Klezmer

Klezmer is the instrumental music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe: dance tunes and free, sobbing improvisations played at weddings by professional bands, led by a violin or a clarinet that sounds uncannily like a human voice. Nearly destroyed in Europe by the Holocaust, it survived through 78 rpm records made by immigrants in New York and was rebuilt from the 1970s onward into a living, international music.

This guide covers what klezmer is, where it came from, the modes and dance forms that define its sound, its instruments and ornaments, the musicians who shaped it and how it relates to swing and jazz. Curious how a classifier hears it? Try a clip in our free AI music genre detector and compare the result with the note below.

The word comes from the Hebrew kley zemer, "vessels of song". In Yiddish a klezmer (plural klezmorim) was originally the musician, not the music. Using "klezmer" as the name of a genre is relatively recent: it was popularised as a label by revival musicians in the late 1970s, and the musicologist Walter Zev Feldman, whose 1979 album with Andy Statman used the term, has claimed credit for that shift.

Historically, klezmorim were professional musicians who played for the Jewish community's celebrations — above all weddings, which could last for days and had a fixed sequence of ceremonial and dance music. They also played for non-Jewish patrons, and their repertoire absorbed Romanian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, Greek, Ottoman and Romani influences. At the centre, though, the music drew on the sound of Jewish prayer: the modes of the synagogue and the ornamented voice of the cantor.

Klezmer is primarily instrumental dance music, which separates it from Yiddish song and from Yiddish theatre music, although the three overlap heavily in practice. It is modal rather than built on Western chord progressions, its dances have their own rhythms, and its ornaments imitate laughter and weeping. That is what distinguishes it from jazz, even though the two shared the clarinet and the dance halls of early 20th-century New York.

Jewish professional musicians are documented in Central and Eastern Europe from the late Middle Ages; guilds of klezmorim existed in Prague by the 16th and 17th centuries. The classic klezmer repertoire took shape in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Pale of Settlement and neighbouring regions — today's Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Romania — where small family bands, known as kapelye, played weddings alongside the badkhn, the wedding jester and master of ceremonies.

The violin was the original lead instrument. Over the 19th century the clarinet rose to share and then often take that role.

The great wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1920s carried klezmer to the United States. In New York, immigrant musicians played weddings, dance halls, union rallies and restaurants, and recorded extensively for record labels' ethnic catalogues. The clarinettists Naftule Brandwein, from Galicia, and Dave Tarras (c. 1895–1989), from Ukraine, became the stars of this era, alongside bandleaders such as Abe Schwartz and Harry Kandel. Their 78s from the 1910s to the 1930s became the main record of the style.

The Holocaust destroyed the communities in which klezmer had lived in Europe. In America, the music faded from mainstream Jewish life after the Second World War as younger generations assimilated and Israeli music took its place at celebrations. Klezmer influence surfaced in swing — trumpeter Ziggy Elman's "And the Angels Sing" (1939) for Benny Goodman grew out of his klezmer-inflected "Fralich in Swing" — and in comedy, but the tradition itself narrowed.

The klezmer revival began in the mid-1970s, when young American musicians started learning from the old 78s and from surviving players such as Dave Tarras. The Klezmorim (formed in Berkeley), the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Kapelye, Andy Statman, and later Brave Old World and The Klezmatics rebuilt the music, while clarinettist Giora Feidman carried it in Israel and Europe. Violinist Itzhak Perlman's project In the Fiddler's House (1995) brought it to classical audiences, and from the 1990s composer John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series on his Tzadik label pushed it into avant-garde jazz.

Klezmer's harmonic character comes from a small family of modes, many related to the prayer modes of the synagogue:

• Freygish (also called Ahava Rabboh) — equivalent to the Phrygian dominant scale: a flattened second and a raised third, producing the sound most listeners think of as "Jewish". The ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski estimated that roughly a quarter of the klezmer music he collected was in freygish.
• Mi sheberakh (altered or "Ukrainian" Dorian) — a minor mode with a raised fourth, closely related to freygish.
• Adonoy molokh and mogen ovos — modes resembling the Mixolydian and natural minor, with their own characteristic turns.

Ornamentation is what makes klezmer sound like speech or weeping. Players use the krekhts (a sob or catch in the note), kvetsh (a squeezed, bent pitch), trills, slides and grace notes, drawn directly from the vocal style of the cantor. A good klezmer clarinettist or violinist is judged as much by these inflections as by speed.

Klezmer does not run at a single tempo. Each dance has its own rhythm and feel:

Klezmer bands vary in size from three players to large brass-heavy ensembles:

• Violin — the original lead instrument of the European kapelye, with a second violin or sekund playing rhythmic chords.
• Clarinet — the lead instrument of much American klezmer, especially in the C and E-flat sizes; its ability to laugh, cry and slide made it the voice of the music.
• Tsimbl — the Jewish hammered dulcimer, important in older European bands and revived by modern players.
• Bass — double bass or cello in the older string bands, later tuba in brass-driven bands.
• Accordion — common in 20th-century bands, providing harmony and rhythm.
• Brass — trumpet, trombone and baritone horn, heard in American recordings and in larger dance bands.
• Drums — a bass drum topped with a cymbal (poyk), later a full drum kit.
• Piano — common in American recording studios from the 1920s.

Early recordings sound thin and bright by modern standards, but they are the reason the style survived: revival musicians learned from them note by note.

• Old-world klezmer — the European string-band style reconstructed by groups such as Budowitz, using violin, tsimbl and period instruments.
• American klezmer — the clarinet-led, brass-inflected dance-band style of 1910s–1930s New York, dominated by the bulgar.
• Revival klezmer — the 1970s–80s rebuilding of the repertoire from records and surviving players.
• New Jewish music — from the 1990s, bands such as The Klezmatics added original songs, political lyrics and influences from rock, jazz and world music.
• Radical Jewish Culture — John Zorn's Masada project and the Tzadik catalogue, combining Jewish modes with free jazz.
• Yiddish theatre and song — the vocal sister tradition; "Bei Mir Bistu Shein", written for the Yiddish stage, became a swing hit for the Andrews Sisters in 1937.
• Hasidic niggun — wordless devotional melodies that share modes and phrasing with klezmer.
• Neighbouring dance musics — Romanian, Moldavian and Ukrainian folk dance, and the wider Central and Eastern European dance-band world of the polka, which shares its two-beat bounce.

Where to start:

• Naftule Brandwein — the wild, brilliant clarinettist of 1920s New York.
• Dave Tarras — the polished master clarinettist whose playing linked the old world to the revival.
• Abe Schwartz and Harry Kandel — bandleaders whose orchestras recorded much of the American repertoire.
• The Klezmorim — the Berkeley band that helped start the revival in the 1970s.
• Klezmer Conservatory Band — the Boston ensemble founded by Hankus Netsky, central to the revival.
• Andy Statman — clarinettist and mandolinist who studied with Dave Tarras.
• The Klezmatics — the New York band that turned klezmer into a contemporary song-and-dance music.
• Giora Feidman — the clarinettist who popularised klezmer in Israel and Europe.
• Itzhak Perlman — In the Fiddler's House (1995), recorded with leading revival bands.
• John Zorn — Masada and the Radical Jewish Culture series.

Start with a Dave Tarras bulgar, then a Klezmatics album, then a doina into freylekhs from any revival band to hear how a slow lament explodes into a dance.

Klezmer and jazz grew up side by side in early 20th-century American cities, often among the same musicians. Jewish clarinettists and trumpeters moved between wedding bands and swing orchestras, and klezmer phrases surfaced in swing hits of the late 1930s. The clarinet's prominence in both scenes makes them easy to confuse on a quick listen.

The differences are structural. Jazz improvises over cycles of chord changes with a swung rhythm; klezmer moves within modes, often over a drone-like or simple harmony, plays dance rhythms such as the bulgar and freylekhs with a straight or lilting feel, and treats ornament as the main expressive device. Modern bands play across the line freely, but the two traditions keep their own grammar. Stage music is a third case: Yiddish theatre songs and musical theatre scores such as Fiddler on the Roof borrow the sound of klezmer while remaining composed theatre music.

An audio model can hear several of klezmer's markers: a bright clarinet or violin lead with sobbing bends and slides, accordion and brass, a bouncing oom-pah bass, and the distinctive augmented-second interval of freygish. Fast bulgars and freylekhs have a recognisable two-beat drive.

The problem is that each of these features belongs to other genres too. A clarinet lead points toward early jazz and swing, an accordion and two-beat bass toward Central European folk and polka, and the freygish interval toward Middle Eastern and Balkan music. What makes a tune klezmer — its repertoire, its ornament style, its role at a Jewish wedding — is a cultural combination rather than a single sound. Try a clip in the Genre AI music genre detector, and read why songs often get more than one genre label.

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