The Klezmer Revival: How Old World Music Found New Life

What Is Klezmer?

The word klezmer comes from the Hebrew klei zemer — instruments of song. Originally, it referred to the musicians themselves: the professional instrumentalists who played at Jewish weddings, celebrations, and community events across Eastern Europe from at least the fifteenth century onward.

Klezmer music developed as the soundtrack of Ashkenazi Jewish life. It accompanied every significant life event — weddings (where klezmorim might play for hours or even days), circumcisions, holiday celebrations, and community gatherings. The musicians were working-class professionals, often traveling between villages and towns, adapting their repertoire to local tastes.

The music itself is immediately recognizable: minor-key melodies that seem to simultaneously laugh and cry, ornamented with the bends, slides, and trills that give klezmer its distinctive vocal quality. The clarinet — which arrived in klezmer bands in the nineteenth century — became the defining instrument, valued for its ability to mimic the human voice in all its emotional registers.

The Old World Tradition

In the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, klezmer bands typically included a fiddle (the original lead instrument), a tsimbl (hammered dulcimer), a bass, and various wind instruments. The musicians formed guilds, passed down repertoire through family apprenticeships, and maintained complex relationships with both Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Klezmer was never purely Jewish. The musicians absorbed melodies from Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Turkish, and Greek folk traditions, creating a hybrid sound that reflected the multicultural environment of Eastern Europe. A klezmer band at a wedding might play a freylekhs (a lively Jewish dance), then shift to a Romanian hora, then perform a slow, mournful doina (improvised lament).

This eclecticism made klezmer both authentically Jewish and genuinely cosmopolitan — music that emerged from a specific tradition while remaining open to the world around it.

Immigration and Decline

When millions of Eastern European Jews emigrated to America between 1880 and 1924, they brought klezmer with them. Klezmer musicians thrived on the Lower East Side, at Catskills resorts, and in the recording studios that produced thousands of 78 RPM records in the early twentieth century.

Musicians like Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras became stars of the Jewish-American entertainment world. Their recordings — virtuosic, passionate, and wildly entertaining — captured the old-world sound while adapting to American tastes and instrumentation.

But assimilation gradually eroded the tradition. As second- and third-generation American Jews adopted jazz, swing, and pop music, klezmer came to seem old-fashioned — the music of the grandparents. The Holocaust destroyed the Eastern European source communities, and by the 1960s, klezmer appeared to be dying.

The Revival

The klezmer revival began in the late 1970s, driven by young American Jewish musicians who were part of a broader movement of ethnic and cultural rediscovery. Giora Feidman, an Argentine-Israeli clarinetist, brought klezmer to international concert stages. In the United States, musicians like Andy Statman and Hankus Netsky began tracking down old recordings and surviving elderly musicians.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band, founded by Netsky at the New England Conservatory in 1980, treated klezmer with the same scholarly rigor and artistic ambition applied to jazz and classical music. The Klezmatics, founded in New York in 1986, combined traditional klezmer with punk energy, political activism, and queer sensibility.

These groups and dozens of others transformed klezmer from a fading ethnic tradition into a vital, evolving art form. Klezmer festivals appeared worldwide — in Krakow, Amsterdam, London, and San Francisco. The music attracted non-Jewish audiences who responded to its emotional directness and improvisatory freedom.

Modern Klezmer

Contemporary klezmer encompasses an enormous range of styles. Traditionalists like the Epstein Brothers Orchestra faithfully reproduce the prewar sound. Innovators like John Zorn’s Masada project fuse klezmer with free jazz, punk, and avant-garde composition. David Krakauer’s klezmer meets funk and electronica. The Klezmatics blend klezmer with world music, rock, and the poetry of Woody Guthrie.

This diversity reflects klezmer’s inherent eclecticism. The music has always absorbed influences from surrounding cultures; modern klezmer musicians are simply continuing a tradition of creative borrowing that stretches back centuries.

Legacy

The klezmer revival is one of the most successful cultural recoveries in modern history. Music that was nearly extinct sixty years ago now thrives on concert stages, in recording studios, and at celebrations worldwide. It has spawned academic programs, documentary films, and a scholarly literature that treats klezmer as seriously as any other musical tradition.

More importantly, klezmer has become a living bridge between Jewish past and present. When a clarinetist plays a freylekhs at a wedding today, the melody connects the celebration to centuries of Jewish joy, survival, and communal life. The music that accompanied Jews through the shtetls of Eastern Europe, the tenements of New York, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust continues to sound, proving that some things are too vital to be silenced.