Written by Jeff Tamarkin

In the rich and colorful Yiddish language there are expressions that vividly convey virtually any emotion or action. One such phrase is farshafn a sakh freyd un fargenign, which means to give much joy and pleasure. Farshafn a sakh freyd un fargenign perfectly encapsulates the happiness that the Klezmatics have delivered to the passionate millions who have discovered their music since the band’s formation more than 30 years ago. In that time, the Klezmatics have raised the bar for Eastern European Jewish music, made aesthetically, politically and musically interesting recordings, inspired future generations, created a large body of work that is enduring, and helped to change the face of contemporary Yiddish culture. Not bad for a bunch of Americans who each came to klezmer music almost by accident!

Since their emergence, the Klezmatics, often called a “Jewish roots band,” have led a popular revival of this ages-old, nearly forgotten art form that, in its first incarnations, flourished at Jewish weddings and other joyous occasions. They have performed in more than 20 countries and released 11 albums to date—most recently the album Apikorsim (Heretics), produced by Danny Blume (who helped the band win a Grammy in 2006) and the first of the band’s albums to feature only the 6 members. They have also recently served as the subject of a feature-length documentary film, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

During their third-of-a-century existence they have collaborated with such brilliant artists as violinist Itzhak Perlman, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner and Israeli vocal icon Chava Alberstein. They’ve also worked with everyone from folk singers Theodore Bikel and Arlo Guthrie to poet Allen Ginsberg, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, New York downtown scene fixtures John Zorn and Marc Ribot, and pop singer Neil Sedaka.

The Klezmatics have appeared on TV programs as diverse as Late Night with David Letterman and Sex and the City, and have also guested on numerous radio programs, including the BBC’s John Peel Show and NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. They’ve recorded two Yiddish dance standards with klezmer clarinet legend Ray Musiker for the album Klezmer Music: A Marriage of Heaven and Earth, Klezmaticized the Jamaican ska rhythm for a cover of the classic “Do the Ska (KlezSkaLypso)” on the Skatalites tribute CD Freedom Sounds and written music for the Pilobolus Dance Theatre’s Davenen (which premiered at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center). Their music was also incorporated into a new work by choreographer Twyla Tharp in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Martha Graham’s birth. Regardless of what they undertake, their creations bear the unmistakable stamp of the Klezmatics.

Today, with three original members—Lorin Sklamberg (lead vocals, accordion, guitar, piano), Frank London (trumpet, keyboards, vocals) and Paul Morrissett (bass, tsimbl, vocals)—still on board, alongside longtime members Matt Darriau (kaval, clarinet, saxophone, vocals) and Lisa Gutkin (violin, vocals), the Klezmatics are without a doubt the most successful proponents of klezmer music in the world.

As with any world music form, klezmer—with songs sung mainly in Yiddish—is easily appreciated on its own terms but it makes an even deeper impression with some orientation and knowledge of its roots and function. The Klezmatics’ klezmer is rooted in but is not a strictly traditional variety of the genre. Nor is it an avant-garde mutant form of the music. Rather it is a comfortable hybrid that appeals equally to those with no previous exposure to the music and those already familiar with it. The Klezmatics have brought the small-group klezmer style of the 1930s and ’40s into the modern world by incorporating elements of numerous other styles, updating its lyrical outlook and injecting it with plenty of downtown chutzpah. A Klezmatics song might take the form of a sober, florid, evocative ballad or it might aspire to serve as nothing more than joyous, danceable Jewish party music. Its richness and breadth is what makes the Klezmatics’ music such a gift.

At times—most notably on their Grammy-winning 2006 album Wonder Wheel, on which they set a dozen previously unsung Woody Guthrie lyrics to music—they’ve almost diverged from klezmer altogether. In every undertaking, the musicians’ personalities and experiences shine through, resulting in a sound that, ultimately, is wholly their own. One sharp observer has dubbed it—and he wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek—“Heavy Yiddish.”

The Klezmatics are about connections. For those within the Jewish Diaspora, especially, they provide a bridge to a culture that, in many ways, has long been threatened with extinction. “People are quite detached from their Jewish roots,” says Gutkin, who admits that, to many modern listeners, early klezmer “was old people’s music, and it was too schmaltzy.” She adds, “Very few families have kept the cooking traditions and even fewer have a connection to the music. The Klezmatics fill an incredible void for these people. They have memories of ‘Jewishness’ from their parents or grandparents, but they have little that is relevant to their present lives. Because of the more contemporary elements of our style they, and even their children, are brought closer to those old sounds, and what might have once produced scorn makes them happy. We are accessible, we are current, and yet we are a reference to the past.”

“Yiddish culture as it existed in Eastern Europe can never be revived as it was,” says Sklamberg. “Luckily, enough of the culture has been preserved in books, on recordings and by older mentors to have allowed us to pick up the thread and be a part of our tradition, even if it has evolved into something new and different.”

Musically, he adds, klezmer shares enough in common with music of other cultures that it can easily be adapted to suit the artistic sensibilities of a contemporary world. “The motor that drives the rhythm of Yiddish dance music is the tension between a straightforward, steady pulse and a syncopated pulse, similar to the ‘clave’ in Latin music or the Arabic çiftetelli,” he says. “It is what has enabled the klezmer repertoire to encompass both traditional Jewish modal tunes and tunes from surrounding non-Jewish East European traditions.”

“Yiddish rhythms are very grounded and earthy and the dancing reflects the music,” says Gutkin. “There are other folk styles where the emphasis seems to be for the dancers to lift off the ground, but aside from the few dances that mimic some of the flashier Russian dances, Jewish dancing keeps the feet closer to the ground.”

“Klezmer, when played with the proper ornamentation and rhythmic expression,” adds London, “is the unique sound of East European Jewishness. It has the power to evoke a feeling of other-worldliness, of being there and then, of nostalgia for a time and place that we never knew. Tradition is not static or fixed in time and place; it is a continuum. It is impossible to separate traditional music from the traditional function that it played in its traditional cultural context. Originally, this music was functional, used at community events, predominantly weddings but also in other religious and social contexts, and klezmer in the concert hall was once an oxymoron. Klezmer performed outside the Jewish community was preposterous. But these are now largely the predominant venues or contexts for klezmer. The Klezmatics are in the klezmer tradition, and a very important post-war exemplar of that tradition, although we often venture into other musical territories.”

“It’s marvelous music,” adds Morrissett about klezmer. “It has everything you want, ethnically, and yet it’s so intertwined with American culture. You can stretch it as far as you want. Everybody defines it in a slightly different way. When I joined I figured we were going to play this ultra-traditional music and wear outfits like we’re from the shtetl [a small Jewish village]. But we didn’t. We wanted to make sure that we were part of a living tradition, and living traditions change; they don’t stay in a pickled form. I’m still learning more about this music to this day.”

Whether what the Klezmatics do qualifies as bona fide traditional music or “in the tradition,” one incontestable truth is that a listener need not subscribe to the Jewish faith to embrace what’s been called Yiddish soul music. “There’s a slight exoticism that people hear in us, and a little romance with the Jewishisms that come through our music,” says Gutkin, “not unlike the songs on St. Patrick’s Day that make everyone feel Irish.”

It all started for the Klezmatics in 1985, with an advertisement for klezmer musicians placed in New York’s Village Voice by a San Francisco clarinetist named Rob Chavez. Frank London was among those answering the ad, and he brought in Lorin Sklamberg, whom London had known only as a Balkan accordionist, not as a singer with an interest in Jewish music.

London had arrived at klezmer as a result of his natural hunger for multiple musical styles from around the world. “In 1980 I was a student of Afro-American music and Third Stream Music at New England Conservatory,” he says. “At the time, I devoured every possible music I could: salsa, Haitian, free improvisation, gradual process, Balkan, etc. I was invited to be part of an NEC Jewish music concert, and a group was put together to play three songs. After that concert, the ensemble became the Klezmer Conservatory Band, one of the first post-1970 American klezmer groups. I was with them for about seven years and five recordings.

“I was very blown away by klezmer’s funky rhythms, the polyphony, the wild old-world, old-school ornamentation, the particular way it expressed its Jewishness and how the instrumental music was not at all kitschy or corny the way most Jewish music I had heard up to that point was,” he adds. “Klezmer is the intersection and interstitial space between East and West. It has its own integrity, a unique expression of Jewish culture and identity in sound. Klezmer is perhaps the most distinctly defined of all Jewish musics.”

For Sklamberg, klezmer came into the picture “when I was almost 15 years old. I had co-founded a band, Rimonim, with three other Sunday school/Hebrew school classmates at my conservative shul in Alhambra, California. This would have been around the end of 1970, well ahead of what would now be considered the beginning of the klezmer revival. We formed the band mostly to play Israeli folk dance music and made our debut at my sister’s Bas Mitzvah in January 1971. The clarinetist in the group had heard some recordings of the great Yiddish-American clarinetist Dave Tarras on the radio, and played us a reel-to-reel tape he recorded off the air. We managed to get our hands on a compendium of basic klezmer repertoire numbers. That was how I started playing Yiddish tunes. Rimonim survived for seven years as one of the few bands in the Los Angeles area that could provide virtually any combination of Israeli, Yiddish or pop music.

“The other seed that was planted for my future as a bona fide klezmer was that, around 1981, I attended a Balkan singing workshop with the great Yiddish singer Michael Alpert. At the end of the workshop he took me aside and played me a cassette of him performing a song on the seminal Yiddish band Kapelye’s then-unreleased first record. The voice that came out of the tiny speaker sounded more than a bit like me and, in the back of my mind, gave me the idea that this was something that I, too, could do.

“Fast forward to 1986. I had moved to New York because I wanted to live someplace with a more rooted Jewish history and a stronger cultural scene. By that time, I had attended two California universities and had dabbled in Early Music, opera, American folk and pop and Balkan and East European musics, in addition to having danced and sung in four semi-professional ethnic song and dance ensembles. I had studied voice, piano, guitar, accordion, recorder and oud and had served as the cantor at USC’s Hillel House and Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim. It was through this last experience that I became part of a gay-Jewish-radical faerie folk duo, Pilshaw and Sklamberg, and traveled the country for a summer performing house concerts and shows in gay bars. We even recorded a commercially released cassette, Bending the Rules. But the most important thing that came out of that tour was that, when we drove over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, we heard the ‘Art Raymond Simcha’ over radio station WEVD. I decided then and there that I would move to New York. And a little over a year later, that’s what I did.”

By the time the original Klezmatics came together in 1986, Chavez—the musician who had placed the original ad—was gone. The first official lineup of the group—their name a play on the punk rock group the Plasmatics—featured London and Sklamberg, with David Licht on drums, Margot Leverett on clarinet and David Lindsay on bass. It took them a while to find their way.

“We didn’t really set any goals at the outset,” says London, “but we found a way to express ourselves and put our personalities into a traditional musical form. We found a way to circumnavigate what had been a seemingly unbreakable connection between Yiddish music and kitsch or shtick. We were part of a community and generation that put Yiddish music culture back in the contemporary cultural discourse. We did this from a feminist, egalitarian, spiritual perspective.”

“When we first started,” adds Sklamberg, “we generally lifted arrangements and stylistic elements from vintage recordings. It was a big help that Frank had already spent several years as a founding member of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band. All of us were avid students, and I think we eventually grew into the name, but we definitely didn’t represent the gestalt of it when we started!”

They were quick studies, however, absorbing the elements and intent of the music and—simply by virtue of being young, hip New Yorkers during an exciting period for emerging cultures—filtering it through their own sensibilities. “It was a constant study of going back to the sources, the recordings from the giants of the ’10s, ’20s and ’30s,” says Darriau, whose interest in klezmer was an outgrowth of a previous infatuation with Balkan music. “Those musicians played on a technical level, and a passionate level, that is rarely—actually never—heard today.”

The Klezmatics built a devoted following in New York that quickly expanded outward once word spread about this exotic new band that was bringing klezmer back from the abyss. For some fans, the group’s appeal went beyond the music itself. “People have a need for something to hold onto,” says Gutkin. “They want to be part of something. So the Klezmatics are, for many, more than just another world music group. We are their family. In a different era we would be their aunts and uncles and they know what we do needs to be preserved.”

It was time to make a record. A festival in Berlin was booked after the group impressed producer Ben Mandelson (of 3 Mustaphas 3 fame), and that led to a recording contract with the newly established German Piranha Musik label. The Klezmatics’ first album, 1988’s Shvaygn =Toyt (Silence = Death), recorded in the German capital, established that, while it drew from the past, this music was to be no retro exercise—this was a band very much of its time, and not just musically: the Klezmatics, over the years, would also invest themselves in activism that would take many forms, from gay rights to human rights. That debut album’s title translated to Silence=Death, and it was, says London, “both an homage to the slogan of ACT UP [an organization committed to ending the AIDS crisis], and an acknowledgement that if one is silent in the face of injustice then one is siding with the oppressor. It was also a literal statement about the Yiddish language: if no one speaks or sings in it, it will be dead.”

The album received rave reviews for its forthrightness and dynamic reimagining of klezmer. In addition to the then-current lineup of the group, which by that point included Morrissett on bass (replacing Lindsay, who dropped out early on). Morrissett brought to the Klezmatics a familiarity with instruments from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia—he had studied with many masters of these traditions. Originally from Colorado, Morrissett started out playing piano as a child and found his way to his first artistic love, international folk dancing, a passion he shared with Sklamberg. Over the years Morrissett has recorded and performed on numerous instruments including hardanger fiddle, violin, nyckelharpa, gadulka, baritone horn, accordion and tamburitza, but it was his budding proficiency on the bass led him to the Klezmatics—first the upright and later electric.

“I was playing odd instruments for international folk dancing in Colorado in 1979,” says Morrissett. “I went to grad school for a couple of years and then moved to New York City to work for AT&T but started dabbling in different kinds of music, mostly Balkan, then Scandinavian. I was playing in a small Yugoslav dance group, essentially amateur stuff. That was the reason I started playing bass—everybody would change instruments and do music from a slightly different region. Somebody found out I played bass and I became the bass player. The Klezmatics had already started when Lorin asked me to join. I had heard klezmer and was interested in it but I didn’t know anybody who played it. To me it was like a flavor of something I’d been dancing to since I was a kid, the Eastern European modes, so it was not a stretch at all to play.”

The debut album also featured Les Misérables Brass Band, one of whom was saxophonist Darriau, who would soon become a full-fledged member of the Klezmatics. Slowly but surely, the lineup that would continue to grow over the next quarter-century was falling into place.

For their 1991 sophomore album (originally on Piranha and Flying Fish, then later Rounder), with clarinetist David Krakauer having now replaced Leverett, the Klezmatics chose the somewhat audacious, but quite accurate, title Rhythm + Jews. Inspired by their label head to “be themselves,” the group created an exciting recording boasting near rock and roll energy and a gorgeous group vocal blend uncommon to classic klezmer. The release furthered the Klezmatics’ reputation among cognoscenti of the cutting edge. Its songs, arranged by the group, mostly focused lyrically on romantic themes. But although it still largely hewed to traditional klezmer structure, it was obvious to all who heard the album that this group was also marking new trails. As London has said, “The music has to mean something in the contemporary world.”

Rhythm +Jews, he adds, “was and remains a watershed recording. It gives a blueprint for over a dozen ways to approach klezmer and Yiddish music from a traditional foundation while building a modern edifice. Structural experimentation abounded: multiple overlapping rhythms, ostinato improvisation, jazz, Arabic, rock influences. All the voices of our musical identity were tossed into the blender. This album was the first to define our musical identity and distinguish us from other groups.”

One highlight of the record was “Honikzaft (Honey-juice),” with words adapted by Sklamberg from King Solomon’s Song of Songs and music and arrangements provided by London, showing how this Biblical text could be read as a homoerotic love poem. The Rough Guide to World Music later dubbed Rhythm + Jews “one of the greatest klezmer records ever made,” and it reached the top 10 of Billboard Magazine’s world music chart.

In 1994 the Klezmatics recorded music for a film about AIDS activists (Fast Trip, Long Drop). That was followed by a new album, 1995’s Jews With Horns (Piranha and Xenophile, later on Rounder). Said London at the time, commenting on the titles of this and the previous recording, “Those are not just puns. We want the word Jews on the covers of our albums. We believe in being out, honest, clear, who we are. Being quiet never worked for Jews. Politically, it never worked for anyone.”

Throughout the years a wide range of lyrical ideas has inhabited the Klezmatics’ songs; the subjects group members have chosen to write about, and the songs by others they have chosen to interpret, have run the gamut from contemporary issues of global import facing each of us to matters of intimate love, and from good old New York leftist politics to age-old Jewish mysticism, with their take on Hasidic anthems. Of course, the original klezmorim never sang about—to use the most obvious example—same-sex rights. But, London has said, so much of what they do cover in their songs, even songs touching on radical political ideas, has correlations in the ancient religious tomes. “Whenever we think we are being very now, very new, we find out what we have done is actually very traditional,” he says. “A radical Jewish tradition goes back hundreds of years. We fit right in with old Yiddish socialist music.”

“From early on,” adds Sklamberg, “even before we made a conscious effort to make the music our own, we decided that if we sang songs, they would be ones we believed in, which, since I’m the singer, meant that we would be forgoing chestnuts of the (overwhelmingly heterosexual) Yiddish theater repertoire. Not that that material isn’t great, but, for one thing, other people do it better, and for another, a lot of it plays on the nostalgia for days gone by of the audiences it was by and large written for.”

“We sing about doing the right things in life,” says Gutkin, “and really enjoying doing them at the same time. So there’s dance music and party music and drinking songs sung side by side with pleas against extremism (as in ‘I Ain’t Afraid’ by Holly Near), requests that the Messiah benefit all peoples (our edited version of ‘Shnirele Perele’) and hopes that people will be treated fairly on Earth and not wait until the afterlife.”

Jews With Horns featured guest contributions from downtown guitarist Marc Ribot, Canadian folk group Moxy Früvous and the female rock band Betty. From its opening number, “Man In a Hat,” this third collection from the group—retaining the same core lineup as the previous album—promised new riches and explored new directions. Sung mainly in English, “Man In a Hat,” with lyrics by original Klezmatics bassist Lindsay and traditional music arranged by the group, is frenetic and exceedingly clever, a surreal travelogue of sorts that emphasized the wordplay and humor that quite often finds its way into the Klezmatics’ music, offsetting the seriousness inherent in so much of the rest. “I met a man in a hat with a tan,” the chorus delivers twice, then comes the punch line: “Man-hat-tan, I met a Manhattan man,” in a bit of homage to the band’s hometown. Other tracks spanned the Klezmatics’ other concerns, from “In kamf,” a Yiddish labor song of the late 19th century that featured a multi-generational chorus, to the celebratory drinking anthem “Simkhes-toyre” and the quirky poem “es vilt zikh mir zen,” by Celia Dropkin with music by London, whose words start off nearly tender before dropping a bombshell in its final line.

For 1995’s Possessed, the fourth album (originally on the Piranha and Xenophile labels, later Rounder), Matt Darriau was fully integrated into the lineup. Darriau had first come into contact with klezmer music because, he says, “It was an offshoot from my interest and work in other Eastern European (Balkan) musical forms when I was at New England Conservatory in Boston in the early ’80s. I had grown up in an arty household where my father held international folk dance parties featuring Israeli, Balkan, Greek and Scandinavian dance music. I wasn’t really that into it as a kid but when I got to Boston I found myself in the eclectic scene of the Third Stream Department at New England Conservatory of Music (along with Frank London and other now prominent players in the klezmer scene). A lot of us were looking to world music for inspiration and ‘new’ sounds so we spent a lot of time in the international section of used record stores and passing tapes to each other. It developed from there, all the while with an intention of integrating improvisatory ideas with this music.”

Possessed included liner notes and lyrics (for two songs) by Tony Kushner, the renowned playwright of Angels in America fame. The entire second half of the album is a suite of music written by the band for the original production of Kushner’s play A Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds, an adaptation of S. Ansky’s Yiddish folk tale The Dybbuk. Among the guests on Possessed was keyboardist John Medeski of the contemporary jazz trio Medeski, Martin and Wood. The album was also notable for the song “Mizmor shir lehanef (Reefer Song),” which London, who composed it with words by Michael Wex (author of Born to Kvetch), proudly christens “the first Yiddish ode to smoking pot.”

By this point in their career, the Klezmatics had long been considered virtuosic musicians, each member of the band praised by critics and beloved by fans for his or her playing skills. Even those who were not particularly klezmer fanatics had to give the band their props. The trick, perhaps, was that they made it looks easy. It’s anything but. “I don’t think klezmer is something you can just pick up and play,” says Sklamberg. “It takes practice and understanding and discovering for yourself the particular aspects of its very specific musical language—repertoire, style and ornamentation—and klezmer’s historical relationship to the culture of East European Jews in general. Playing Yiddish music well requires a skill set not unlike playing classical or any other highly evolved musical style.”

Thus it was no surprise that other highly acclaimed artists yearned to work with them. In 1995, the same year that they released Possessed, the Klezmatics took part in the highest-profile collaboration of their career to that point. Itzhak Perlman, the world famous Israeli violinist, invited the group, as well as three other prominent klezmer bands, to accompany him for a concert that would be released as the album In the Fiddler’s House (Angel/EMI). The Klezmatics were featured on six of the album’s tracks and also toured with Perlman to great acclaim. A second CD, recorded live at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, followed.

Another equally magnanimous collaboration followed in 1998, when the Klezmatics teamed with the renowned Israeli vocalist Chava Alberstein for their next album, The Well (Xenophile, later Rounder). Composed of 20th century Yiddish poetry, with music by Alberstein and arrangements primarily by the Klezmatics, The Well incorporated a wide range of ethnic styles, proving the adaptability of the Klezmatics.

“Chava had made a short documentary film about elderly Yiddish poets in Israel,” says Sklamberg, “and, with renewed energy regarding her Yiddish heritage, began writing music to some of the poems. She sent us a cassette of this incredible outpouring of newly composed songs, asking if we’d be interested in collaborating with her. This is perhaps the most consistent of all Klezmatics recordings. The experience of creating and singing with Chava makes this a personal favorite.”

“She is so rich and prolific in her writing,” adds Darriau. “She gave us 25 songs and then we all went to town setting them for our group. It’s one of our strongest albums in the creative production and arranging.” The collaborative effort was subsequently honored with that year’s GLAMA (Gay and Lesbian American Music Award).

Rise Up! Shteyt Oyf! followed in 2002 on Rounder Records. “One could see this as the third in a series begun with Rhythm + Jews and Jews With Horns,” says Sklamberg. “It shares with them an eclectic batch of tunes, but also, in fact, contains the suite of material Frank was commissioned to write for the Pilobolus Dance Theatre, though it’s broken up into separate pieces on the CD. It also includes our Yiddish adaptation of Holly Near’s great ‘I Ain’t Afraid,’ which led us to the thrill of performing with both Holly and Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers at UC Berkeley a couple of years later.”

Although the composition of “I Ain’t Afraid” predates the September 11 tragedies, the band considers Rise Up! their response to the events of that day. Reviewing the album, Time Out New York wrote, “One third of the songs will make you feel holy; one third will make you feel like whirling around frantically at a Jewish wedding; and a few insistent calls-to-arm may make you feel like smashing capitalism.”

Rise Up! introduced to the lineup the most recent full-time addition to the group, violinist and vocalist Lisa Gutkin. Unlike the others, who came to klezmer from various circuitous routes, Gutkin found the music through…the Klezmatics! “Matt Darriau was in my Celtic band Whirligig and thought I’d be good at it,” she says, “so he and [drummer] Dave Licht brought me tapes of old Jewish violinists and I flipped.”

Gutkin had grown up playing classical violin and then bluegrass, Irish and a host of other international styles, as well as backing songwriters. “I had made a pact to only play Irish music but the Klezmatics were such a fantastic band and these old recordings mesmerized me. So when the Klezmatics called me I decided to give it a try,” she says.

“It took many years before I felt that I understood klezmer deeply,” she adds. “I had an immediate feel for it. Oddly it was my paternal grandfather’s more cantorial voice that I referenced in my head more than my maternal grandmother’s Yiddish singing when I was learning the phrasing and note emphasis.”

The next album, Brother Moses Smote the Water (2004, Piranha), was the Klezmatics’ first live album, recorded in Berlin, the site of their debut studio set. The concert featured two amazing guest artists, gospel singer Joshua Nelson and jazz stylist Kathryn Farmer, both of whom contributed vocals, piano and organ to the show. For the concert, the Klezmatics and their guests performed “freedom songs” solo and together, drawing mostly from the Jewish and African-American spiritual traditions, with Passover playing a large role in the songs’ lyrical focus. Nelson has continued to appear with the Klezmatics for several concerts each year and fine examples of the “Kosher gospel” amalgam they create can also be viewed in the documentary, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

Describing the album, a press release at the time said, “The Klezmatics, known for their unique blend of melodic mysticism and improvisational activism have once again turned their music inside out, exposing the complexity of Jewish identity, black identity, human identity.”

Critics fell in love. Calling the Klezmatics “the best band in America,” the Pop Matters website raved about Brother Moses Smote the Water: “There are no longer any boundaries of any kind. The world is changed, somehow. If you have any soul at all, you will weep.”

For all that they had already accomplished during their first two decades together, the Klezmatics’ next move was to earn them their greatest recognition to date from the music industry and virtually redefine just how much this group was capable of. Through an introduction to Nora Guthrie, the daughter of American folk icon Woody Guthrie and sister of Arlo, the Klezmatics began working on their most ambitious project to date, one that would ultimately take seven years to come to fruition.

To make a somewhat convoluted tale short, the Guthrie family lived for some time during the 1940s in Brooklyn’s fabled Coney Island. Woody’s second wife, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, was the daughter of Aliza Greenblatt, a well-known Yiddish poet. While living in Coney Island, Woody had written many lyrics inspired by his relationship with his mother-in-law. Guthrie had set the words to music, but never wrote it down or recorded it, so the music was lost and the words remained.

Enter, decades later, the Klezmatics. Recognizing Nora at one of their concerts, Lorin introduced himself and struck up a conversation. Nora mentioned that Woody had written some Jewish-themed songs and would the Klezmatics be interested in seeing them?

“Would we!” Sklamberg told her. He picks up the story: “Nora responded with a huge packet of something like 30 lyrics, including a new batch of never-before-heard Hanukkah songs and a poetic treasure-trove of words running the gamut from the joys of the cultural life in Coney Island and war-time merchant marine swagger to sad country ballads, utopian idealism and anti-fascist love songs. All in need of music.”

The Klezmatics, working in tandem with Nora as executive producer, crafted music around Woody’s words. The end product, Wonder Wheel, released on the Jewish Music Group label, was, as Darriau puts it, the “least Klezy” record of their career—but quite possibly their most popular. Sung in English, it didn’t completely avoid the klezmer on which they’d built their name but it broadened their palette significantly. Here they incorporated elements of everything from Latin to—with the help of guest vocalist Susan McKeown—Celtic music and, of course, the pure Americana of the late, great Mr. Guthrie. Calling Wonder Wheel (named after the famous Coney Island roller coaster) “a more accessible Klezmatics album,” the All Music Guide website singled out as a highlight the tune “Mermaid Avenue,” honoring the block on which Guthrie lived, and noted its “playful lyrics.” A sample: “Mermaid Avenue that’s the street/Where the lox and bagels meet.”

“Somehow,” says Darriau, “we have arrived at a way of filtering ideas and influences so that no matter what we do, it has a Klezmatics sensibility to it. Our original sound has evolved in its own way, such that now we may arrange and create music that on the surface may not sound ‘klezmer.’ But hopefully the Klezmatics’ sound and klezmer history is always present at least on some subtle or structural level.”

“It would have been dumb if we had tried it make it sound like klezmer,” adds Morrissett. “Nobody said, ‘Here’s what our theme is.’ It was, ‘Everybody do what you think sounds good and we’ll see what it sounds like.’ There was no band conception of how it should sound.”

Wonder Wheel garnered rave reviews from critics and, ultimately, it gave the Klezmatics their first Grammy Award, when it was chosen as the Best Contemporary World Music Album at the 49th annual award ceremony. “The Grammy validated the unique qualities of the entire project,” says Sklamberg. “In fact, we and the klezmer community viewed it as a win for all of us.”

But Wonder Wheel wasn’t the only Klezmatics recording to feature the words of the great dust-bowl troubadour. Prior to that, in 2004, they’d recorded Happy Joyous Hanukkah, several songs built on lyrics Guthrie had written for the celebratory December Jewish holiday, including “Hanuka’s Flame,” “Hanuka Gelt,” “Honeyky Hanuka” and “The Many and the Few.” Expanded with four newly composed instrumentals to an even dozen tracks, it was re-released by JMG in 2006 in the wake of Wonder Wheel’s success.

Another five years would pass before the Klezmatics would release a new album. By that time, drummer Licht, who had been with the band since its inception, had departed to spend more time with his family. Since then, the Klezmatics have not utilized a specific permanent drummer, but have instead relied upon a handful of trusted percussionists, among them Richie Barshay (who worked previously with Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and others) and Aaron Alexander, who has recorded with many of the top names in world music, jazz and klezmer. Licht has on occasion returned to reprise his inimitable drumming for the band.

As previously mentioned, the newest Klezmatics release as of this writing is the two-disc Live at Town Hall, which captures the group’s March 5, 2006 20th anniversary concert at the New York venue. Recorded in conjunction with the On Holy Ground documentary, the set features a cross-section of music from throughout the Klezmatics’ history, and a lengthy list of special guests, among them previous members David Krakauer and Margot Leverett, who had never recorded with the band until this gig. Licht, Barshay and Alexander all contribute drums to the proceedings, and McKeown and Nelson are among the featured vocalists. The repertoire draws from the group’s earliest days (“Man in the Hat,” “Dybbuk Suite”) and material as recent as the Guthrie adaptations. For everyone involved, the event was a celebration.

“Some of the songs, including Abe Ellstein’s ‘Bobe Tanz’—a tune the Klezmatics played at their first gig in 1986—and the Woody Guthrie-Matt Darriau collaboration ‘Lolly Lo,’ make their first appearance on a Klezmatics CD here,” says Sklamberg. “And the presence of a large coterie of our friends singing backup makes for some great vocal moments, particularly a new Russian choral-inspired arrangement on ‘Dzhankoye’ and the sheer joy of singing together on such favorites as ‘Fisherlid,’ ‘St. John’s Nign,’ ‘Shnirele, perele’ and ‘Tepel.’”

The concert also gave the Klezmatics an opportunity to feature some of their esteemed guests in a solo setting: Joanne Borts on the title song from The Well; Adrienne Cooper and Sklamberg recreating their duet on “I Ain’t Afraid”; Joshua Nelson’s smoking “Elijah Rock” and Susan McKeown’s passionate take on “Gonna Get Through This World.” The show also featured Krakauer recreating “Fun tashlikh” from Rhythm + Jews. Perhaps the most transcendent moment arrives when all of the instrumentalists cut loose on “NY Psycho Freylekhs.”

“It’s great to hear those songs all done with the expanded orchestra. The tunes take on another life and dimension anew,” adds Darriau about the Town Hall set.

“It was great to have so many people from our past and so many great klezmer musicians on stage,” says Morrissett. “I call it ‘the klezmer concert of the decade’ because it was really quite an event. We still have a real excitement for doing this.”

Adds London, “We wanted to celebrate being together for so many years with everyone who has been part of our family. It felt so good and natural and right. The energy was incredible; the love and mutual respect. We are blessed to be part of such a wonderful community.”

Indeed, the Klezmatics have always been as much about community as music, and each member has remained prolific outside of the format of the Klezmatics [see individual bios]. Says Sklamberg, “The energy and support we received from the local community fueled the band, rather than it being a particular sensibility. I would say that at very least it allowed us the freedom to be us.”

Over a quarter-century after their formation, the Klezmatics remain committed to their music and to the close relationship they share with their fans. Today, that often means redefining how those interactions take place, with a growing focus on the Internet as a means of delivery and communication. Says London, “With the new technologies and means of distribution we get to do all sorts of fun things, like have a special subscription fans’ page where we can let people hear all our old obscure and fascinating one-off projects, like our cover of the Skatalites’ ‘Doin’ the Ska’; the original soundtrack to Fast Trip, Long Drop; our original score for Pilobolus’ Davenen; the “Crown Heights Affair” remix from GodChildren of Soul; Alollo Trehorn’s beatnik poetry and klezmer Ode to Karl Marx; and many more.”

In conclusion, London says, the Klezmatics are well aware of their place in the world and of what they have accomplished thus far—even while they continue to break new ground. He says: “By putting forth a consistent and coherent political and aesthetic Yiddish/klezmer music that embraces our political values, supporting gay rights, workers’ rights, human rights, universal religious and spiritual values expressed through particular art forms, as well as making particular musical choices that at turns emphasize the beauty or funkiness or Jewishness of the music itself, and eschewing the aspects of Yiddish/Jewish culture that are nostalgic, tacky, kitschy, nationalistic and misogynistic, we have shown a way for people to embrace Yiddish culture on their own terms as a living, breathing part of our world and its political and aesthetic landscape.”

“I’ve spent most of my life after age 30 doing something that is profoundly personal and, incredibly enough, artistically fulfilling,” adds Sklamberg. “I was blessed to literally find my voice through my 30-year journey with this band. In 1986 I never imagined that preserving, disseminating and helping to redefine Yiddish music would become my life’s work. I’d like to think that after 30 years of the Klezmatics, audiences ‘get’ what we do,” “I certainly don’t think we sound like anyone else.”

Indeed, they don’t. Never have and—should the Klezmatics (hopefully) last another 30 years—it’s a safe guess that no one else ever will!