(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 13, 1998) -- It takes some degree of persistence and the aid of a magnifying glass to find the word "Klezmer" anywhere on "Blood Oranges," the new CD by Brave Old World. The term "New Jewish Music," however, appears in several places in the jacket and liner notes for the disk, currently available as a European import on the Pinorrekk label.

Has Brave Old World, widely considered to be one of the premiere Klezmer bands in the world, turned its back on the Yiddish music of the Old Country?

"We didn't want to be confined by the label `Klezmer' and the kinds of things it suggests to people now," says Michael Alpert, one-fourth of the world-renowned Klezmer quartet, which performs on Sunday at the Clark Art Institute at 2 as part of the museum's month-long, "From the Old World to the New" world-folk series. Call 458-2303, ext. 324, for ticket information and reservations.

"Klezmer is such a broad category, it's not quite clear what is meant by `Klezmer music,'" said Alpert, speaking in a recent phone interview from his home in New York City. "Yet at the same time, it's a very pigeonholing kind of category, and it's associated in many people's minds with something less artful and less conscious than what we're doing."

In fact, a listen to "Blood Oranges" makes immediately clear that Brave Old World is still firmly ensconced in the Klezmer tradition. All the recognizable elements are still there: the mournful clarinet and fiddle melodies, the rousing, Eastern European dance rhythms, the alternately playful and soulful vocals of the badkhen.

Yet it is also instantly clear that something else is at work here -- that far from recapitulating the sounds of the Old Country or taking listeners on some sort of heavy nostalgia trip, Brave Old World is breaking new ground in its field.

>From the very first measures of the opening track, "Wailing World," to the closing number, "Daybreak," ancient meets modern on "Blood Oranges," as the ensemble takes a listener on a dynamic journey that, while rooted in Old World Klezmer, touches down with grace and agility in jazz, rock, tango, ambient, Asian, gospel, world-beat and new-classical.

"We're not Klezmer musicians out of a shtetl in Eastern Europe a hundred-and-fifty years ago," said Alpert, the group's vocalist and fiddler. "We're American-born musicians with a whole lot of different musical styles and musical experiences under our belts, and we draw from that whole pot in what we create."

Ironically, says Alpert, this desire to incorporate influences from non-Klezmer or non-Jewish sources does more to bind the members of Brave Old World to their forebears than it does to set them apart.

"Even back then [in the 19th century], Klezmer music and all Eastern European Jewish musical traditions reflected a very interesting kind of multi-cultural synthesis," said Alpert "Even then we'd be talking about different genres and different influences."

"Blood Oranges" is the most ambitious undertaking by a contemporary Klezmer group since the current revival began about 30 years ago. The album -- which will be released later this year in the U.S. -- is an artfully composed song cycle with unifying themes and motifs that take a listener on a metaphorical journey through time and space. It is at once a geographical journey, through various landscapes of Jewish experience, and a temporal journey, making stylistic leaps across the decades and centuries. Its structure also echoes the role Klezmer music originally played as the soundtrack to key Jewish life-cycle celebrations, such as weddings and bar-mitzvahs.

That such an effort should come from Brave Old World is no surprise. Ever since its founding in 1989, the group has strived to gain respect for Klezmer as an "art" music without losing its essence as a utilitarian dance music.

Said Alpert, "One of our goals is to make an art music without losing the guts and the heart and the `hotness' of a traditional music -- especially a traditional dance music -- that has the beat and all the hotness but that also has the depth and beauty and poignancy and heartbreaking quality of the non-dance parts of the Yiddish tradition and of a lot of Eastern European music."

Alpert is quick to point out, however, that the view of traditional Klezmer merely as "party music" is somewhat misleading. "In fact thirty percent of the old-time, Eastern European Jewish repertoire was music for listening, for displaying the virtuosity of musicians and for creating a whole kind of emotional experience -- taking people on an emotional journey," he said.

This is why in the end, the members of Brave Old World prefer the term "New Jewish Music," perhaps a necessary evil in a world that demands a label to stick on everything -- even on individual pieces of fruit. "It's clear that our music is both new and at the same time that it's Jewish in the sense that it hasn't lost touch with its roots," said Alpert. "And not only with its roots, but where it hasn't lost the kind of vitality that comes from the deep connections that we have to the various traditions involved.

"We have always seen ourselves as coming out of a very, very deep level of connection with some of the oldest aspects of the Yiddish musical tradition. And at the same time, we're doing a great deal of new composition with that as a basis, in a way that we see as moving the music forward."

Brave Old World is one of four groups featured alongside Itzhak Perlman in the ongoing "In the Fiddler's House" program, which includes one video, two CDs and several concert tours, including an appearance at Tanglewood last summer. The tour has plans to continue next summer and fall.

The other members of Brave Old World -- all of whom share composing duties -- are musical director Alan Bern, who plays accordion and piano, clarinetist Kurt Bjorling, and Stuart Brotman, who plays bass and tsimbl, a kind of hammered dulcimer characteristic of traditional Klezmer.

If you would like to purchase any of Brave Old World CDs on-line, please click on the SoundStone logo to the right.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 13, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]

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