Re: What is Klezmer ?

[Owen Davidson <owend...>]

>What is klezmer? Or rather, what kinds of klezmer are there? You ask a
>mighty good question, podner. 

It seems to me that these two questions are not at all equivalent.  The
problems involved in trying to categorize all the various styles of music
that are presented as "klezmer" today will only yield a confusing muddle
until we arrive at an answer to the first question.

"Klezmer," before it was applied to eastern Ashkenazic instrumental music in
general, was the term for the musician.  Not *any* musician, but a musician
who played a certain musical style and repertoire, for very specific
cultural/religious purposes, mostly pertaining to Jewish wedding traditions.
Such a musician may not have been a skilled performer in any other style of
music, and there is plenty of evidence that the klezmer did not enjoy high
status in the community, but his special knowledge made him indispensable at
weddings.  The specialized music played by the klezmorim still constitutes
the core repertoire of all the modern "klezmer bands".  I suggest that this
traditional repertoire is what should be referred to as "klezmer music".
Any of the various other things we play (vaudeville and theater songs, folk
songs, art songs, *any* kind of songs for that matter, folk music from other
traditions, jazz, &c.) may be looked upon as hybrid or related forms, not as
klezmer per se.  Other types of music can be played using klezmer's unique
musical vocabulary, but I don't think they thus become Klezmer music.
Particularly, jazz doesn't seem to cohabitate comfortably with klezmer: the
two forms are really philosophically opposed on a basic level.  Klez-jazz
fusion seems to me to succeed as one form in exactly so far as it fails as
the other.

Sorry if I seem like a hard-liner, but we are given the ability to make
distinctions, and where distinctions are hard to draw,  one does well to
consider the root of the question.

Best regards,

Owen
____________________________________________________________________________
________         Owen Davidson, Amherst, Mass.

        I look into its glowing screen 
        And see the Adversary,
        And know that it, could it see me,
        Would see the Beast all hairy.