THE KLEZMATICS REVITALIZE THEIR ROOTS
When it came time for The Klezmatics to celebrate the release of their album Possessed in the spring of 1997, a simple CD-release concert wouldn't do. Instead, the group presented a multi-level, multi-cultural extravaganza at New York City's Knitting Factory, the temple of the downtown avant-garde. The show included overlapping performances by Circus Amok, featuring fire-breathing sword swallowers and a genuine bearded lady, Shasmaqam, an ensemble playing the traditional music of Jews from the Bukharan region of Central Asia, X-Cheerleaders, whose radical-feminist cheers you never heard in high school, and the Richard Khuzami Pan-Middle Eastern Ensemble. And at the end of the night, the assembled crowd - a colorful mix of black-clad downtown bohos, bridge-and-tunnel socialites and adventurous, slivovitz-fueled yeshiva bochers -- danced to the latest Anglo-Indian bhangra beats of DJ Rekha. What tied it all together - the diverse music and audience - was The Klezmatics, who in their own way are a sort of fire-breathing, pan-cultural, radical ensemble playing a global fusion firmly rooted in a traditional dance music. So by the time the band got around to playing "Ale Brider (We're All Brothers)," an old Yiddish labor anthem the group has transformed into a theme song of pan-sexual unity, the crowd had become one swirling mass, dancing and singing along on the catchy chorus, which in its entirety consists of the quintessential Yiddish word "Oy!" repeated over and over again. Over the years, the New York City-based Klezmatics have combined forces with artists as varied as classical violinist Itzhak Perlman, poet Allen Ginsberg, pop group Ben Folds Five, Morocco's Master Musicians of Jajouka, Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner and choreographer Twyla Tharp. Individual members have played with an even more diverse array of performers, including Talking Heads' founder David Byrne, heavy-metal group Led Zeppelin, pop wiseguys They Might Be Giants, avant-jazz trumpeter Lester Bowie, downtown avant-gardnik John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne's "psychedelic-comedy" band Shockabilly. But as much as The Klezmatics are valued for the flavor and ideas they bring to other peoples' projects, it is their own, unique work -- as heard in concert and on their own recordings -- that has firmly established their reputation as the most popular, innovative, and, by virtue of that innovation, perhaps the most authentic exemplars of the contemporary klezmer revival. This is no small point, as it goes to the heart of what The Klezmatics and klezmer music itself are all about. Far from being a nostalgia trip or some aural, living-museum piece, contemporary klezmer is a lively, vital genre that -- in the hands of groups like The Klezmatics and other neo-klezmer outfits such as Brave Old World and the Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra -- speaks with as much relevance to today's audiences as did the Old World klezmorim to their listeners in pre-20th-century Eastern Europe. There are occasional dissenters from this point of view. More than once, an audience member -- typically not old or young but more likely comfortably middle-aged -- has been heard to mutter while leaving a Klezmatics concert something along the lines of, "It was nice, but I didn't hear any klezmer." It's not always clear just what our hypothetical, disgruntled concertgoer means by not having heard any klezmer. Perhaps she was expecting something more akin to the Yiddish theater music or Yiddish swing popularized in the 1920s and '30s -- the style favored by revivalist groups such as the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Or perhaps The Klezmatics' fusion of traditional klezmer with various modern influences, including jazz, rock, reggae and other world-beat styles, offends her preconceived notion of what is properly labeled "klezmer."
Whatever the case, our disappointed friend is sadly mistaken, for The
Klezmatics are firmly, deeply rooted in traditional klezmer - the
instrumental dance music of Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European Jews. In
fact, one could make the case that The Klezmatics uphold that tradition
precisely by integrating those very non-klezmer influences that offend. For
as The Klezmatics' violinist and co-founder Alicia Svigals points out,
klezmer has always been a music of exchange and innovation, always borrowing
from other sources while redefining itself as the Jewish music of its
particular geographical, temporal and musical milieu. "Every generation of klezmer musicians has done fusions," said Svigals, who studied ethnomusicology at Brown University. "Musicians don't care about authenticity. Musicians care about interesting music. As soon as a klezmer musician in the shtetl in the 19th-century met his neighbor the Gypsy musician, he wanted to learn his tunes. He didn't worry, `Oh, are these not Jewish?' And that's how a lot of the [traditional] repertoire came to be, because of those meetings, and that's true of every kind of music in the universe." Thus, it is not unusual for The Klezmatics to juice up an old-time melody, perhaps one based on a Chasidic prayer tune, with a funk undercurrent or a reggae pulse. Nor would it be out of the question for a freylekh or a bulgar -- traditional dance rhythms - to bear a suspicious resemblance to Jamaican ska. Nor is it atypical for one of the group's soloists to head out into territory that owes more to Miles Davis or Frank Zappa than Naftule Brandwein or Abe Ellstein. Says Svigals, "There's definitely a segment of the population that thinks, `Oh, this other group is the traditional one, because they're playing Yiddish swing from the 1940s.' What's so traditional about that? But The Klezmatics are not [perceived as] traditional, even if we're playing the most straight-ahead, trad arrangements from the 1890s, which they don't recognize, because it was before their time." That tension between tradition and innovation is undoubtedly what fuels The Klezmatics and what accounts for their popularity among all but the most closed-minded listeners. But more than a mere old vs. new duality, the internal dynamic powering The Klezmatics is the result in large part of the creative energies that its six talented members bring to the collective. The Klezmatics first came together about 13 years ago on New York's Lower East Side. Several members answered an ad that had been placed in the Village Voice by an elusive figure named Rob looking for musicians who wanted to play klezmer. Rob soon disappeared, but before doing so he succeeded in bringing together trumpeter Frank London, a Long Island native who had recently moved back to New York from Boston, and Svigals, who at the time was burning up the Greek music scene with her fiddle in Astoria, Queens. A few others passed in and out of the group in the first few months, but within a year the core of the group had stabilized around Svigals, London, Lorin Sklamberg, David Licht and Paul Morrissett. London found Sklamberg, newly arrived from California, playing accordion in a Balkan brass band, and Licht, newly arrived from North Carolina, playing drums in the "psychobilly" band Bongwater, and invited them both to join the group. After the group's first bassist, Dave Lindsay, dropped out, Sklamberg brought in Morrissett --who also plays the tsimbl, a kind of hammered dulcimer -- from the Balkan band. Those five players have been with the band ever since. The clarinet - perhaps the instrument most often identified with klezmer - has been the only one to change hands every few years, starting with Kurt Bjorling, who is now with Brave Old World, passing to David Krakauer, and then on to the current reed player, Matt Darriau. "Clarinetists are a very independent-minded group of people," explains Svigals facetiously. "They don't want to be pinned down for too long in any one band. They have other fish to fry." At the time the group had formed, only Frank London had had any significant experience playing klezmer, as a charter member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band in Boston. The other musicians had wide-ranging musical backgrounds with experience in Jewish music that ranged from some to next-to-none. They all immersed themselves in klezmer, studying and transcribing vintage recordings, some of which they found in the sound archives at YIVO, a research institute housing Yiddish cultural artifacts in New York, where Svigals, Sklamberg and several other klezmer musicians wound up working. "We started off kind of copying other people's arrangements, trying to emulate different period styles of the way klezmer was played," recalls Sklamberg, who had some early experience with klezmer through his involvement with Jewish and Israeli folk-dancing as a teen-ager. "Once we did that, we started making up our own arrangements." "It tooks us a while to figure out what we were doing," said London. "We put out Shvaygn=Toyt in 1988, which was a live record made in Berlin on our first European concert tour. Then, over the next two years I would say we really developed our personality and our -- not our sound so much as our theoretical, our philosophical approach to the music." That approach, while broad and open -- is deeply grounded in the members' personalities, encompassing their politics, their spirituality, and their private lives. And while it is rooted in klezmer tradition, it scoffs at any preconceived notion of authenticity. "We don't believe in limiting ourselves to an ultimately arbitrary piece of a musical universe," said Svigals. "We're trying to make good music, so we don't arbitrarily dismiss different musical ideas because they are not generically correct. "We're not about authenticity. We're not about folk fetishes and fetishizing what's supposed to be a Jewish band. We're working from that material, and working from those impulses and working from that spiritual place, but our only rule for ourselves is that what we end up with should be good music, and if it's not good music, we don't do it, and if we do it, and it turns out to be not good music, we trash it, and if it's good music, we don't care what people think." London echoes Svigals' comments. "I come with no biases about any music," he says. "It's not like I like rock and I don't like jazz, or I like bebop and I don't like swing. It's just either good music or bad music. And I'm a very opinionated person, so when I say good or bad, I'm totally relying on my own aesthetics." The group's unique sound and approach were fully realized on its third album, 1995's Jews With Horns, its first for Green Linnet's Xenophile imprint. A mix of original compositions and traditional tunes reworked Klezmatics-style, the album opens with the raucous, frenetic signature tune, "Man In a Hat," featuring vocal pyrotechnics and verbal punning by Lorin Sklamberg. "Fisherlid" follows, a trad-sounding, Middle Eastern-inflected slow dance, laced with psychedelic electric guitar courtesy of downtown denizen Marc Ribot, and a New Orleans second-line-style drum break is injected into "Khsidim Tants," a traditional Chasidic dance tune. Party songs like "Simkhes-Toyre" are juxtaposed with meditative, delicate, mystical explorations of tone and melody such as "Romanian Fantasy," which boasts Svigals's achy-breaky cry on violin. That same year, the group's biggest break came via In the Fiddler's House, a multi-media extravaganza featuring renowned classical violinist Itzhak Perlman. The project began as a documentary for the PBS-TV series "Great Performances," in which Perlman would travel to Poland to rediscover his musical and cultural "roots" in the world of the klezmorim. The Klezmatics were among the small handful of contemporary groups featured in the documentary, which includes a tense yet humorous scene where Perlman, still new to the genre, sits down to jam with the group. A sort of crossover project for Perlman, In the Fiddler's House took on a life of its own, resulting in a commercially-available home video, two best-selling CDs and several concert tours, all of which feature Perlman sitting in alternately with The Klezmatics and other groups, including Brave Old World, the Klezmer Conservatory Band and the Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra. While critics and klezmerphiles differ over the quality of the music spawned by the project, everyone agrees that the Perlman collaboration -- which continues to bring klezmer to the masses in annual concert tours -- has been the biggest thing to happen to the quarter-century-old klezmer revival, as thousands of concertgoers and record buyers drawn simply by the name "Perlman" have been turned on to the fertile, contemporary klezmer scene. The revival itself began in the 1970s, as part of a larger trend toward ethnic exploration spawned by Alex Haley's best-selling book and TV documentary Roots. Klezmer, along with all things Yiddish, had pretty much been left behind by most American Jews in the postwar American scramble of assimilation and suburban homogenization. But with the vacuum left by the dissolution of the counterculture of the 1960s, and, to some at least, with the resultant feeling of cultural emptiness or vacancy left in its wake, the time was ripe for a reinvestigation of cultural roots. Among the first figures publicly to explore traditional Yiddish music was bluegrass-fusion mandolinist Andy Statman. Statman, who also plays saxophone and clarinet, studied the latter with famed klezmer-swing clarinetist Dave Tarras, who deeded to him his instruments and anointed him his successor. In 1979, banjoist Henry Sapoznik formed Kapelye, one of the first touring bands of the klezmer revival. Sapoznik had discovered a cache of vintage recordings in the archive at YIVO, and produced the first re-issue of period recordings, Klezmer Music: 1910-1942, for the Folkways label. Other early exponents of the klezmer revival included the Bay Area group the Klezmorim and African-American clarinetist Don Byron, who after a stint with the Klezmer Conservatory Band recorded a solo album of Mickey Katz tunes for the Elektra/Nonesuch label. But no sooner did the new wave of klezmer musicians learn the tradition than they started experimenting with it, stretching it in new and exciting ways that allowed them to express themselves personally while at the same time speaking to contemporary audiences in ways that were relevant to their time. Hot on the heels of the klezmer revival, downtown, avant-garde musicians such as John Zorn and Anthony Coleman began experimenting with traditional Jewish modalities in order to construct a new Jewish music under the rubric "radical Jewish culture." At the nexus of this equation are The Klezmatics, with one foot planted firmly in the shtetl and the other in the Knitting Factory. It is their precisely cultivated combination of cutting-edge innovation rooted to a studied authenticity that insures that The Klezmatics never succumb to the kitsch, camp, nostalgia, shmaltz or novelty that plagues some of the other current bands working the klezmer genre. Having carefully built a bridge from functional dance music to artful concert music, The Klezmatics -- more definitively than perhaps any other group of the current, second-wave of the klezmer revival -- have charted a path for a new generation of klezmorim to follow.
The group's latest musical partner, Israeli folk singer Chava Alberstein -
herself a champion of Yiddish music for the last 30 years - characterizes
The Klezmatics' dynamic perfectly when she says, "It's a combination of
knowing very well the roots and the tradition, and not being afraid to add
to the tradition and the roots something original of your own, while on the
other hand, not trying to be too much up to date. Sometimes people take old
music, traditional music, and in a very artificial way they make it into
rock and roll or jazz, and the result is many times very stupid, awkward,
and you don't believe it's really art. They have a way to sound like today's
musicians and still feel like they come from a very far, unique place." The Klezmatics first met Alberstein, who is sort of the Israeli answer to Joan Baez or Judy Collins, at 1992's Berlin Jewish Culture Festival, and they have performed together on several occasions since. Reflecting Alberstein's broad stylistic palette, which includes American folk, French chanson and Brazilian samba, the sound of The Well -- which was produced by Ben Mink, known for his work with k.d. lang and Roy Orbison -- fits squarely into the amorphous musical territory of world-pop. But ultimately it is a song-based album, and a showcase for the lush vocals of Alberstein, who sounds like a Yiddish Edith Piaf, and Sklamberg, who duets and shares leads with Alberstein on several numbers. The collaboration with Alberstein is just the latest of many projects in which The Klezmatics have merged their talents with the creative vision of other artists (much like roots-rockers The Band did 30 years ago in their particular genre). Perhaps their most longstanding, fruitful partnership has been with Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America). In addition to Kushner-penned liner notes (which begin, "Dear Klezmatics, I find myself unable to write your liner notes. Your music moves me like no other….."), the group's 1997 album, Possessed, boasts songs written with Kushner for two separate theater pieces, including an entire suite of tunes written for A Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds, Kushner's adaptation of the classic Yiddish fable. When the play had its run at New York's Public Theatre in the fall of 1997, The Klezmatics performed the dual task of providing the music while actually appearing in costume on stage as a band of Old World klezmorim wandering through the scenery. It's not surprising that Kushner keeps coming back to work with The Klezmatics. "He is someone who's searching to integrate his Jewishness into the rest of his life, his politics and his art, and I think he's felt an affinity to us for that reason, and vice-versa," said Svigals. "It's a thrill for us, because he's a genius. Everybody likes to work with a genius. And he's such a brilliant writer. He's so subtle, so funny, so sarcastic, so creative. He's complex. We like that. We don't like earnest -- we like witty and complex." Kushner and The Klezmatics also share a gay sensibility in their art, their politics and their private lives. Svigals and Sklamberg are as outwardly gay as Kushner, and as far back as the group's first album -- whose title, "Shvaygn=Toyt," was a Yiddish translation of the ACT-UP slogan, "Silence =Death" -- Sklamberg has been mischievously giving masculine pronouns in love songs a new, cheekily ironic, gay twist. "We politically come from the same place," said Sklamberg about his creative partnership with Kushner. "And it's important to collaborate with other people who share your view of humanity, and we're lucky we can do that." While the musicians all share a basic, underlying vision of what the band's approach should be, that doesn't mean they are single-minded in terms of where the approach should take them. "We're a collective of strong-minded people, all butting up against each other," said Svigals of the sextet. "Sparks flash as a result, both in good ways and ways that have to be channeled into good ways." With no leader and with each member a potential composer, arranger and/or soloist with his own agenda both in and outside the band, The Klezmatics seem destined for creative implosion. Yet the band has found a way to tap into its members' various talents and interests in order to make them work to the advantage of the unit as a whole. Said Sklamberg, whose soulful, cantorial-style vocals give The Klezmatics' sound its ecstatic warmth and intimacy, "Someone will bring something in and everyone will put in their two cents, or their own spices and ideas. It changes from piece to piece. It really depends on the material. Some things really lend themselves to going to some other place and other things it seems like, the more direct you are the better. There's no hard and fast rule about it, but we do have conflicts all the time about arrangements. Sometimes they get settled by force of personality and sometimes they don't get settled. Sometimes what happens is that nobody wants to deal with it and things just kind of get left on the sideline. We used to be much feistier than we are now in some ways. You get used to things. In some ways it's just like too much work. Other things become more important. Family and settling down has become very important to people in the band. But we're still the same people." If there are two polarities in the band, they find their reality in the group's onstage set-up, with Svigals at stage-right and London at the extreme left. While Svigals' hauntingly bewitching violin sound is utterly modern and personal, when it comes to the band's arrangements, her creative instinct is to ground the band to the music's roots. "Even though I have this anti-authenticity philosophy, I'm actually also pulling for the authentic," she said. "To play klezmer, there's definitely a language you have to learn. And it takes years of study. I want the melodies to be played with depth, with the full complement of ornamentation, for example." Indeed, when it came time for Svigals to record her first solo album, she delved deep into the traditional repertoire for Fidl, an all-acoustic album that attempts to reclaim for the violin its starring role in the traditional klezmer ensemble, a role usurped by the clarinet around the turn of the century. London's outside interests, on the other hand, symbolize his pull toward the more radical. His group Hasidic New Wave plays a fusion drawing equally from funk and free-jazz, with occasional excursions into hip-hop and punk-rock (a recent single, "Giuliani Uber Alles," was a rap-remake of a song by punk group Dead Kennedys), to create a sort of new, Jewish avant-garde music. No matter how far out he gets, however, London always maintains a connection to his music's Jewish roots. "There's just a really, really rich pool to dive into," says London, "and there's enough there that it's conceivable that the rest of my career could be spent exploring all kinds of different aspects and never really run out of things to explore." In addition to her solo work, Svigals also leads an all-female klezmer ensemble called Mikvah. London and Svigals aren't the only ones with careers outside the band, either. Darriau leads the appropriately-named Balkan/Gypsy quartet, Paradox Trio. While his group's repertoire is ostensibly non-Jewish, Darriau said the band continues to get lumped in with klezmer groups and booked at klezmer festivals. In part to rectify that misconception, but also as a logical result of Darriau's own exploration of the connections between musical styles, the group's next album -- its third, due out on the Knitting Factory label in early 1999 -- will feature what he calls a "Balkan-Jewish crossover repertoire." There are other side-projects involving The Klezmatics and its members -- so many it's impossible to keep track of them all. "I'm doing about ten different projects now, each one going in different ways," says London. "It's just a testament to how rich this music is." Among these are an album of niggunim, or Chasidic prayer melodies, by a trio including London and Sklamberg. Sklamberg also recently put out The Green Duck, a recording of Yiddish animal songs for children, which was produced by Living Traditions -- a Yiddish folk-arts organization he co-runs with Henry Sapoznik. Living Traditions sponsors Klez Kamp, an annual, week-long seminar on klezmer and other aspects of Yiddishkeit held in the Catskills. Band members frequently compose music for independent films -- London's score for Jonathan Berman's documentary, "The Shvitz," is available on the Knitting Factory label -- and the group's music can be heard in a new animated short, The Parable of the Clowns, part of the HBO cable network's new series, "Kids Are Punny." As for what's next for The Klezmatics as a group, anything could happen. There's mention of another collaboration with Tony Kushner. There is talk of recording a children's album drawing upon a cache of recently discovered, Jewish-themed lyrics for children written by folksinger Woody Guthrie, whose wife was Jewish and whose mother-in-law, Aliza Greenblatt, was a famed Yiddish poet (who wrote the lyrics to the aforementioned song, "Fisherlid"). London jokes, "We have to make our punk album, and our live album, and then our greatest hits album."
Whatever the future brings for The Klezmatics, one thing is certain: they
will continue to challenge today's audiences by constructing an authentic
contemporary klezmer repertoire that speaks to and for them. "There's definitely a whole tradition of performing klezmer that way, and expecting it to be that way and presenting it that way, desexualized, rendered innocuous so that it won't annoy the majority culture. We know that it's very serious, very passionate, very erotic. It's very….down and dirty."
[This article appeared in similar form in the Winter 1999 issue of Sing Out! Magazine. Copyright Sing Out! Magazine 1999. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy rogovoy@berkshire.net music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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