Klezmer Conservatory Band: Providing the soundtrack for the 'Yidstock Nation'
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., January 7, 2001) - When Judy Bressler enrolled in the New England Conservatory in the late 1970s, it was not with the intention of carving out a career singing Yiddish theater songs.

Rather, the budding vocalist hoped to refine her classical technique on her way to performing as a cabaret singer, albeit it in the conservatory’s famed Third Stream department, where she knew the faculty would be open to a wide-ranging approach that would include jazz, folk and popular musics from around the world, as well as the classical repertory.

One telling detail from her first days at NEC stands out, however. When it came time for her to audition, one of the numbers she sang was the Yiddish classic, “Oy Mame Bin Ikh Farliebt,” made famous by Molly Picon in the film “Yidl Mitn Fidl” - a film, coincidentally, about a girl who joins a klezmer band.

Yiddish song just happened to have been part of Bressler’s background. Her grandfather, Isidore Lipinsky, was an actor, singer and comedian in Yiddish theater for 50 years. Her great aunt, Lucy Gehrman, and a great uncle, Menashe Skulnick, were also well-known performers in Yiddish film and on stage. And her mother had also sung and performed Yiddish for many years.

But Bressler arrived at NEC as influenced by Broadway and American pop music as anything else, and at the time her Yiddish musical heritage was not uppermost in her mind or her artistic aspirations.

Shortly after she arrived at NEC, a young faculty member who like Bressler had strong family roots in Yiddish music was beginning to explore these musical roots. Bressler soon learned that teacher Hankus Netsky, whose grandfather and uncles had been Yiddish musicians, was hosting informal klezmer jam sessions after hours. Curious as to whether anyone might share her interest in Yiddish vocal music, Bressler began attending these sessions, which were mostly focused on the Yiddish instrumental tradition rooted in Old World wedding music, what we now call “klezmer.”

Bressler mostly wound up playing the tambourine and listening to the musicians jam. But when it came time to prepare for a student concert of Jewish music, a big band worked up a few Yiddish vocal numbers featuring Bressler.

By the end of the evening, which was never intended as more than a one-shot deal, several members of the audience approached bandleader Netsky and asked if his group was available to perform at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Thus, in 1979, the Klezmer Conservatory Band was born.

Twenty-two years and many personnel changes later, the KCB continues to reign as perhaps the most perennially popular klezmer and Yiddish recording and performing group of all time. The band has performed throughout North and South America, Australia and Europe, for private affairs and Jewish groups, as well as at top concert stages around the world, including Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, and at nearby Tanglewood, where the group was last seen in the Berkshires as part of Itzhak Perlman’s “In the Fiddler’s House” tour.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band performs this Sunday, January 14, at 2 p.m. in Chapin Hall at Williams College. The concert is free and open to the public.

All that remains of the group’s original lineup is leader Netsky, bassist James Guttmann and Bressler. A host of klezmer all-stars have passed through the band’s lineup over the years, including avant-garde clarinetist Don Byron, Brave Old World’s music director Alan Bern, and trumpeter/composer Frank London of the Klezmatics (coming to the Clark Art Institute on Feb. 17).

The current KCB lineup includes a whole new generation of klezmer talent, including clarinetist Ilene Stahl (last seen in the Berkshires fronting her klezmer-fusion group, Klezperanto, last August at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), violinist Deborah Strauss, and mandolinist Jeff Warschauer.

As the group’s only and longstanding vocalist, Bressler is probably the most readily identifiable member of the KCB. Along with Netsky, Guttmann and her other bandmates, Bressler has logged over the course of the last two decades countless hours in the recording studio and thousands of hours on stage recapitulating and reconstructing much of the classic repertoire of Yiddish song: theater tunes, folk songs and numbers from the Yiddish hit parade. These include well-worn classics like “Rumania, Rumania,” “Belz, Mayn Shtetele Belz” and “Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen (Raisins and Almonds),” novelties like Mickey Katz’s “Tsatske Kazatske (Toy Break Dance)” and “Dos Geshrey fun der Vilder Katshke (The Cry of the Wild Duck)” and numbers that skirt the edges of the Yiddish repertoire like “Miserlou,” Johnny Mercer’s “And the Angels Sing” and, on the group’s latest album, the title track, Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.”

What distinguishes so much of the Yiddish repertoire, says Bressler, is its rich emotional content.

“Not to take anything away from other styles of music -- I’m sure people who do that incredible vocal Bulgarian music connect to it in the same way - but these tunes are just very emotionally rich,” said Bressler in a recent phone interview from her home outside Boston. “For me, in Yiddish, there’s that connection. The songs are beautiful, emotionally rich vignettes. The songs are so reflective of life’s struggles. The songs are so heavy, they’re so emotionally charged. “They’re just -- it’s like an emotional minefield. Even the simplest little song sometimes, it’s never just a simple song about a simple thing. It’s always, even when it seems to be just simple, it’s an allegory for the most heavy, mind-blowing, what is the nature of reality, why are we here, kind of questioning.”

As to what a Leonard Cohen song is doing serving as the title track of the KCB’s latest album, which includes a typically eclectic mix of big-band Yiddish swing, small ensemble instrumentals, wedding music and Yiddish popular song, Bressler said, “We’d have to talk to Mr. Cohen to find out what it’s all about, but it certainly seems very resonant with Yiddish lyrics in certain ways, in translation, if you will.

“‘Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin.’ What is that? ‘Dance me to the wedding now, dance me to the children who are asking to be born.’ These are images that could probably be claimed and related to people from any number of backgrounds. But when we were putting together this album, it certainly conjured up images of the klezmer violin.”

When Bressler is not performing Yiddish music with the KCB, she has her own ensemble, Judy Bressler’s Klezmer Kabaret, which focuses exclusively on vocal material, and includes more English material.

But performing Yiddish music provides Bressler and her bandmates with “a sense of continuity and connection” to something larger. “In a world where money seems to be the only thing that people are interested in -- money and flash -- there’s a lot beyond that, in terms of beauty and love and connection to the human condition,” said Bressler. “And it’s not just the Jewish condition -- it’s the human condition that this music has grown out of. And I think it’s that essential human condition that the music touches on and that keeps it going, keeps the young people coming out as well as the old people coming back.

“This is not something that any of us are making a lot of money doing. No one’s doing it for the money. We’re doing it because we love this music, because it brings us a wealth of emotional connection and a way of connecting, emotional connection internally and externally to the people who are listening. There’s something very powerful here.

“Our mainstay audience is a more mature, older audience who remembers the music somehow from their youth or from their parents’ youth. But also I think that middle-age and younger people have been reconnecting in some way with their Jewish backgrounds through the music.

“A lot of people like myself came from secular homes but became interested in trying to connect with Jewish culture, particularly when they started having children and raising their own families.

“And I think Yiddish music and klezmer has given them the opportunity to experience some of the culture in a non-religious way and on an immediate, gut level, like this feels good, I can get up and dance communally. “This is almost like Woodstock -- it’s like the ‘Yidstock nation.’ It’s got that communal, feel-good thing going for it.”

Seth Rogovoy is the author of “The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul.” He is teaching a course on klezmer at Williams College this month. Rogovoy will present “Rockin’ the Shtetl,” a multimedia slide lecture tracing the evolution of klezmer from Old World shtetls to New World nightclubs and concert halls, preceding the KCB concert on Sunday, January 14, at 11 a.m. in the Jewish Religious Center on the Williams College campus.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Jan. 12, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]