new, and forced me to confront, for neither the first time nor the last, my tendency to assume the worst about people I don’t know.

Of course, some people have done more than simply ponder the parallels between Jewish and American folk music. For the past seven years, clarinetist Margot Leverett has performed an amalgam of klezmer and bluegrass with her string band, the Klezmer Mountain Boys. Although their latest recording, 2nd Avenue Square Dance (released October 14), takes detours into rock and Brazilian choro—Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) and the Brazilian Bay Area-transplant Carlos Olivera both make appearances—Jewgrass remains the dominant sound. That’s especially true on tracks like “High Lonesome Honga” and “Boreasca,” where Leverett marries traditional klezmer melodies to the rapidfire unison delivery that mandolinist Bill Monroe, guitarist Lester Flatt, and banjoist Earl Scruggs pioneered in the 1940s. (The Klezmer Mountain Boys comprises mandolinist Barry Mitterhof, guitarist Joe Selly, violinist Kenny Kosek, and bassist Marty Confucius. Banjoist Tony Trischka also appears on several tracks.)

Leverett, who played avant-garde music in New York City before helping to found the Klezmatics in the mid-1980s, had been drawn to bluegrass for many years, indulging a taste for playing old-fashioned fiddle tunes—Appalachian, Cajun, Northeastern—on the clarinet. Opportunities to do so, however, were limited; even those bluegrass musicians who were relatively open-minded about bringing a reed player into their midst were hardly beating the bushes for klezmer-oriented collaborators. “I could spend the rest of my life sitting by the phone, waiting for a bluegrass band to call to me to sit in,” she tells me.

So Leverett formed her own bluegrass band in 2001 and began transcribing Bill Monroe tunes. In doing so, she followed in the proud tradition of Jewish musicians and musicologists who have thrown themselves into American roots music. But unlike some of her colleagues, such as the banjo player Henry Sapoznik, who were inspired to explore their own musical heritage only after discovering somebody else’s, Leverett made the leap in reverse. (Full disclosure: I spent many years studying and playing jazz and African music before I paid serious attention to Jewish music of any kind—and my “conversion” took place only when I was asked, as the token Jew in the music department at a Midwestern liberal arts college, to deliver a lecture on the subject.)

Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys

Listen to clips from “Boreasca” and “Electric Kugel”

Leverett also came to appreciate the social and historical parallels between klezmer and old-time country music. “Both came from people in isolated rural communities that led harsh lives, and their music reflected the oppression they suffered, as well as the strength and joy it takes to overcome that,” she says. And both genres were transformed as the people who originated them migrated from one place to another: from rural Appalachia to the industrial cities and towns of the Midwest and Northeast, and from the shtetls of central and eastern Europe to America.

As it spread cross-country via recordings and radio in the 1920s and 1930s, early Appalachian string band music, at once idiosyncratic in its tunings and rhythms and communally oriented in its emphasis on ensemble performance and dance accompaniment, became a vehicle for virtuoso solo displays and artful arrangements, culminating in the polished brilliance of 1940s and 1950s. Yet if this new, more urban form was in some ways more sophisticated than the folk tradition that preceded it, it was also more homogenous. Klezmer followed a similar trajectory. Only a handful of the local styles that originated in Europe made it to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and those that did quickly hybridized with American popular music in subsequent decades, resulting in swing klezmer, dance band klezmer, and much else that Tevye and the good people of Anatevka wouldn’t have recognized as klezmer at all.

Both old-time country music and early klezmer also absorbed elements of African-American music, like jazz and blues. Listening to the eerily compatible sound of Kaukonen’s bluesy electric guitar and Leverett’s klezmer clarinet on “Electric Kugel,” it’s tempting to surmise that there is something similar, or at least mutually sympathetic, about the music of downtrodden folk everywhere.

Then again, that’s exactly the kind of essentialist thinking that nearly got me into trouble with Kip way back when. Perhaps it’s best just to note how well Leverett’s particular fusion project works, and leave it at that.

On a summer morning in 1958, up on 126th Street in Harlem, Art Kane took a photograph of a group of musicians that included some of the greatest jazz players of all time, such as Dizzy Gilespie, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker. The photograph, titled “A Great Day in Harlem,” is now legendary and recently it served as the inspiration for another group photograph.

The new picture, taken on the steps of the newly-restored, 120-year-old Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, was of nearly 100 klezmer musicians from all over the United States and Europe. They came at the invitation of musician and ethnographer Yale Strom to celebrate the vitality of klezmer today. This photo (and a series of concerts planned alongside it) would be called “A Great Day on Eldridge Street.”

It seems like such a lovely idea, but could they really pull it off? And would it really, truly, be great? Here’s our report.

Photos courtesy of the Eldridge Street Project. Parading musicians by Jessica Schein. Group portrait by Leo Sorel.

Golijov explains the shofar in Krakow

What about Federico García Lorca inspired you to write an opera?

It was Lorca who said that the greatest tragedy in the history of Spain was the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews. That made Spain from a great civilization into a petty and chauvinistic little provincial thing.

The image that I had when I started composing the opera was of a floating pomegranate, bleeding melodies of the three civilizations that were in Spain—Jewish, Muslim, Catholic. The Arabs were translating the Greeks, and Maimonides was in touch with Averroes, and all of that. People were having a dialogue. It’s not like it was all rosy, but there was creative tension.

As opposed to a more violent kind of tension today?

Violence and fear, mutual fear.

Also, Ainadamar was so beautiful in the Golden Era. It was a place people went to be in harmony with the world, and the same place, nine centuries later, becomes the witness of a horrible murder. Lorca was assassinated there. It’s about how things don’t necessarily get better.

The idea is that there are rhythms and melodies that come from the soil of Spain. What I did was mostly take them and bend them in a way, to express the history of that place—the pain, the war, and the beauty.

Do you see any of this as a lesson for today?

Wishful thinking. [Laughs] In the opera, Lorca, through one of the characters, says “You love freedom, but I am freedom.” And that to me is the main point. That people who love freedom feel entitled to kill others for that love, but those people who are freedom are actually killed. Like Lorca, just by being freedom, they scare the others. It would be beautiful to arrive at the place where we all are freedom, and do not just love freedom.

How did your grandparents end up in Argentina?

Argentina, believe it or not, was as good as America in terms of promise then. There is still a pretty sizable Jewish population there, but it’s much smaller than when I was growing up. In the 1960s, there were two Yiddish newspapers, a lot of theater in Yiddish. In most homes Yiddish was spoken. When I was younger—well, I forgot everything now, but I was fluent. But with the dictatorship and anti-Semitism, people emigrated, many to Israel. Many assimilated, and several hundred were killed.

You left for Israel. How old were you then?

Twenty-two. I had a very happy childhood in Argentina, but then it got much more difficult with all the violence and I got fed up. And musically, I was not growing. Plus there was always the desire to know Israel, to know Jerusalem.

By the time you got to Israel, you already knew a lot of Jewish music.

Yeah, but I didn’t know all the Sephardic music. It was just incredible to walk down the streets and hear—there are so many little synagogues. And people sing all the time, like the plumber would come to fix something and see the piano and start singing. He didn’t fix the problem, the leak got bigger. But I got a couple of songs out of him, so it was okay.

Do you come from a musical family?

My mom was a very good pianist. My dad was a doctor, an orthopedist. Because of my mother, I studied piano. I loved Bach and still love it, and Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and all of that. But because we were in a relatively small town, there were no amazing performers coming. The orchestra in my town was pretty bad. My knowledge was mostly from playing scores or listening to records.
So when I was, like, 10, and my mom took me to see Astor Piazzolla, it was a shattering moment in my life because—here is a real, living person, not someone born 200 years ago in Vienna, who integrates all that I loved, from Bach to Bartok. Piazzolla sublimated the sound of the streets of Argentina into music. The way people talk—you know, people who talk to you from the side of their mouth just to show how macho they are? That’s the way the phrasing was. I could hear everything at the same time, Bach and the streets. And that’s something that I still remember with goose bumps.

Is that when you knew you wanted to write your own music?

Oh, that definitely did it. I was already writing little ditties by then.

Since your mother introduced you to music, that must have made her very happy.

Not really. She was scared. I could be anything I wanted, but not a musician. The whole prospect of a starving artist was not very exciting for her. Once it was inevitable and she couldn’t fight my decision anymore, she was incredibly supportive, and she totally believed in me. She always said, “Keep dreaming.” Many times I felt like giving up—when you slowly let go of your wildest dreams—and she was the one who always kept pushing me.

You write a lot for Dawn Upshaw, who is known as a champion of new music. How did you meet her?

She got my name from the Kronos Quartet. She called to ask for a song, seven years ago. Now, I’m a little used to big people calling, but at that moment only AT&T called me to remind me to pay the phone bill. She was given some money to commission a piece, and she decided that rather than call a well-known composer, she wanted somebody she didn’t know. In Dawn, I was able to find somebody with that affective power, that deep truth of expression, but also the possibility of whatever I want because she’s such a huge musician.

There are moments on Ayre when she doesn’t even sound like a soprano—sometimes she even sounds throaty.

Exactly. In Ayre, she’s like seven different voices. [Laughs] I told her: after this record, either they will change the definition of soprano or of Dawn Upshaw.

Does your recent success, especially now with Lincoln Center devoting a month to your music, feel a little strange?

When you are born in La Plata, Argentina, you never lose that wide-eyed feeling, which I think is actually a good thing. It means a lot, but it could also be a freak thing. Obviously I try to do my best all the time, but I don’t have that supreme confidence that I think Mozart or Strauss had.

Mozart was very poor when he died.

Yeah, but he had confidence. He knew he was Mozart. I still don’t know who I am. I think that what I do is truthful, but I also feel that I’m pretty minor. But I’m opening a door. I think I’m John the Baptist, except I never want to end up with my head on a platter. But I am kind of announcing a new era in music, an era in which boundaries will disappear. But I think a much greater composer than me will come soon.

In the late 1980s, klezmer music was making a comeback in the United States, but also on the festival circuit in Europe. It even caught on in Italy, which struck Francesco Spagnolo as strange; klezmer had nothing to do with Italian Jewish culture, a venerable and singular blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influences.

Back in Italy, Spagnolo hosted a Jewish music program in Milan, and later, a nightly program on Italian National Radio. He talks about why Italians were more drawn to klezmer than to native Jewish music, and how he worked to introduce other sounds. With traditional music from Livorno performed by Simone Sacerdoti, and a liturgical remix by Enrico Fink.

Editor’s note: Since he spoke to us last year, Spagnolo has moved to New York City and taken a new job as executive director of the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History.

Dmitri Shostakovich

One thing Shostakovich was not was Jewish, by birth or belief. Yet from the frenzied klezmer dance melody of the Second Piano Trio (1944) to the mournful vocal cycle From the Jewish Folk Poetry (1948) to the sweeping sorrow of the Holocaust evoked in the Thirteenth Symphony (“Babi Yar“) of 1962, Shostakovich carried on a lifelong affair with the sound and soul of Russian Jewry. Why would a non-Jewish composer living in one of the modern world’s most bitterly anti-Semitic and repressive societies, where mere possession of Hebrew literature could lead to arrest and imprisonment, choose to make Jewishness a recurrent theme in his work? The answer is tied up with the debate over the man behind the music.

Shostakovich was a Communist Party member and First Secretary of the Soviet Composers’ Union, and his signature appeared on a 1973 letter attacking the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Few doubted his tremendous musical talents, but there was little interest in the West for a composer who seemed such an obedient musical apparatchik.

Then came Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovitch as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, purportedly dictated shortly before the composer’s death in 1975. Volkov, a senior editor at Sovetskaya Muzyka, the leading Soviet music journal, brought the manuscript to the United States in 1976 and published in English in 1979. Testimony offered a startling image of the quiet, legendarily taciturn composer as a secret freedom fighter, an anti-Soviet liberal who revealed himself only in these private conversations. Volkov’s Shostakovich was boldly courageous and pettily proud, alternately explaining the hidden anti-Soviet political meaning in many of his famous compositions and dismissing former colleagues such as Prokofiev in unflattering, gossipy terms.

The book’s convoluted title was the first indication that this was not a standard autobiography. In fact, charges of forgery immediately began to surface among Soviet authorities and Western scholars. Volkov offered as evidence of Shostakovich’s approval the composer’s signature on the first page of each chapter, certifying that he had read the contents. And in the context of the Cold War and the political movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Westerners eagerly embraced the new heroic image of Shostakovich as a secret dissident, making his music a new concert hall favorite and Volkov’s book a bestseller.

Shostakovich with Ivan Sollertinsky

Among the themes to emerge from Testimony was the central place of Jews and Jewishness in Shostakovich’s life and creative work. Many of the people closest to Shostakovich were Jews, including his favorite pupil, Venyamin Fleishman, and his best friend, Ivan Sollertinsky. Both men died tragically during World War II, Fleishman as a Red Army soldier and Sollertinsky of illness exacerbated by wartime living conditions. Shostakovich produced musical tributes to each. He completed Fleishman’s unfinished opera, Rothschild’s Violin (1944), based on a Chekhov short story about a Jewish klezmer musician. Sollertinsky he recalled in the mournful, piercing Second Piano Trio, written as word of the Holocaust was reaching Moscow. The final section of this piece includes a freylekhs, a Jewish wedding tune that seems to link the dead and the living in a desperate, sacred dance of joy and sadness.

These are among a dozen major works in which Shostakovich displayed an intense, sustained interest in the larger symbolic meaning of Jewishness and Jewish music. What was the source of this attraction? Testimony provided one answer:

Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it, it’s multifaceted, it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality of Jewish folk music is close to my ideas of what music should be… Jews became a symbol for me. All of man’s defenselessness was concentrated in them. After the war, I tried to convey that feeling in my music. It was a bad time for Jews then. In fact, it’s always a bad time for them.

The problem is we don’t really know if Shostakovich actually said so. In 1980 American musicologist Laurel Fay published an article demonstrating that large chunks of Volkov’s supposedly original oral interviews in Testimony were taken verbatim from previously published articles. The evidence against the book’s authenticity only grew more and more damning over the ensuing years. Leading scholars of Russian music— Fay, Richard Taruskin, Malcolm Hamrick Brown—now agree that Testimony is at best a sloppy embellishment of Shostakovich’s words and at worst an audacious forgery. On the other side of debate are a few highly vocal Soviet émigré musicians and their sympathizers.

Much of the scholarly detective work on Testimony has been assembled in a new anthology, A Shostakovich Casebook. Editor Malcolm Hamrick Brown wants to present the clearest possible case against Volkov’s Testimony; he includes interviews with relatives and close friends, including the composer’s widow, that challenge many factual and linguistic details. Its centerpiece is a new essay by Laurel Fay that exhaustively and conclusively shows that the signatures held up by Volkov as proof that the memoirs were genuine were forged. Despite its slightly monomaniacal air, the Casebook succeeds in demonstrating that Volkov’s Testimony simply cannot be trusted.

Determined not to be outflanked in the Shostakovich wars, Volkov published Shostakovich and Stalin: The Composer and the Dictator, a smooth, erudite attempt to prop up his heroic, cardboard image of Shostakovich. He maintains that Testimony is a faithful document, but because of the “confusion,” he avoids quoting from it, relying instead on a range of colorful anecdotes culled from other interviews and memoirs. Volkov engagingly and skillfully synthesizes decades of complicated Soviet cultural history, but ultimately repeats the thesis first articulated in his introduction to Testimony. To survive under Stalin, Shostakovich adopted the guise of the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” a folk trickster figure who uses craftiness, feigned insanity, and artistic ability to secretly criticize those in power. To demonstrate this subversion, Volkov interprets Shostakovich’s music against his biography, teasing out the hidden anti-Soviet codes in the symbolic language of dark dissonances and jagged rhythms.

Solomon Volkov with Shostakovich

Problems with Volkov’s current effort to lionize Shostakovich extend beyond the shadow of Testimony. For instance, Volkov admits he has no convincing explanation—musical or otherwise—for why Shostakovich joined the Communist Party in 1960, when the Stalinist threat was long over and the dissident movement was just beginning. However, on the question of Shostakovich and Jewish music, he zeroes in on a simple, powerful truth: In the postwar Soviet Union, to write music on Jewish themes of any kind was a provocative, explicitly political act, a direct critique of the regime’s anti-Semitism. There is no question, for instance, that a work such as From the Jewish Folk Poetry, composed in 1948, the year in which Stalin began his murderous campaign against the country’s leading Yiddish poets, actors, and writers, was a direct commentary on the brutal Soviet regime. So too the use of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar“—which caused a scandal upon its initial publication in 1961, when discussion of the Holocaust itself and Jewish suffering was forbidden—as the text of his Thirteenth Symphony. Other recent Russian-language memoirs, such as émigré musicologist Vladimir Zak’s Shostakovich and the Jews (1997), buttress this assertion, documenting how Shostakovich went to great lengths to defend many prominent Jewish musicians targeted by Stalin for persecution. We may not have Shostakovich’s actual testimony, but his music and his actions speak volumes about his respect, compassion, and deep friendship.

Shostakovich fails on all three counts the test once proposed by scholar Curt Sachs, that Jewish music is music created “by Jews, as Jews, for Jews.” And yet in some of his works, Shostakovich used melodies, rhythms, and other musical elements borrowed from traditional Eastern European Jewish folk music. Beneath the thunder of Shostakovich’s archmodern dissonances, the village fiddler and cantor are wailing away. What’s more, Shostakovich’s explicit intention to acknowledge and honor the Holocaust and Yiddish folk poems certainly lends his music a meaningful Jewish theme. These works, then, are Jewish in both form and content.

To that we may add a third factor. A substantial portion of his Jewish audience, in Russia and beyond, continues to claim Shostakovich’s music. Vladimir Zak calls Shostakovich’s musical language a form of Jewish “biblical romanticism.” Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the late exponent of American Jewish religious music, spoke of Shostakovich’s music as soaked through with “the sorrow of the Jews…crying out together with the Torah.” And so Volkov’s work, while it may not successfully prove that Shostakovich was a political dissident, does rightly remind us that the great master of modern Russian music was also a great Jewish composer.