This is the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Klezmer
The Latest
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The Schmooze Monday Music: When Jews and Gypsies Play
Photo by Pawel Mazur The Other Europeans’ impressive new live album, “Splendor,” should carry the subtitle “Everything You Wanted To Know About Klezmer and Lautar Music But Were Afraid To Ask.” Would you bet on your ability to differentiate klezmer from so-called “Gypsy” music in a simple drop-the-needle listening test? Before this recording, even those…
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The Schmooze Hardcore Klezmer: Talking With Ramzailech
Crossposted from Midnight East. Photos by Gangi. Thirty seconds into the music bodies are moving on the dance floor, my pulse is synched to the beat, and electric guitar and drums are crashing through my bloodstream. Then the wail of the clarinet takes over my brain and I’m singing along with the band — in…
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The Schmooze ‘Shlemiel the First’ Just as Good the Second Time
Is there room for a klezmer musical on Broadway? I think so. The band for “Shlemiel the First,” led by the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theatre’s Zalmen Mlotek, is so good that during the exit music a sizeable portion of the audience drifted down toward the pit instead of up to the exits. Costumed as an…
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Culture A Sneak Preview of Itzhak Perlman
Itzhak spoke to Yitzchok in Hebrew. Hankus spoke to Yitzchok in Yiddish. The conductor made puns in English with a heavy accent that is Australian and South African. And this all happened in the studio where Bruce Springsteen recorded “Born To Run” and Madonna laid down her vocal tracks for “Like a Virgin.” We’re talking,…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Down Home Brooklyn
Photo courtesy of Andy Statman The version of “The Lord Will Provide” on “Old Brooklyn,” Andy Statman’s virtuosic two-CD excursion through all manners of American and Jewish music, struck me as unusual, and not just because the voice and clarinet duet is spine-tinglingly powerful. It’s more because the 18th-century hymn, written by James Newton —…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: Russian Klezmer Orchestra Tours Stateside
It’s no coincidence that The Klezmasters are highly reminiscent of The Klezmatics. The former band, which bills itself as Russia’s only klezmer orchestra, was inspired by the latter. Having been created in 2003 by a group of classical music students who met through Hillel in Moscow, The Klezmasters have been gaining notoriety in recent years…
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The Schmooze No Pasaran! London Parties Like it’s 1936
October 4 was the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which erupted when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march through the East End of London. Five thousand black-shirted men amassed on the border of Stepney, which at the time 60,000 Jews called home. But they didn’t get in: 300,000 people…
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The Schmooze Monday Music: The Klezmatics at 25
Courtesy of GAT publicity The Klezmatics are 25 this year (where does the time go?), and to mark the anniversary, they’ve released “Live at Town Hall,” a two-disc recording of a performance given in New York five years ago. That concert, itself an exuberant 20th anniversary celebration, was recorded in conjunction with “The Klezmatics: On…
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