RE: promiscuous fusionizers

[Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky <reyzl...>]

>Our job is not to condemn it just because it doesn't match our 
preconceived
>notions.

The point that was being made was you either you know/mastered the 
tradition or you don't know.  It is not a matter of musicologists having 
preconceived notions of what the music is. Knowledgeable musicians who know 
the tradition make the same remarks as the musicologists.   If anything, 
the musicologists very often get their cue from musicians who know the 
musical traditions well.  I think the problem is that some musicians have 
stereotyped the klezmer sound and they think that if they produced those 
elements, they got it.  That's the problem.

>It's very simple-Musicians
>create what they know-sometimes starting from a preexisting tradition or
>material, sometimes only vaguely connected to music that's gone before.

If it's "vaguely connected to what has gone on before", then fine, but then 
don't call it klezmer music.  Keep yourself to places like The Knitting 
Factory and to that kind of specialized audiences.



Reyzl


----------
From:  TROMBAEDU (at) aol(dot)com [SMTP:TROMBAEDU (at) aol(dot)com]
Sent:  Wednesday, December 08, 1999 4:28 PM
To:  World music from a Jewish slant
Subject:  Re: promiscuous fusionizers

In a message dated 12/8/99 3:58:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
media (at) kamea(dot)com
writes:

<< For Jewish and Yiddish musical culture to matter and flourish, the
traditional
 must be balanced out by the contemporary.  The musical creations of people
 living today --whose art is an expression of their actual life, not some 
Ben
 Shahn <shtetl- cum -Lower East -Side> fantasy world of benign, wise 
 rabbis
and
 kindly, old <bubbes> -- should be given more opportunity to be heard. >>

This is also true, but my point didn't need to even extend this far to a
conceptual framework such as Wolf is expressing. It's very simple-Musicians 
create what they know-sometimes starting from a preexisting tradition or
material, sometimes only vaguely connected to music that's gone before. Our 
job is not to condemn it just because it doesn't match our preconceived
notions. Musicologists are free to argue over genre cross pollination, but
that has nothing to do with the living music involved.

Jordan



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