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—also sometimes known by the earlier term freilach music —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.
Donald Byron is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist. He primarily plays clarinet but has also played bass clarinet and saxophone in a variety of genres that includes free jazz and klezmer.
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.
Harry Kandel was an American clarinetist and klezmer bandleader of the early twentieth century. His recording career with the Victor Recording Company lasted from 1916 to 1927, during which he released dozens of Jewish music records.
The Klezmer Conservatory Band is a Boston-based group which performs traditional klezmer music; it was formed by Hankus Netsky of the New England Conservatory of Music in 1980. Originally formed for a single concert, they have gone on to release eleven albums.
Dave Tarras was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, a celebrated klezmer musician, instrumental in Klezmer revival.
Alan Bern is an American Jewish composer, pianist, accordionist, educator and cultural activist, based in Berlin since 1987. He is the founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar and the Other Music Academy (OMA). He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the research, dissemination and creative renewal of Jewish music with Brave Old World, The Other Europeans and the Semer Ensemble, among others. He is the creator of Present-Time Composition, a musical and educational approach informed by cognitive science that integrates the methods of improvisation and composition. In 2016 he received the Weimar Prize in recognition of major cultural contributions to the city of Weimar. In 2017 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Free State of Thuringia, and in 2022 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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.
Abraham "Abe" Elenkrig was a Russian-born American klezmer bandleader, Cornet player, barber and recording artist of the early twentieth century. He was among the earliest bandleaders to record klezmer music in the United States, making a series of discs for Victor Recording Company and Columbia Records from 1913 to 1915. In 2009, the Library of Congress named his 1913 recording Fon der Choope to the National Recording Registry.
Shlemiel the First is a musical adaptation of the "Chelm" stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer about the supposedly wise men of that legendary town, and a fool named "Shlemiel". It was conceived and adapted by Robert Brustein, with lyrics by Arnold Weinstein and music based on traditional klezmer music and Yiddish theater songs by Hankus Netsky of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Zalmen Mlotek, who wrote additional music and arrangements, and served as the musical director of the original production. Singer had written a non-musical theatrical adaptation of the stories which Brustein produced in 1974 when he was the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, and this served to provide the basic material for the musical.
Shloimke Beckerman also known as Samuel Beckerman, was a klezmer clarinetist and bandleader in New York City in the early twentieth century; he was a contemporary of Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. He was the father of Sid Beckerman, also a klezmer bandleader.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Tamara Brooks was an American choral conductor.
Ben Zion Shenker (1925–2016) was a world-renowned American Hasidic composer and hazzan, associated with the Modzitz hasidic dynasty. Shenker was born in the heyday of the American hazzan. He became interested in the art as a child, and was performing on radio by his early teens. Soon after, he became close to Rabbi Shaul Taub, the Holocaust-surviving Modzitz Grand Rabbi, who was known for his mystical Hasidic compositions. He dedicated much of his life to recording and publishing the large stock of pre-war Modzitz songs, as well as Taub's post-war work. Shenker created a music label, Neginah, for the purpose of recording those songs, and himself became a composer of hundreds Modzitz moded songs.
KlezKanada is a Canadian organization for the promotion of klezmer music and Yiddish culture. Its principal program is a week-long Jewish music festival founded in 1996 that takes place annually in August at Camp B'nai B'rith in Lantier, Quebec. The organization also hosts workshops, concerts, and other educational programs in Montreal throughout the year.
Israel J. Hochman was a Russian-born Jewish American violinist, klezmer bandleader, music arranger, and recording artist in early Twentieth Century New York City. He recorded prolifically for Edison Records, Emerson Records, Okeh Records, and Brunswick Records during the period of 1916 to 1924. He was one of a handful of bandleaders such as Abe Schwartz, Joseph Frankel and Max Leibowitz whose recordings are considered to make up the golden age of American klezmer.
Joseph Cherniavsky was a Jewish American cellist, theatre and film composer, orchestra director, and recording artist. He wrote for the Yiddish theatre, made some of the earliest novelty recordings mixing American popular music, Jazz and klezmer in the mid-1920s, was also musical director at Universal Studios in 1928-1929, and had a long career in radio and musical theatre.
Itzikl Kramtweiss or Krantweiss, also known by the anglicized name Isadore Krantweiss, was a Russian-born American klezmer musician and recording artist of the early twentieth century. He was leader of the Broder Kapelle, a popular klezmer orchestra in Philadelphia which made recordings for the Victor Recording Company in the late 1920s.
Jacob "Jakie" Hoffman was a Russian-born American Klezmer and orchestral musician, recording artist, and Xylophone player. He played and recorded with Harry Kandel, Philadelphia klezmer bandleaders of the interwar era, and was the father of Klezmer percussionist Elaine Hoffman Watts and grandfather of Trumpet player Susan Watts.
Michael Winograd is an American Klezmer clarinetist and composer. He has performed with such groups and artists as Vulfpeck, Tarras Band, Geoff Berner, Socalled, Adrienne Cooper, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird and Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentshn.
