Itzhak Perlman is an Israeli-American violinist.
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.
Henry "Hank" Sapoznik is an American author, record and radio producer and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music.
The National Heritage Fellowship is a lifetime honor presented to master folk and traditional artists by the National Endowment for the Arts. Similar to Japan's Living National Treasure award, the Fellowship is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. It is a one-time only award and fellows must be living citizens or permanent residents of the United States. Each year, fellowships are presented to between nine and fifteen artists or groups at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
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.
The Fabrangen Fiddlers is an American Jewish folk music band. Founded in 1971, the Washington, DC-area group was the first music collective devoted to the rediscovery of Jewish folk music and the development of new Jewish liturgical folk music.
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.
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.
Hankus Netsky is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and ethnomusicologist. He chairs the Contemporary Improvisation Department at the New England Conservatory. Netsky is founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, an internationally renowned Yiddish music ensemble, and serves as research director of the Klezmer Conservatory Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of traditional Eastern European Jewish music. He plays the piano, accordion, and saxophone.
Leon Schwartz, Yiddish אריה–לייב שווארץ (1901-1990) was a klezmer and classical music violinist born in the village Karapchiv, Austria-Hungary near the town of Vashkivtsi in today’s Vyzhnytsia Region of the Bukovina area of Ukraine.
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.
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.
Pro Musica Hebraica (PMH) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is "to present Jewish classical music – much of it lost or forgotten – in a concert hall setting." Since April 2008, Pro Musica Hebraica has presented 13 concerts, typically two per year at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The concert series featured performances by Itzhak Perlman, the ARC Ensemble of Canada, the Apollo Ensemble of Amsterdam, Jascha Nemtsov, and Marc-André Hamelin, among others. The concert recordings are not sold, but are available on the website for free. PMH concerts are occasionally broadcast on WETA (FM).
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.
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.
Avraham-Yehoshua Makonovetsky was a Russian-Jewish Klezmer violinist who acted as a key informant to the Soviet Ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky in the 1930s. His extensive handwritten manuscripts, which are now in the collection of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, serve as a rare example of nineteenth-century Klezmer violin music.
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.
