Re: essential klezmer cds

[andyrubin <andyrubin...>]

My own list would include Budowitz' "Mama Loshn" (Mother Tongue) and Alicia 
Svigals' "Fidl" as examples of exquisitely performed traditional klezmer, and 
Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mt. Boys' recent CD (epynomous, I believe) as a 
fine example of musical bridging with a sacrosanct American folk idiom 
(bluegrass).

I'd also include the first two albums of the Klezmorim ("East Side Wedding" and 
"Streets of Gold"), but perhaps they were issued more than 25 years ago (well, 
sometime during the mid-to-late seventies, no?). In any case, they were 
extremely important to the then-nascent klezmer revival.

-Andy Rubin
Ceilizemer and The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band 
> 
> >If you were to recommend 10 CDs to a budding klezmerologist that 
> >accurately represent the best of the various strains over the past 25 
> >years--traditional, modern, and so on--which 10 would you choose?
> 
> ...
> 
> >Mine includes Izhak Perlman, Shirim's "Klezmer Nutcracker,"....
> 
> 
> As much as I love the Klezmer Nutcracker, I think of it more as a curiosity 
> (albeit wonderfully done and performed) that distracts attention from the 
> first two Shirim CDs, which are very different, and each quite essential. 
> The second CD, "Naftule's Dream" (later chosen by the band as the name for 
> their avant garde, post-klezmer band-name) was one of the original 
> "essential" klezmer CDs with which the KlezmerShack was begun - in support 
> of an article for the Whole Earth Review which needed the obligatory (in 
> 1995) "support webpage".
> 
> The other five CDs that seemed to represent the diversity of that time 
> still stand up as worth listening to (or better), although the world 
> continues to expand:
> 
> Brave Old World / Beyond the Pale (but, as with the Klezmatics, below, I'd 
> have no trouble suggesting the new album, "Bless the Fire")
> Kapelye / On the Air (the precursor to Henry's wonderful Yiddish Radio 
> Project - this, too, shouldn't be forgotten)
> Klezmatics / Jews with Horns (today I would happily suggest the latest: 
> "Rise Up!")
> Klezmer Conservatory Band / Yiddish Renaissance (which I think =has= been 
> overshadowed, especially by albums in the last five years, but is still 
> wonderful)
> Andy Statman-David Grisman / Songs of our Fathers (never my personal 
> favorite, but an album that people continue to mention to me)
> 
> ari
> 
> 

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