Author: Steve Epstein
Date: 2000-12-20 02:38
Feidman is an authentic klezmer player...in his own way. Biographical notes in his CD's allude to his lifelong love of the music. But he brings to it his background of classical clarinet.
If klezmer to you is only the style of music played by Eastern European emigres in the 20's, then you need to listen to Brandwein and Tarras, and later performers like Sid Baeckerman, and of course, Mickey Katz. And you can listen to their proteges, like Margot Leverett of the Mazeltones, whom I understand studied with Baeckerman, and Andy Statman, who studied with Tarras, I think. But if you listen to Statman, will you not wonder if he has been influenced by his own bluegrass mandolin playing? And those 1920's musicians were always going to the other clubs to listen to the black jazz musicians, and vice-versa. Cross pollenation and adaptation have always been the rule. Anyway, most of the klezmorim "assimilated" into jazz by the 30's. So the question is, are you interested in preservationist American 1920's klezmer, or in the broader area of Eastern European music identified with Ashkenazic Jewish culture, or the even broader area of Eastern European folk music identified with many other Eastern European cultures? And let us not leave out the aborted (by the communists) school of Jewish classical music in Leningrad, now revived and expanded upon by the band Brave Old World (which features Kurt Bjorling playing custom-made basset soprano clarinet in C, as well as basset horn).
My own "gig" (purely amateur) is playing in several large open orchestras for American contradancing and "old-time" (whatever that is) squares and circles, for an eclectic crowd here in the Philadelphia area where I live (it's popular all over the US, though, with other eclectic crowds). In other words, I'm playing Irish fiddle tunes, French Canadian reels, southern blue grass, etc...on clarinet (and a bit of sax). Every note I play is untraditional. Have you ever heard of the Irish saxophone? Last week, I created it. And I'm by no means the first, the only, and certainly not the best:).
I realize this was a long answer to your original questions.
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The Ethnic Clarinet
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