Klezmer is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman music, Baroque music, German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As the music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker.
Naftule Brandwein, or Naftuli Brandwine, was an Austrian-born Jewish American Klezmer musician, clarinetist, bandleader and recording artist active from the 1910s to the 1940s. Along with Dave Tarras, he is considered to be among the top klezmer musicians of the twentieth century, and has a continuing influence on musicians in the genre a century later. Along with Tarras and other contemporaries like Israel J. Hochman, Max Leibowitz and Harry Kandel, he also helped forge the new American klezmer sound of the early twentieth century, which gradually gravitated towards a sophisticated big-band sound.
A badchen or badkhn is a type of Ashkenazic Jewish professional wedding entertainer, poet, sacred clown, and master of ceremonies originating in Eastern Europe, with a history dating back to at least the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The badchen was an indispensable part of the traditional Jewish wedding in Europe who guided the bride and groom through the stages of the ceremony, act as master of ceremonies, and sing to the bride, groom and in-laws with the accompaniment of klezmer musicians. They also had a traditional role on holidays such as Hanukkah or Purim. Today they are primarily found in Chassidic communities.
The Klezmatics are an American klezmer music group based in New York City, who have achieved fame singing in several languages, most notably mixing older Yiddish tunes with other types of more contemporary music of differing origins. They have also recorded pieces in Aramaic and Bavarian.
Frank London is an American klezmer trumpeter who also plays jazz and world music.
David Krakauer is an American clarinetist who performs klezmer, jazz, classical music, and avant-garde improvisation.
KlezKamp was a yearly Klezmer music and Yiddish culture festival in New York State.
Dave Tarras was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, a celebrated klezmer musician, instrumental in Klezmer revival.
Joel Rubin is an American clarinetist, klezmer musician, ethnomusicologist, and scholar of Jewish music. Since becoming involved in the klezmer revival in the late 1970s, he has been researching, teaching and performing klezmer music and related genres. He has been a member of, or performed with, such groups as Brave Old World, the Joel Rubin Ensemble, and Veretski Pass.
Alicia Svigals is an American violinist and composer. A co-founder of the Grammy-winning band The Klezmatics, she is considered by many to be the world's foremost living klezmer fiddler.
Michael Alpert is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s. He has performed solo and in a number of ensembles since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and has collaborated with clarinetist David Krakauer, hip-hop artist Socalled, singer/songwriter/actor Daniel Kahn, bandurist Julian Kytasty, violinist Itzhak Perlman, ethnomusicologist and musician Walter Zev Feldman, trumpeter/composerFrank London and numerous others.
Festival of Jewish Culture in Warsaw – "Singer's Warsaw" is an annual celebration of Jewish culture that has been held in Warsaw since 2004.
Mames Babegenush is a Danish Klezmer band formed in 2004 in Copenhagen.
Mames Babegenush is the East meeting the North. Strong Scandinavian roots merging with the vibrant dance music of Eastern Europe. From the great ambience of Nordic pine trees to lively weddings in Romania the music of Mames Babegenush gives a sense of both melancholy and ecstatic joy. In the beginning doing quite traditional klezmer music—with inspiration from artists such as Naftule Brandwein, Abe Schwartz and Dave Tarras—but has increasingly developed their own sound.
Moisei Iakovlevich Beregovsky was a Soviet Jewish folklorist and ethnomusicologist from Ukraine, who published mainly in Russian and Yiddish. He has been called the "foremost ethnomusicologist of Eastern European Jewry". His research and life's work included the collection, transcription and analysis of the melodies, texts and culture of Yiddish folk song, wordless melodies (nigunim), East European Jewish instrumental music for both dancing and listening, Purim plays, and exploration of the relationship between East European Jewish and Ukrainian traditional music.
Metropolitan Klezmer is a New York band that was established in 1994. While clearly a Klezmer band, Metropolitan Klezmer takes an eclectic approach to Yiddish musical genres from around the globe.
Jewish hip hop is a genre of hip hop music with thematic, stylistic, or cultural ties to Judaism and its musical traditions.
There exists a long-standing and well-documented relationship between Jews and punk rock. This includes multiple prominent Jewish musicians, promoters, and label executives who were involved in the development of punk in the 1970s and 1980s, the continued presence of prominent Jewish artists and personalities in the genre in the modern era, a small but noteworthy punk rock scene in Israel, and a more recent loose proto-scene of explicitly Jewish-themed punk bands and artists.
Alicia Jo Rabins is a performer, musician, singer, composer, poet, writer, and Jewish scholar. She lives in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Her use of language and words is central to her work: "Words may be the closest we get to immortality as humans. Death has no power over those words. Geography has no power over them. They transmit something beyond any one, or any community's, lifetime." She played violin for eight years in the rock-klezmer band Golem.
Pedotser, also pronounced Pedutser in some Yiddish dialects, was the popular name of Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko, a nineteenth century Klezmer violin virtuoso, composer and bandeader from Berdychiv, Russian Empire. He was one of a number of virtuosic klezmers of the nineteenth century, alongside Yosef Drucker "Stempenyu", Yehiel Goyzman "Alter Chudnover" and Josef Gusikov.
Abraham "Art" Shryer was a Russian-born American Klezmer cornetist, bandleader, and recording artist who was active in the New York City area in the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1920s he recorded a number of Jewish and other Eastern European music sides for Brunswick Records, Vocalion Records, and Victor Records.
