Joel Rubin is an American clarinetist, Klezmer musician, ethnomusicologist, and scholar of Jewish music. [1] Since becoming involved in the Klezmer revival in the late 1970s, he has been researching, teaching and performing Klezmer music and related genres. [2] He has been a member of, or performed with, such groups as Brave Old World, the Joel Rubin Ensemble, and Veretski Pass.
Joel Rubin was born in Los Angeles in 1955. His paternal grandfather, who was from Kyiv, was a guitarist and his maternal grandfather, who was from New York City, was a passionate fan of classical music and opera. Both men instilled a love of music in him. [3] Rubin's father was a Psychoanalyst and his mother was a visual artist and painter. [3] From 1973 to 1975, Rubin studied classical clarinet with Richard Stoltzman at the California Institute of the Arts. Rubin was exposed to a wider range of Eastern European music from Bill Douglas during that time. [3] In 1975 he relocated to New York City where he studied with Kalmen Opperman, who he continued to study with for several decades. [1] [4] In 1978 he received a BFA from the School of Music at the State University of New York at Purchase. At around that time, he was experimenting with Jazz music and other more contemporary genres. He was often performing with Lisa Rose, a pianist who was interested in Jewish music, and when an acquaintance lent him a Dave Tarras LPs he began to take a greater interest in Klezmer music. [3]
Rubin's career as a performer of Klezmer music began in 1980 in the Hester Street Klezmer band from Portland, Oregon, as well as a duo with Lisa Rose called The Old Country. He said in a recent interview that few people in Portland at that time had any awareness of the genre. [3] At that time, old recordings were fairly difficult to find anywhere in the United States, so musicians would trade cassettes of 78-rpm records from the 1920s or visit archives such as YIVO in New York. [3] KlezKamp was founded in 1985, and he started teaching there annually. In San Francisco from 1986 to 1989 he played with the Joel Rubin Klezmer Band, which included Michael Alpert and Stuart Brotman. [1] In 1988, he started a new duo with accordionist Alan Bern, which Brotman and Alpert soon joined as well; the group eventually became Brave Old World. [5] [6] Rubin moved to Berlin, Germany in 1989; for the next three years, Brave Old World toured regularly in Europe, although in 1992 Rubin left the group. [7] [3]
In 1994, he founded his next project, which still performs to this day, the Joel Rubin Ensemble, which includes Kálmán Balogh on cimbalom, David Chernyavsky on violin, and Claudio Jacomucci on accordion. [4] (The violinist in the ensemble was also Steven Greenman for a time and is and currently Mark Kovnatskiy). He also began to perform as a duo with Joshua Horowitz, who was living in Austria at the time. In 1994, he recorded a cd with Horowitz (Bessarabian Symphony). Both that 1994 album and his subsequent Joel Rubin Ensemble cd Beregovski’s Khasene (1997) drew heavily on melodies collected by Soviet ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky, which at that time were still not being performed much by Klezmer revival musicians. [8] [9] [3]
Since 2013, Rubin has been collaborating more frequently with the group Veretski Pass, releasing two albums with them, Poyln, A Gilgul (2015) and The Magid Chronicles (2019), which was based on the work of Sofia Magid. [10] [11] [3]
Over the years, Rubin has appeared on stage with a number of other traditional performers such as the Epstein Brothers, Moshe “Moussa” Berlin, Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, Leon Schwartz, Sid Beckerman, Pete Sokolow, Danny Rubinstein, Ben Bazyler, and Leopold Kozlowski, Vladimir Terletsky and Bronya Sakina. [12] [13] He has also appeared with Klezmer revival groups such as the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, The Klezmatics, and the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band. He has also directed some university klezmer ensembles, including the University of Virginia Klezmer Ensemble (of which he has been the director since 2006), the Syracuse University Klezmer Ensemble (in 2006), and the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble (2003-6). [14] [15] [4]
Rubin has been teaching klezmer music since KlezKamp was founded in 1985. He noted in a recent interview that there was very little information available in English about klezmer at that time, which motivated him to begin his own research into the genre in the early 1980s. [3] Since then, he has become a prominent scholar of klezmer music, Hasidic music, and related genres of Jewish music. He began collaborating with Ethnomusicologist Rita Ottens in the early 1990s; they have since collaborated on a number of books. [1] Rubin's research into the Epstein Brothers Orchestra in the 1990s led to the creation of a documentary film directed by Stefan Schwietert called A Tickle in the Heart (1996). [16] [17] [18]
His 2001 dissertation at City University, London examined the performance style of klezmer clarinetists Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. [19] His most recent book, New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century: The Music of Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras (U. of Rochester Press, 2020) revisits those two clarinetists. [20]
After finishing his PhD, in 2003 he returned to the United States and worked as an instructor at Cornell University and Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. In 2006 he became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia where he worked until 2020. At present he is an Adjunct Researcher at the University of Bern. [21]
He has also published many academic papers, many of which are available on Academia.edu. [22] In 2021, Rubin deposited his collection of research materials and other documents with the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. [23]
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.
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.
Abe Schwartz was a well-known klezmer violinist, composer, Yiddish theater and ethnic recordings bandleader from the 1910s to the 1940s. In his various orchestras, he recorded many of the leading klezmer musicians of the early twentieth century, including Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras.
Dave Tarras was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, a celebrated klezmer musician, instrumental in Klezmer revival.
Veretski Pass is a klezmer trio using traditional instrumentation of accordion, violin, cimbalom and bowed double bass. They are based in the United States, and are named after Verecke Pass, the mountain pass through which Magyar tribes crossed into the Carpathian basin to settle what later became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Members of this group have previously played in other Klezmer groups such as Budowitz and Brave Old World.
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.
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.
Max Leibowitz was an American klezmer violinist, composer and bandleader in New York City primarily in the 1910s and 1920s.
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.
Sofia Magid was a Soviet Jewish ethnographer and folklorist whose career lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s. Among the materials she collected were folksongs of Volhynian and Belarusian Jews and among the only prewar field recordings of European klezmer string ensembles, as well as the music of Russians and other ethnic groups of the USSR. Although she was largely unknown abroad during her lifetime, in recent years she has been seen alongside Moshe Beregovski and other Soviet Jewish ethnographers as an important scholar and collector of Jewish music.
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 Katzman was a Klezmer violinist, bandleader, composer, and Brunswick Records recording artist of the 1920s. He was the father of film producer Sam Katzman, uncle of American arranger and bandleader Louis Katzman and the great-uncle of Henry Katzman and Leonard Katzman.
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.
Alter Chudnover, whose real name was Yehiel Goyzman or Hausman, was a nineteenth century Klezmer violinist from the Russian Empire. He was one of a number of virtuosic klezmers of the nineteenth century, alongside Yosef Drucker "Stempenyu", A. M. Kholodenko "Pedotser" and Josef Gusikov. He was also an early teacher to the violinist Mischa Elman.
J. & J. Kammen Music Company, commonly known as the Kammen Brothers, was a sheet music publishing company operated in Brooklyn, New York by Jack and Joseph Kammen from the 1920s to the 1970s. The company published Jewish music as well as non-Jewish music. They owned the rights to some well-known songs such as Bei Mir Bistu Shein. Their Klezmer Fake books were by far the most popular of their time, offering arranged interpretations of Jewish wedding repertoire for non-specialist musicians.
Stempenyu was the popular name of Iosif Druker, a klezmer violin virtuoso, bandleader and composer from Berdychiv, Russian Empire. He was one of a handful of celebrity nineteenth century Jewish folk violinists from Ukraine; others included Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko "Pedotser" and Yechiel Goyzman "Alter Chudnover" from Chudniv. Sholem Aleichem loosely based his 1888 novel Stempenyu: A Jewish Novel on the real-life Stempenyu; it was adapted into various stage and film versions in the twentieth century.
Belf's Romanian Orchestra was a Jewish music recording ensemble from the Russian Empire. Although little is known about them, their numerous recordings for Syrena Rekord during the period of 1911 to 1914 are among the earliest documented examples of recorded klezmer music and are played in a style very different from the better-known American klezmer recordings of the 1910s and 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.
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