The Klezmorim, LA, 1986. L to R: Donald Thornton, Chris Leaf, Kevin Linscott, Ben Goldberg, Ken Bergman, Lev Liberman. Photo: Amy Etra

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The Klezmorim

published in Jazz Forum (Warsaw) 99 (Apr 1986)


The Klezmorim described their own music quite well:  “from the wine-cellars of Bucharest, the alleys of Odessa, and the hashish-dens of Constantinople, wandering musicians blended 19th-century Western harmonies and rhythms with ancient Eastern modes to create klezmer music.”  With emigration to America the Yiddish musicians learned to assimilate another music of different sources, yet of a kindred spirit, to which they in turn lent ideas, namely jazz.  But klezmer music largely faded away as the musicians assimilated into American society, and only in the 1970s did a new generation of musicians pick up the thread.

The Klezmorim was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1975 by saxophonist Lev Liberman and violinist David Skuse; clarinetist David Julian Gray was also one of the original members of the band.  It took on its more or less definitive shape of five horns and a percussionist a few years later.  For this interview, conducted in Paris during their first European tour in October 1985, Liberman was joined by tuba player Donald Thornton and percussionist Ken Bergmann.  The other members of the group at that time, besides Gray, were trombonist Kevin Linscott and trumpeter Christopher Leaf.


On your newest album (Notes from Underground, 1984) you even do some old jazz tunes, early pieces by Bechet and Ellington.  This crossover between jazz and klezmer has happened before.

Lev Liberman:  We had always suspected, and recently found out for sure, that Duke Ellington in fact knew klezmer musicians and actually got some musical ideas from them, fragments of tunes which he may have incorporated into his own compositions.  We’d always felt that in some of the Harlem and New Orleans jazz pieces of the 1920s, there were voicings and passages that were very reminiscent of klezmer.  And whether this was an accident or a parallel development or what, we have since found out that it’s actually a case of mutual influence between black jazz and Yiddish klezmer music.

Can we actually trace the rapport between klezmer music and jazz?  Is it a result of klezmer coming to America?

LL:  The rapport existed before that.  The music is very ensemble-oriented and highly improvisational.  It just has intrinsic similarities to jazz, which were in klezmer music before the jazz and the klezmer players ever heard each other.  Once they heard each other, there was probably a faster rate of interchange.  And that is what we recreate on stage, the excitement of different genres melting and influencing each other, and of musicians appearing both in high society and low-life dives, and creating the atmospheres in which all this stuff developed.

Donald Thornton:  They really served the same function, both klezmer music and jazz, as dance music.  It’s really the music of the people.

LL:  And both were often played in the early 20th century on old military band instruments, but with a lot of the musical ideas coming from a much earlier time, possibly even being ideas from vocal music or even just the sounds and the rhythms of daily life.

They were also both musics that developed within a dominant culture that was not exactly their own.

LL:  Yes.  And which borrowed a lot from that dominant culture, but which took some of its conventions and twisted them inside out.  It gives the music a kind of satirical or mocking flavor, which appeals to us.

Can we talk about the role of improvisation in klezmer music?  For instance, in New Orleans music it seems there is more ensemble improvising, whereas in klezmer perhaps it’s more one instrument, usually the clarinet, that leads in the improvising.

Ken Bergmann:  Everything you hear on the record is improvised, all the background parts, the tuba part, everything.

DT:  Usually there is just one person playing lead but everyone else is responding to that, rather than everybody having melodic improvisation all the time.  It’s more rhythmic.

LL:  For the most part what we go in with is a structure.  We just rehearse a lot, so we’re used to playing with each other and that gives us the freedom to change it around.  What’s partly interesting about the style is that you can take what’s usually thought of as a rhythmic instrument, like the tuba, and by simply doing unusual things with the rest of the band, you can bring the tuba to prominence as a lead melodic instrument.  And you can take what’s thought of as a melodic instrument, like the clarinet, and put it in the rhythm section.  That’s something we do a lot of.  Donald has pointed out on other occasions that a lot of the music that turns us on, that we want to play, was orchestrated for or played by bands of 10 or 15 or 20 people.  And we want to get all that music in, but there’s only six of us.  So, we’ve always tried to sound like a much larger band and this requires that everybody has to do everything, and everybody has to make everyone else be able to use a lot of different instrumental textures.  So we’re always thinking of how we can break up the rhythm, how we can create unusual combinations of sound.

This involves the arranging essentially.

LL:  Right.  Which we do collectively.

Richard Foster (manager):  It’s also what makes the stage shows look and sound like a Marx Brothers movie.

LL:  Right.  Because everything that’s happening musically is sort of doubled visually, in that we’re moving every place at once.

KB:  The only difference between klezmer and jazz to me, playing both as I do, is that klezmer uses slightly different rhythms and different modes than jazz.

LL:  Yeah, the two genres are not interchangeable, but they’re very intimately connected.  And that’s kind of an unknown story of music which we have brought out and made apparent.  Now people can talk about the influence that klezmer had on jazz, or the klezmer players who sort of grew into jazz players.  Certainly jazz is largely a style created by black people in America, but it attracted a lot of other players too.

Particularly Joseph Cherniavsky and his Yiddish-American Jazz Band, I would suppose.  What was his importance, was he at the forefront of this crossover?

LL:  He had a unique band.  It was kind of to klezmer what Paul Whiteman was to jazz.  A little too formally structured but very big and grandiose, and incorporating all the classical concepts, jazz concepts and klezmer.

DT:  They supposedly did light classics in addition to klezmer.

LL:  We met Cherniavsky's son in Los Angeles recently, who said that when Cherniavsky came over to America, he had three other musicians with him who had been performing in Europe and came over at the same time.  They were a classical chamber group, and once they got here the band got bigger, they branched out.  They already knew klezmer music, so they incorporated that.  They had these enormous stage shows, a very large orchestra which made recordings and did concerts.  And which contained players who could read music and some that couldn’t. Actually, two of the great klezmer clarinetists, Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwine, both worked for Cherniavsky.  And Cherniavsky was a buddy of both Duke Ellington and Sergei Prokofiev, and supposedly provided Prokofiev with the klezmer melodies that were used in the Overture on Jewish Themes.  Klezmer must have influenced not only Prokofiev but some other composers like Gershwin and Kurt Weill.

Do you see what The Klezmorim is doing, and what other klezmer bands are doing now, as a revival or as a continuation?

LL:  We don’t see ourselves as part of a movement.  We’re just a band.  We are the first band to have gotten interested in klezmer music and to have attempted to play it, and I think we’ve always been at the forefront.  We’re the only klezmer band that works professionally and does it full time.  And we’ve probably brought the music to a much wider audience than had ever heard it in the first place.  Most of what the other bands call klezmer music, in fact isn’t.  It’s just different genres.  They think the term klezmer is so loose and all encompassing that they can get away with whatever they already happen to know.  Also, klezmer music is instrumental music, it’s not vocal.

When The Klezmorin was founded, did you have more of a traditionalist attitude at the beginning?

LL:  To me, the important thing about the music is not that it’s old.  To everyone who plays it or hears it now, it’s new.  I think it’s one of the hippest, most interesting, most exotic things one can do.  And in the US, where we’ve done 40 tours now, we find that in a lot of places we’re attracting a young, avant-garde type of audience.

How old is klezmer music?  It’s said to go as far back as the Middle Ages.

LL:  I’ve heard the earliest date being placed somewhere in the 16th century.  Frankly, we don’t know a damn thing about what it sounded like in the 16th century, so we don’t even try.  Mostly our sound ranges between about 1880 and 1930, with the emphasis on the 1920s.  But it’s sort of misleading to talk about the historical aspect.  It’s a music you can get into without any historical interest whatsoever and just listen to and enjoy.  Some of the musical concepts that we’re using in our band are probably very old.  And that’s part of what makes it interesting, using 19th and 20th century musical instruments to express ideas that perhaps come from entirely different times and places.  But again, to a contemporary listener that’s just part of the miscellaneous exotic fascination.  It’s like we’re breaking the rules.  And it’s true, we’ve had to learn a whole different rulebook of how to play music.  Even the fingerings and how you blow through a horn; you can do it the normal way and you can use that some of the time in klezmer, but you also have all these other ways of doing it that you call on to give the music its own flavor.  The way the ensemble is put together, it has a superficial similarity with a New Orleans jazz band.  But there are also a lot of differences.  We all come from different musical backgrounds.  We’ve had to forget a lot of what we know in order to play this.

Do you notate the music much?

DT:  We write out some lead sheets so that we play the melody in a consistent way, but it’s very difficult to write the little ghost notes that go in between the notes in the melody.

LL:  One of the things you have to learn in this music is that you finger notes that you don’t actually play.  What you’re creating, much as a synthesizer player does, is an envelope for the sound.  So that even if the tone-producing mechanism, in this case your air, cuts off before you get to that point, still you have to go through these certain physical moves because they influence how you get to the next note or how you finish up the previous note.  And there’s so much of that in klezmer.  You could easily play about a third again as much music as anybody actually hears you playing.  And if you don’t do it that way, it doesn’t sound right.

All of which you essentially picked up from hearing the older musicians.

LL:  The old-time klezmer musicians were such amazing virtuosos that I can’t think of anybody who’s ever been better.  We have the benefit of being able to stand on the shoulders of giants and to assimilate every evidence we have of everything they did.

DT:   The only source that we really have is old records.

LL:  Even the sources that we’ve had around for years reveal more information on repeated listening.  It’s like the better you get at playing the music, the better your mind gets at understanding what is going on in it.  And you hear things that were literally invisible to you before.

DT:   The people from one generation before us didn’t want to play this music, or if they had experience playing the music, they wouldn’t admit to it.  Lev had an interview with a guy who was apparently an old klezmer player, but this guy didn’t want to talk about it at all.  He just wanted to talk about all the classical work he did.  It was something you wouldn’t want to admit to, being a klezmer.

LL:  Of course, that’s part of what creates its appeal.  To us that’s kind of romantic and fun, being so disreputable and raunchy.

Have you met any of the old masters, such as Dave Tarras?

LL:  We jammed with him.  It was the first time in forty years that he’d played some of the arrangements that he’d recorded back then.  Since 1930 or so, he’s never worked with musicians who were klezmers.  He’s played with a lot of corny commercial bands or incompetent ensembles.  The music fell on hard times after 1930, and we do claim the credit for bringing it back.  And it’s something that has excited musicians not only in the folk field, but also among jazz and classical and rock musicians.

Have you jammed much with musicians working in other genres?

DT:  We played at a folk festival in Cologne, and on the bill was a Bavarian band.  There was a big beer party for everybody involved in the festival, and the Bavarian band started playing and so we all jumped in and started playing with them.  They got off on it, we were playing some of their tunes, they were playing our tunes.

LL:  And then we all started playing some jazz and classical music together, it was wonderful.

KB:  And then the Swiss yodeler would join in.  There was also a Greek guitar group.  It was probably the world’s strangest jam session.

It’s interesting that in jazz circles people talk about “world music,” like in Don Cherry or Oregon.  But klezmer music is by its essence very much a world music.

LL:  That’s true, and as I say we regard ourselves as being in the same bag as all the most innovative musicians of every genre.  We feel that our impact on the cultural scene is of the same order.

Have you spoken much with older musicians besides Tarras?

LL:  I’ve met and interviewed some.  Not any except for Tarras who were big names, known for recordings.  But I’ve talked to people who traveled through Europe and who played in America.  The story is very often the same.  They tell consistent stories about how the musicians lived, how they were low lives, what they played everywhere all the time, how great the music was.  But it was so socially downscale that in every case they went on to play pop music or jazz or classical.   That, to them, is something more to be proud of.  I try to let them know that I respect them enormously for having played klezmer.  It’s hard for them to believe.

DT:  They couldn’t make a living playing klezmer music.  That was part of the tradition of the klezmer anyway, that wherever you were you sort of played that kind of music, whatever the people wanted to hear, so you could make a living.

LL:  They’d pay you in vodka, you didn’t make money, you know, they’d just give you food!

Has klezmer music ever been used in the theater much?

KB:  In a Chekhov play, he specified klezmer music to accompany the play.

LL:  Right, in The Cherry Orchard the script calls for a klezmer band to be performing for these provincial landowners.  We were asked to record a musical soundtrack for the Berkeley Repertory
Theater production of The Cherry Orchard, but it wasn’t until after we were asked to do the gig that we and the director discovered that in fact that was exactly what Chekhov had specified in the first place.  And it probably has never been done in many decades, or that there was even a klezmer band around to perform in the play.

Within the context of the play, it was also a part of the tradition for klezmer bands to play for non-Jewish audiences.

LL:  Which they did most of the time, because that’s where the work was and the money was.  There are many stories of klezmer bands playing in spas and at the upper class hotels, playing for the Polish aristocracy.  I met a klezmer musician, a woman, who said that she and her family band had played for the czar.  They were Romanian but they traveled a great deal in Russia, usually dressed up as gypsies.  They danced and played in the streets, with tambourines, and sold postcards of themselves.

Listening to the new album, I hear traces of vaudeville and the circus as well.  Yet it’s still klezmer music, isn’t it?

LL:  Sure, because klezmer music had an influence on those forms.  I mean, that’s the point, the musicians weren’t sitting off in a corner somewhere.  They were in the circus, they were in military bands, they led municipal orchestras, they composed for the theater.  That was going on for hundreds of years.  There isn’t that much documentary evidence of it until you get to the turn of the century, where a few important musicians were written about, and until you get to the age of recording.  We have about a 20-year span there to work with, 1910-1930.  That’s how we know how they did it.  But when you hear . . . my God, these things pop up.  In the score for The Blue Angel, the film with Marlene Dietrich.  The score is by Friedrich Hollander.  I don’t think anybody’s asserted that he was a klezmer but on the other hand there are scenes in that movie where they have the night club band playing off stage and what they’re doing is clearly influenced by klezmer music.  Some of the other members of the band know of a W. C. Fields movie in which the soundtrack contains some klezmer music.  There were a lot of Betty Boop cartoons that had quotations from klezmer tunes.

But how do you know this, what is it you’re identifying as pieces of klezmer music?  Is it the sounds, is it the ways of playing, is it the melodies?

LL:  It’s all that.

DT:  Yeah, sometimes it’s a direct quotation of a tune.  Other times, it’s just a characteristic sound.

LL:  We trust our judgment, because in those cases where we’ve simply guessed at this, we’ve usually later found out that our hypotheses were correct.  That, yes, such a person was in such a place at such a time, heard such a band and knew such a musician.