Where did klezmer come from?

A musician before it was a music

For most of its history, klezmer (כּלי־זמר) named a person, not a genre. The Yiddish word comes from the Hebrew kley zemer (כלי זמר) — “vessels of song,” the instruments themselves — and by extension the professional who played them (plural klezmorim (כּלי־זמרים)).^[2] From the later sixteenth century, Jewish musicians in Bohemia and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth organized into guilds like other tradesmen, and the new word carried the new respectability.^[1]

Calling the music “klezmer” is startlingly recent — Britannica dates the common usage to about 1980, when the revival needed a name for what it was reviving.^[2] The musicians themselves would have said they played yidishe muzik (ייִדישע מוזיק) — freylekhs (פֿריילעכס) , bulgars (bulgar), and shers (שער) for weddings. What they meant by that is the story of this page.

Predecessors: the synagogue, the nigun, and the neighbors’ dances

Klezmer did not spring from nowhere, and it was never sealed off from the music around it. Its oldest layer is sacred and vocal: the chant of the synagogue, whose prayer modes the wedding bands carried into instrumental music. The most famous of them is called Ahava Rabbah (אהבה רבה) after the prayer sung in it — the same scale klezmorim knew in Yiddish as freygish (פֿרייגיש).^[4] Next to the liturgy sat the Hasidic nigun (ניגון) — wordless, repeating melodies sung to reach ecstasy — a living reservoir of tunes that instrumentalists drew on freely.^[1]

The secular layer came from the neighbors. In the towns of Moldova, Ukraine, and Galicia, Jewish musicians worked alongside — often in the same bands as — the Rom lautari (lăutari), and the dance repertoire shows it: the hora (horă) , the sirba (sârbă), the bulgar, and the free-time doina (doină) all came into klezmer from Romanian and Ottoman-era practice and were remade in a Jewish voice.^[3]

So the honest genealogy names several streams — cantorial voice, Hasidic song, and the dance music of Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Greek-Ottoman neighbors — carried by professional musicians and remade, not imported whole. (The blues tells a structurally similar story of practices remade under new conditions; the two histories read well side by side.) Still, the YIVO Encyclopedia is careful on what makes this music its own: a distinctive Jewish instrumental repertoire, style, and system of genres is documented only in Eastern Europe, with derivatives in America and Israel.^[1]

The world it lived in: the Pale, the wedding, the badkhn

The heartland of this music was the Pale of Settlement — the western provinces of the Russian Empire where most Jews were required to live — plus Austro-Hungarian Galicia and the Romanian lands. Its stage was the wedding: a multi-day sequence of ritual moments, each with its own music — processionals to and from the ceremony, laments to seat the bride, listening tunes at the table, and dance after dance.^[1] The band (kapelye (קאַפּעליע) ) worked alongside the badkhn (באַדחן) , the wedding jester whose improvised rhymes could tip a room from laughter into tears — the emotional double-helix the instruments learned to imitate.

The older bands were led by the fiddle, with the tsimbl (צימבל) (hammered dulcimer) at their heart; the clarinet is a relative latecomer that rose through the nineteenth century and conquered in America.^[5] Klezmer families passed the trade down like any guild craft — both of the American era’s great clarinetists, below, were born into multi-generation klezmer dynasties.^[6]

The sound: freygish, the krechtz, and tunes that dance

Two things make a klezmer tune recognizable in a bar or two. The first is pitch: melodies built on modes like freygish (פֿרייגיש), whose flattened second and major third leave the dramatic leap of an augmented second between them. The freygish scale is what most ears mean by “the Jewish scale,” though the same notes serve flamenco and the Arabic maqam Hijaz — a scale is a meeting place, not a passport.^[4]

The second is the voice in the instrument. Klezmer playing imitates a singer — more precisely a cantor — with slides, bent notes, and above all the krechtz (קרעכץ) , the little sobbing catch on the tail of a note. In the doina (doină), the beat stops entirely while a solo instrument laments over a drone, then breaks into a dance tune — weeping and dancing in a single breath. The dance forms themselves are a small vocabulary worth knowing: the freylekhs and sher of the old country, the khosidl (חסידל) , the slow-spinning hora, and the bulgar, the Bessarabian import that conquered America.^[3] Over a hundred of these tunes are playable in our Piano Roll library.

Steerage to Second Avenue: klezmer in America

Between 1881 and 1924, some two million Jews left Eastern Europe for America, klezmorim among them. In New York the music found new rooms — catering halls, Second Avenue’s Yiddish theaters — and a new machine: the record industry.^[5] Columbia hired the Romanian-born violinist Abe Schwartz around 1917 to lead its Jewish sessions and scout talent, and his house orchestras put the immigrant repertoire on 78rpm shellac largely as it was played — vernacular, spontaneous, without written arrangements.

The era’s two defining soloists were opposites. Naftule Brandwein, born into a Galician klezmer dynasty in 1884, played like a man possessed — a hot, ornament-drenched style the stories say he guarded by playing with his back to the audience so rivals couldn’t copy his fingerings.^[6] His 1923 recording of “Heyser Bulgar” is still the reference version of one of the best-known tunes in the repertoire. Dave Tarras, from a Podolian klezmer family, was his temperamental opposite — poised, lyrical, impeccably in tune — and became the most recorded klezmer musician in America.^[5] The National Endowment for the Arts, honoring Tarras decades later, caught the whole aesthetic in one sentence:

The crossover: Yiddish swing

In late 1937, the music jumped the fence. A Yiddish theater song that had flopped with its show in 1932 — Sholom Secunda’s “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” — was rediscovered in Harlem, of all places:

Cahn wrote English lyrics, the Andrews Sisters cut it as a B-side, and it became one of the biggest hits in the country — while Secunda, who had sold the rights for $30, watched from Second Avenue.^[8] The klezmer instrumental repertoire crossed over too: trumpeter Ziggy Elman, a klezmer player inside Benny Goodman’s band, took “Der shtiler bulgar” — first recorded by Abe Schwartz’s orchestra in 1918 — and swung it; with Johnny Mercer’s lyrics it became the 1939 #1 hit “And the Angels Sing.”^[10] For a moment, a Bessarabian wedding dance sat on top of the American charts.

A quieter crossing came a generation later. Secunda and Aaron Zeitlin’s “Dona Dona”, written for the 1940–41 Esterke at the Yiddish Art Theatre, reached English in the folk revival: Joan Baez recorded it on her 1960 debut, and a Yiddish theater calf became a freedom song.^[11] The later lives — English folk rooms, still both languages in the air — are on History & versions of Dona Dona.

Silence, and the revival

Then, for a generation, the music nearly vanished. In America the children of the immigrants wanted American music at their weddings; in Europe the Holocaust murdered the communities — and most of the musicians — that had carried the tradition.^[12] By the 1960s Brandwein was dead and forgotten outside a circle of insiders, and Tarras was semi-retired in Brooklyn.

The revival came from record collections. In Berkeley in 1975, Lev Liberman and David Skuse founded The Klezmorim after digging into a trove of 78s at the Judah Magnes Museum.^[13] In New York, mandolinist Andy Statman and scholar Walter Zev Feldman sought out the elderly Dave Tarras, who agreed to teach; Feldman marks their 1978 concert with Tarras as the revival’s true beginning.^[12] Henry Sapoznik — a banjo player who realized his own tradition had a repertoire too — founded the band Kapelye in 1979, reissued the old 78s from YIVO’s collection, and in 1985 started KlezKamp, the annual gathering that turned a rescue operation into a living scene.^[14] It was this generation that settled on “klezmer” as the music’s name.^[2]

The other homecoming: klezmer in Israel

Not every klezmer sailed for New York. Others went to Mandatory Palestine and, after 1948, to the new State of Israel, and the wedding repertoire went with them — into a culture set on forging a new Hebrew self. Yiddish, the language klezmorim had always named their music in, was widely felt to be the sound of the very exile the young state was trying to leave behind. The historian Rachel Rojanski cautions against the legend of an outright ban: there was never a single decree, and Yiddish culture in fact persisted — a vigorous center grew in Tel Aviv — but it lived under an official atmosphere that always put Hebrew first, and its fortunes rose and fell with the politics of the day.^[15]

As in America, the music returned as cherished heritage. The Argentine-born clarinetist Giora Feidman — a fourth-generation klezmer whose family had fled the pogroms of Bessarabian Chișinău — played nearly two decades in the Israel Philharmonic before leaving in the early 1970s to carry klezmer to concert halls the world over as the self-styled “King of Klezmer.”^[16] And since 1988 the Galilean hill town of Safed has given the music a yearly home: every summer its International Klezmer Festival fills the alleys of the Old City — the largest klezmer festival in Israel, and a standing sign that the sound the state once held at arm’s length is now claimed as its own.^[17]

Today klezmer is played on every continent, fused with jazz, punk, and classical music, studied in conservatories — a music that outlived the world that made it and found new rooms to fill. To take its sound apart layer by layer — the modes, the ornaments, the dance grooves — see What is klezmer?.

Quotations are reproduced briefly for commentary and criticism, with attribution and links to the originals. Where a source is public domain it is marked as such; other works are quoted under fair use. Click a song title to play a popular recording in place or open it in the Piano Roll.