The Klezniks

The Boston-based Klezniks musical ensemble was founded in 1994. The Klezniks play freylakhs (lively dance music); Hebrew, Yemenite, Ladino, and Yiddish folk songs; nigunim (Hasidic songs); Yiddish theater and swing tunes. The band includes the various sounds of clarinets, violin, viola, saxophone, flute, guitar, keyboard, drums and vocalists.

Over these many years The Klezniks have participated at the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), Concert Series on the Common in Salem, Temple dedications and numerous charitable functions such as the Walk for Hunger. The band has also performed at numerous concerts and continues to book both public and private functions

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About Klezmer Music

Klezmer music has its roots in the dance music played at Eastern European Jewish celebrations—a melange of Central/Eastern European music, and Greek and Middle Eastern dance music intermingled with everything from Romanian gypsy strains to Polish polkas. The Klezmer tradition has borrowed from and combined these influences to form a joyous, poignant style of dance music. Jewish musicians, emigrating to the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s, discovered jazz and other music styles here, while retaining the influences of the cultures left behind. In the America melting pot, Klezmer and Yiddish tunes were in turn popularized by American pop singers such as the Andrews sisters.

Alongside Klezmer music, Yiddish theatre flourished wherever there was a Jewish community, and became legend on New York City's Second Avenue. This was also the golden age of Jewish cantors, and the popular Yiddish folk tradition continued in lullabies and labor songs. Many of today's Klezmer and Yiddish musicians add to the repertoire by reinterpreting and composing, creating new vibrant music.

Klezmer music, the traditional instrumental music of the Jews of Eastern Europe, developed from Jewish combined with native folk songs, gypsy music, and polkas. As early as the sixteenth century, European klezmer musicians traveled from town to town, playing at weddings and festivals. By the nineteenth century, Klezmer music was well-developed as a musical form and continued to draw inspiration not only from the synagogue but from the non-Jewish culture that surrounded it.

As many European Jews moved to urban centers in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, klezmer music mingled with concert music and with European and Yiddish theater music. In early twentieth-century America, immigrant Jewish musicians—and then their children—infusing klezmer music with new forms such as ragtime, jazz, and popular songs. [creating new Klezmer forms such as jazz-inspired swing tunes?] In the America melting pot, Klezmer tunes were in turn popularized by American pop singers such as the Andrews sisters.

Until the 1940s, Klezmer orchestras flourished. After that the Klezmer tradition began to fade coincident with the emergence of new styles of music and the desire of Jewish immigrants to assimilate and be identified as Americans. Today a Klezmer revival is in full swing with music ranging from the very traditional to more modern fusion forms.