Klezmer: Still Rockin' the Shtetl After All These Years
Resurgence Evokes Old-Time Mischief
By Seth Rogovoy

(NEW YORK, Sept. 26, 2000) - At least as far back as Sholom Aleichem's novella "Stempenyu" - his portrayal of a fiddle-playing Lothario whose trail of seductive embraces is one Mick Jagger could envy - klezmer music has been the rock & roll of the Jewish world. We're told that the title character of the story, based on a real-life violinist and composer from Berdichev named Yosele Druker (1822-1879), was "acquainted with all the witches and warlocks, and that if he even felt like stealing a girl away from her intended he could."

I.L. Peretz, too, populated his stories with rowdy, Old World klezmer musicians who knew how to have a good time, such as the title character of his story "A Musician's Death," who on his deathbed taunts his long-suffering wife with hints of past infidelities. "A woman is a woman," he says, "and musicians are drawn to them the way your hand is drawn to a wound."

The renegade character of immigrant-era American klezmer was embodied by the great clarinetist Naftule Brandwein, perhaps the most influential klezmer musician of all time. You can hear it in the freewheeling abandon of his playing on the vintage 78s (reissued by Founder Records on compact disc as "King of the Klezmer Clarinet"), in which he solos over, under and around his fellow musicians with dizzying speed, much like his contemporary Sidney Bechet was doing in New Orleans jazz. (Indeed, the great modern-day clarinetist David Krakauer has devoted an entire album, "Klezmer, N.Y.," to an imaginary jam session between these two clarinet legends.) Brandwein also anticipated by about a half-century the rock & roll life style: performing while thoroughly soused, occasionally mooning his audience, dressing up in outlandish outfits - such as his Uncle Sam costume festooned with Christmas tree lights that nearly electrocuted him when he perspired - and keeping company with gamblers, hit men and other undesirables.

In addition to these historical correspondences, klezmer and rock share other fundamental similarities. Just as rock derives its more transcendent, mystical aspects from blues and gospel, so does klezmer trace its more spiritual side to an ecstatic vocal tradition: the chasidic nigunim, or wordless meditative chants. Keep in mind, too, that the Eastern European klezmer musicians played for the highly choreographed, Old World wedding rituals. What is rock music if not the modern soundtrack to New World mating rituals?

Klezmer ceased being Jewish rock once it ran out of creative steam in the late 1920s and became primarily a vehicle for nostalgia in the ensuing decades. (One can say the same thing about rock itself - that in the wake of punk it ran out of steam about 20 years ago, and has since been serving itself up as nostalgia in the form of "classic rock," oldies festivals and big-name reunion tours.) When enough years had passed so that an entire generation came of age that was too young to buy the music merely on the basis of nostalgia, klezmer was able to get back in touch with its roots as a kind of proto-rock. What made it even easier was that this generation - the klezmer revivalists of the 1970s and 1980s - was raised on rock & roll, and thus the connection between the two musics was deeply felt by, if not readily apparent to, musicians and listeners alike.

One couldn't help but be reminded of these parallels at the recent standing-room-only concert by Metropolitan Klezmer and its all-female offshoot, Isle of Klezbos, at Makor, the Jewish hipster shtetl on New York's Upper West Side. For one thing, the basement nightclub at Makor could have been any of several other metropolitan jazz or rock clubs, down to the international wait staff, the cosmopolitan crowd and the cable-television crew combing the room for color. As soon as Isle of Klezbos began performing, someone - the head of the Isle of Klezbos fan club, perhaps? - began distributing postcards to each table with the band's upcoming concerts as well as its web site and 24-hour phone information line.

The show - held to celebrate the terrific new CD "Mosaic Persuasion," just released by the two groups - was a snazzy mixture of upbeat Eastern European dance tunes, Middle Eastern-influenced improvisations and luscious Yiddish theater tunes delivered by vocalist Deborah Karpel with just enough of an edge - in this case, the hint of lesbianism that runs through the band's performance - to fend off the dreaded shmaltz or nostalgia factor.

That edginess - the hint of irony, outsiderdom or otherness - is the key to the popularity of contemporary klezmer bands among the young crowd thronging such places as Makor. It is also, as we see in the fictional portrayals of Old World musicians and in the life and music of Brandwein and his peers, part and parcel of the klezmer tradition. Metropolitan's leader, Eve Sicular, may have had this in mind when she wrote about the album title, "'Mosaic Persuasion' can take on new meaning beyond its painful and ironic legacy; after all, it does sound oddly melodious."

One can say the same thing for klezmer itself. By reappropriating the music and making it speak though the voice of a new generation raised on rock, klezmer has been proving for 20 years that it can take on new meaning and sound oddly melodious. In a phrase, it still rocks the shtetl.

[This column originally appeared in the Forward on Oct. 13, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]