An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 21 | KLEZMER 527

the era of peak Jewish immigration: the melody is carried by

violin, trumpet, and clarinet, with lower brass and piano fi ll-

ing out the texture and with a foundation supplied by string

bass and sometimes drums. More distinctively American

instruments like banjo and saxophone are occasionally heard

on old klezmer records as well, and accordion and other

instruments are also not unusual.

As the change in instrumentation suggests, American klez-

morim were open to infl uences from American popular music.

In this respect they were not far removed from such Jew-

ish immigrants and children of immigrants as Irving Berlin

and George Gershwin, who immersed themselves in popular

music and found success on Tin Pan Alley. Even the more tra-

ditional klezmorim found ways to bring jazz and popular song

into their repertory. By the 1920s and 1930s, stars of Yiddish

theater and fi lm, which fl ourished especially in New York City, were singing

songs that sounded like a sort of Jewish jazz, and in the 1930s and 1940s klezmer-

derived songs like “And the Angels Sing” and “Bay mir bistu sheyn” were cross-

over big-band swing hits.

Following the Holocaust, however, klezmer’s association with that histori-

cal tragedy, combined with the dwindling number of Yiddish speakers, led to

a quick decline in the music’s popularity among Jewish listeners. Then, in the

wake of the urban folk revival, a younger generation of musicians exploring

their musical roots rediscovered the music and sought out surviving past mas-

ters such as clarinetist Dave Tarras. Revivalist klezmer bands began to form in

the 1970s, and by the 1980s klezmer was once again alive and well. Today a sec-

ond wave of klezmer revival is taking the music in new directions, with groups

like the Klezmatics incorporating contemporary jazz, punk, and Middle Eastern

music into their original repertory.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band, founded in 1979, revives the jazzier, more

theatrical side of American klezmer. Their rendition of “Oy, s’iz gut” (LG 21.5)

is a tribute to Molly Picon, the Yiddish theater and fi lm star who introduced

the song in the 1937 musical Mayn Malkele. The music uses a minor mode with a

raised fourth scale degree, a major mode with a lowered seventh scale degree,

and melodic phrases that emphasize the interval of an augmented second

(e.g., E fl at to F sharp), all of which resemble various modes used in synagogue

cantillation. Otherwise, the song follows the conventions of a typical classic

American popular song: an introductory verse (here sung in the middle as an

interlude) and a thirty-two-bar aaba chorus. The performance swings like 1930s

jazz, and the second chorus has jazzlike two-bar breaks, though the solos that

fi ll them are in a traditional klezmer style, with elaborate melodic embellish-

ments and a driving, nonswinging rhythm. At the bridge in the second chorus,

the band drops the swing style and plays the eight bars as a traditional freylekh, a

fast dance of Bulgarian origin.

A few com mon t ra it s l i n k m a ny t y pes of root s mu sic. Most f u nct ion a s a n emblem

of ethnic pride for a designated social group. At the same time, most show traces

of contact with other social groups, and any notion of ethnic “purity” is contrary

to the reality of the music’s history. Moreover, many types of roots music have

the revival of klezmer

LG 21.5

K The Klezmer Conservatory

Band recreates the sound and

spirit of early twentieth-century

klezmer.

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