Jewish immigration
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Klezmorim at a Ukrainian wedding
The mass immigration of Jewish people to the United States, starting in 1880 and lasting for about four decades played a key role in klezmer’s reformation. As a great number of Jewish people immigrated to North America and assimilated to the American society after the Second World War, encountering new kinds of music genres, klezmer could not possibly maintain its authenticity, which might have triggered disapproval from European Jews, who were sticking to the original, untouched klezmer heritage. However, if it hadn’t been for the immigrating pioneers like Harry Kandel, Lt. Joseph Frankel, Dave Tarras or Shloimke Beckerman, it is likely that klezmer wouldn’t have possibly survived the challenging period. Thanks to the technical frontiers like commercial recording, the first klezmer records were made around the forties. The likes of Dave Tarras made the genre virtuoso, and by the 70’s, klezmer had gone through a great revival, combining its authentic features with classical, pop, and of course, jazz elements. The United States, therefore, became the scene where klezmer obtained its final, current form.
Although certain features of American klezmer compound from Dixieland jazz, the early New Orleans genre of the 20th century, it is important to distinguish between the two. The evolving and continuous changing of jazz in history was much greater, while, even though it went through a significant change, klezmer is a more constant, static form. The two bear mutual attributes; several Jewish melodies are basis of popular jazz songs. Just to mention two examples, Maxwell Street Band and Andy Statman's Hassidic Jazz both represent a mixture of traditional Jewish music and jazz, born after the revival of the seventies.
Dave Tarras