Search Results

Klezmer, the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Although it had declined in popularity by the middle of the twentieth century, this lively music is now enjoying recognition among music fans of all stripes. Today, klezmer flourishes in the United States and abroad in world music and accompanies Jewish celebrations. The chapters this volume investigate American klezmer: its roots, its evolution, and its spirited revitalization. Contributors to the book include every kind of authority on the subject—from academics to leading musicians—and they offer a wide range of perspectives on the musical, social, and cultural history of klezmer in American life. The first half of this volume concentrates on the early history of klezmer, using folkloric sources, records of early musicians unions, and interviews with the last of the immigrant musicians. The second part of the book examines the klezmer “revival” that began in the 1970s. Several of these chapters were written by the leaders of this movement, or draw on interviews with them, and give firsthand accounts of how klezmer is transmitted and how its practitioners maintain a balance between preservation and innovation.

This book tells the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and cultural sources of New Orleans jazz, the book provides a balanced assessment of the role played by all three of the city’s musical lineages—African Americans, whites, and Creoles—in jazz’s formative years. It also maps the inroads blazed by the city’s Italian immigrant musicians, who left their own imprint on the emerging styles. The study is based on the author’s own interviews, begun in the 1950s, on the extensive material gathered by the Oral History Project in New Orleans, on the recent scholarship of a new generation of writers, and on an exhaustive examination of related newspaper files from the jazz era. The book extends the study area of the author’s earlier book Jazz: New Orleans, 1885–1957, and breaks new ground with its in-depth discussion of the earliest New Orleans recordings. It brings the story up to the present, describing the worldwide interest in the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the exciting resurgence of the brass bands of the last decades. The book discusses the renewed concern over New Orleans’s musical heritage, which is at great risk after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters.