10. A Hora Mit Tsibeles - A Hora with Onions
(trad./C.K.E.) 6:22
11. A Yidishe Neshome - A Jewish Soul (Bjorling)
4:42 Prelistening:
The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble:
Kurt Bjorling: clarinet, tsimbl, accordion
Eve Monzingo: clarinet, piano
Joshua Huppert: violin
Deborah Strauss: violin
Alan Ehrich: double bass
Date of release: 10/03/98
total time: 58:50
20-page booklet in English, French and German
Active since 1984, the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble is one of
the oldest of the klezmer music groups in America. The present recording is the
product of thirteen years of performance, experimentation and new composition,
which, as Michal Shapiro writes, "draw out and amplify the unique characteristics
from the core of the klezmer repertoire".
Musicality is the central value of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and it is this
value that they have discovered in the Jewish klezmer repertoire and style. While
many Jewish-American klezmer music groups have subordinated musical taste to ethnic
nostalgia, this ensemble looks to the essence of the musical structures underlying
klezmer music and takes these as the starting point. For that reason they are
both extremely "traditional", reflecting pre-immigration East European Jewish
musical style, and "avant-garde", creating original arrangements and successful
new compositions. The fact that the band is not predominantly Jewish has allowed
them to view the sources of klezmer music objectively without nostalgia or intra-ethnic
polemicizing.
Although klezmer music underwent some developments in America, on the whole life
here in the first half of the twentieth century was not conducive to the preservation
or development of this music, and so it is only by going back to its Old World
sources that a musically coherent picture can be drawn.
To understand the performance of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble contemporary listeners
must realize that in pre-immigration times klezmer music had a dual function,
both as ecstatic dance music and as sophisticated music for listening. In Europe
only the best and most sought-after klezmorim were capable of creating such a
performance. In America little need was felt for this sophisticated style, which
would have competed with other forms of popular and classical music more accessible
to Jews here than they had been in Eastern Europe. American klezmorim were reduced
to playing dance music for the immigrant community, and even before the Second
World War they were losing even this possibility. Few if any of the masters of
the sophisticated klezmer style ever immigrated to America, so the grandchildren
of the immigrants cannot be expected to be familiar with their music today.
The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble has entered the gap and taken this elevated European
klezmer style as the basis for its own performances. They have gone a long way
toward removing klezmer music from the ethnically parochial and into the universal
artistic sphere. For this they deserve and are attracting an increasingly wide
audience among lovers of klezmer music.
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