Re: Decline and Fall of Clarinet Empire (was Re: women musicians)

[TROMBAEDU <TROMBAEDU...>]

In a message dated 2/28/01 11:29:04 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
GRComm (at) concentric(dot)net writes:


> An ancillary question, perhaps even more elusive to answer; why is
> klezmer fading out in the Ortho community? Given the massive amounts of
> synth-driven faux rock rubbish I hear Orthodox bands churning out, I
> can't say I'm surprised, but what is the reason for this?
> 
> 

Klezmer is not fading out of the Orthodx community. KLezmer has been out for 
over thirty years. Part of the reason is the ascendency of Folk singer types 
like Shlomo Carlebach in the late fifties, Rabbi's sons in the late sixties, 
and singer stars like Mordechai Ben David in the seventies and eighties. 
Quite simply, they were a much more accurate mirror if popular music trends 
then the intricate, subtle, and INSTRUMENTAL style of Klezmer.  
In addition, with the reconstruction of Chasidic life in America after the 
war, Chasidic culture came to dominate musical tastes in Jewish Music. These 
simpler melodies did not require the Folk craft of a Klezmer band to be 
successful. As the Orthodox world had greater contact with the more 
particularistic Chasidic sects, they found a more unadulterated expression of 
Jewishness in the Chasidic world, which after all was at least one generation 
closer to Europe than most of American Orthodoxy. This has ramifications for 
the Kol Isha and Women's issues in general, since the adoption of more 
stringent interpretations of Jewish Law stem in part from the greater 
influence of Chasidim over Jewish life. But it also affected the kind of 
music played at Weddings. In addition, the Jewish wedding business thrived in 
Williamsburg, where a musician could work every night of the week playing 
weddings at the famous halls, like the Bais Rachel and The Continental. They 
would play the more Modern Orthodox style affairs on the weekends, and bring 
the Chasidic music with them. One of the other interesting trends that took 
place in the late sixties was the change in the music business from 
professional, non Orthodox musicians like the Epstiens, Rudy Tepel, and 
Shelly Gordon, to the Lamm brothers, (of early Neginah Orchestra), Shelly 
Lang, The messengers, and Ruach Revival. when that happened, you began to see 
the Williamsburg music become more separated from the "Modern" music, as the 
Orthodox bandleaders came up with their own music, as well as the hit songs 
of people like Carlebach and the Rabbi's Sons. The Clarinet still held sway, 
but he was not playing Klezmer music. The sax started replacing Clarinet in 
the mid seventies, as the Modern Orthodox affair started incorporating 
Israeli pop music. It also coincided with the arrival in the business of the 
first refugees from the Jazz field, who realized they needed the Wedding work 
to make a living. Before that, the musicians were the old time wedding 
musicians like Paul Pincus, who came to weddings as true NY freelancers, or 
young Orthodox musicians like Yisrael Lamm, who really had no place else to 
go. Interestingly enough, one of the musicians who made the transfer to sax 
most smoothly was Klezmer virtuoso Danny Rubinstein. The young jazzers just 
were not Clarinet players in the same way. In the early eighties the death 
knell for the clarinet was sounded by producers like Shea Mendlowitz who 
pushed hard to integrate the sound of Disco music in Chasidic Music. Even in 
Williamsburg, the woodwind players abandoned the Clarinet for the sax. 
There are a lot of other details to this story, but I will conclude with one 
thought, which is that a number of us who are involved in this business are 
pushing hard to reintroduce more traditional Jewish sounding music into the 
Orthodox wedding. Ironically, part of this is due to the rekindling of 
interest in Shlomo Carlebach's music since his death, and part of it is due 
to Avraham Fried's embracing of his Lubavitch heritage, singing more 
traditional sounding songs. 

Jordan