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.
Abe Schwartz was an American 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.
The Klezmorim, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1975, was the world's first klezmer revival band, widely credited with spearheading the global renaissance of klezmer in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially featuring flute and strings—notably the exotic fiddling of co-founder David Skuse—the ensemble reorganized into a "loose, roaring, funky" brass/reed/percussion band fronted by co-founder Lev Liberman's saxophones and founding member David Julian Gray's clarinets. As a professional performing and recording ensemble focused on recreating the lost sounds of early 20th century klezmer bands, The Klezmorim achieved crossover success, garnering a Grammy nomination in 1982 for their album Metropolis and selling out major concert venues across North America and Europe, including Carnegie Hall and L'Olympia in Paris. The band performed steadily until 1993, regrouping in 2004 for a European tour.
Frank London is an American klezmer trumpeter who also plays jazz and world music.
Giora Feidman is an Argentine-born Israeli clarinetist who specializes in klezmer music.
David Krakauer is an American clarinetist who performs klezmer, jazz, classical music, and avant-garde improvisation.
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.
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.
Andrew Edward Statman is a noted American klezmer clarinetist and bluegrass/newgrass mandolinist.
Austin Klezmorim is a klezmer music group founded in 1979 in Austin, Texas by trumpeter and composer Bill Averbach.
The Kharkov Klezmer Band, also known as the Kharkiv Klezmer Band, is a klezmer band from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
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.
Margot Leverett is a New York-based clarinettist. Born in Ohio, she lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York before studying at Indiana University School of Music. At Indiana, she was classically trained. Leverett later became interested in klezmer, a traditional musical style of the Jews of Eastern Europe. She studied with klezmer clarinettist Sidney Beckerman and was a founding member of The Klezmatics in 1985. The Klezmatics, a band associated with the Klezmer revival would later become the first klezmer band to win a Grammy Award.
Adrienne Cooper was a Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the contemporary revival of klezmer music.
Sam Musiker (1916–1964) was an American clarinetist and saxophonist whose career spanned both jazz and klezmer music. He is best known as the musical director of the album Tanz which also featured his brother Ray Musiker and his father-in-law Dave Tarras.
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.
Yiddish Summer Weimar is an annual summer institute and festival for Yiddish music, language and culture which takes place in Weimar, Germany. Starting as a 3-day workshop in 1998, it was officially founded in its current form in 2006 and has grown to become one of the most important festivals and educational organizations for Klezmer, Yiddish song, Yiddish Language, dance and culture. It is known for its transcultural and transnational perspective which supports an international learning community, for the pedagogical approach of its founder, Alan Bern, and for its commitment to the creation and presentation of historically informed, contemporary Yiddish artistic production.
Christian Dawid is a German clarinetist, Klezmer musician, educator, and composer. He is generally regarded as one of the top Klezmer musicians in Germany, and has performed with groups such as Trio Yas and Khupe, as well as with international Klezmer groups such as Brave Old World, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, Ben Caplan, Budowitz and The Other Europeans.
