Naftule Brandwein
1884–1963
The self-styled “King of the Klezmer (כּלי־זמר) Clarinet” — a wild, ecstatic Galician-born virtuoso whose 1920s New York recordings are still the reference point for klezmer clarinet a century later.
was born in 1884 in Przemyślany, in Austro-Hungarian Galicia (now Ukraine), into a klezmer dynasty — his father Peysekhe was a fiddler and badkhn (באַדחן) (wedding jester), and nearly all of his many brothers played. He emigrated to New York in 1909, settling on the Lower East Side, and through the 1920s recorded prolifically for Victor and Columbia, defining the hot, ornament-dense, seemingly improvised solo style of American klezmer clarinet. He was a legendary showman — the stories say he sometimes played with his back to the audience so rival clarinetists couldn't steal his fingerings. Hard living wound his career down; after a last 1941 session under the anglicized nickname “Nifty,” he faded from view, and by his death in 1963 he was known mainly to insiders. The 1970s revival restored him to the center of the canon.