Klezmer

Klezmer is the instrumental dance and ceremonial music of Ashkenazi Jewish Eastern Europe — historically Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania and Belarus. The standard ensemble pairs clarinet and violin as melodic leads with accordion, double bass, drums, sometimes cimbalom (hammered dulcimer), trumpet and trombone. Tempos run from the slow rubato of the doina (free-meter lament, usually solo) to the driving 120–180 BPM of the freylekhs and bulgar dance tunes. Vocal music, where present, is in Yiddish. The melodic vocabulary draws on Jewish liturgical modes (freygish, ahava-raba) that share intervals with Romanian, Ukrainian and Turkish modal music — the bent half-steps that give klezmer its characteristic crying tone.

Klezmer (from the Hebrew kli zemer, vessel of song) was the working-musician's trade of the shtetl: wedding bands toured the regional circuit playing freylekhs, horas, bulgars and the slow doina. Mass migration to the US between 1881 and 1924 brought klezmer to the Lower East Side, where Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras dominated the 1920s recording era. The Holocaust destroyed the European base of the tradition. From the 1970s on, a Boston- and New York-led revival — the Klezmorim, Andy Statman, Hankus Netsky's Klezmer Conservatory Band, the Klezmatics, John Zorn's Masada — recovered the repertoire from old 78s and surviving elders. A parallel European revival is led by ensembles in Berlin, Krakow and Budapest.

The clarinet's krekhts — a sob-like ornament where the player bends a half-step down and back up — is the most identifiable klezmer sound. The doina, usually opening a set, is rubato and improvised; it gives way without warning to a freylekhs in tight tempo. Listen for the violin's slides and the cimbalom's tremolo as colour washes under the lead lines. In dance contexts, sets accelerate gradually into the climactic dance figures.

Naftule Brandwein's 1920s Victor recordings, reissued as King of the Klezmer Clarinet (Rounder 1997), document the New York peak. Among revival records, the Klezmatics' Rhythm and Jews (1991) and Andy Statman's Klezmer Music (1979) are foundational. John Zorn's Masada quartet, especially the early studio albums on DIW, applies klezmer modes to Ornette Coleman–style small-group jazz.

Many of the great 1920s klezmer recordings were issued by mainstream American labels — Columbia, Victor, OKeh — alongside hillbilly and race records, as part of a programme to sell records to recent immigrants. The tradition's twentieth-century survival outside Europe owed a great deal to those commercial recordings, which served as primary documents during the 1970s revival.