American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots

7. Sounds of Sensibility

chapter 7 Sounds of Sensibility barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett 129 Today’s klezmer scene, while it affirms a degree of musical continuity with the past, is in fact the result of an experience of rupture. Reviewing The Klezmorim’s first album, East Side Wedding, which appeared in 1977, Nat Hentoff commented, “For years now, I had thought the klezmorim to be nearly extinct. Oh, some old players must still be boldly wailing in some dwindling Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, but surely they are the last of their line.” When he heard them, he recalled, “I would close my eyes and grin at the ghosts of my clan in Minsk and Pinsk.” Now, he continued, a new generation has “taken up and merrily revivi- fied this heritage.”1 At the time, Hentoff heard the past. Years later, Lev Liberman, who cofounded The Klezmorim in 1975, would look back and see harbingers of the future: “I’d like to think that the current klezmer revival had its origins in our early experiments with tight ensemble playing, improvisation, klezmer/jazz fusions, neo-klezmer composition, street music, world beat, and New Vaudeville.”2 In the hiatus between the old and the new players can be found keys to changes of sensibility that have made today’s scene possible. Whatever their ostensible subject, the contributors to this book sound the sensibilities specific to the klezmer phenomenon of the last twenty-five years. They show “klezmer music” to be a powerful index of what Raymond Williams has called “changing structures of feeling.” Williams distinguishes feeling (“meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt”) from ideology (“formally held and systematic beliefs”), noting that they 130 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Figure 7.1 The Klezmorim’s East Side Wedding (1977), acknowledged as the first revival album. Used with permission of Arhoolie Records. are of course interrelated in practice. “Methodologically, then, a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements [affective elements of consciousness and relationships ] and their connection in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence.”3 This book provides rich evidence of just such “affective elements of consciousness” and their historical location. Here I explore the historical formation of the klezmer phenomenon in terms of changing structures of feeling. I begin by considering arguments over terminology—not only the term klezmer, but also the word revival—and how these debates situate klezmer music within a larger musical landscape. I then relate the klezmer phenomenon to what Haym Sounds of Sensibility 131 Soloveitchik has called the end of self-evident Jewishness.4 While stringent orthodoxy is one outcome of the tension between tradition and ideology , the klezmer revival is another. There follows an analysis of the fault lines of sensibility in the period immediately preceding the klezmer revival. While the popularity of old-time Jewish wedding music declined and an incipient heritage orientation to it can be detected within the Jewish music world of the time, this music was notably absent from the folk song and music revivals of the fifties and sixties. To better understand this absence, I contrast the musical sensibilities of Theodore Bikel, an international folk singer who specialized in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian songs, and those of Mickey Katz, who performed English-Yiddish comedy and musical parodies for largely Jewish audiences. Seen not as a musical wasteland, but as a plenum of shifting sensibilities, the fifties and sixties hold clues to the emergence of the klezmer revival in the seventies, its efflorescence in the nineties, and its changing character in the United States and in the “Jewish space” of Europe today.5 THE KLEZMER PHENOMENON What to call this scene and how to characterize the music are matters of ongoing debate. As Williams writes of keywords more generally, the term klezmer is tangled up with the phenomenon it is being used to discuss .6 While klezmer music, klezmer musicians, and klezmer revival are commonly heard terms, Andy Statman recently said that the music he plays is not klezmer but Hasidic, and Giora Feidman has declared that “Klezmer is not Jewish music.”7 Some take issue with the term revival. Members of a young Swedish band, Vurma Klezmer Orkester, insist on two revivals, not one, and see themselves as part of the “second renaissance ” of the music, the first one having occurred in the late seventies.8...