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"To extend the tradition, you have to be in the tradition," says drummer Aaron Alexander, voicing a fairly common sentiment among jazz musicians. However, Alexander isn't talking about jazz; he's talking about klezmer - or, better yet, both.
A native of Seattle, Alexander was a self-described "jazz purist" in the late '8os when a klezmer band called the Mazeltones invited him to play a gig. "They liked the way I played so they asked if I wanted to join the band," he recalls. "By then, I had drifted away from Judaism, [and] there was something about playing this music that gave me a way to connect to the community. Plus, I liked the tunes."
Nonetheless, during the early 'gos, Alexander moved to New York City, intending to play progressive jazz exclusively. However, he discovered that the '8os klezmer boom had thoroughly penetrated the Downtown scene with the very music he thought he'd left behind.
While often conflated with Jewish music in general, klezmer is, in fact, a particular kind of Jewish music - the traditional dance music of Eastern European, or Ashkenazi, Jews. (Sephardic Jews, who originated in Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East, have their own distinct musical traditions.) Carried to the States by successive waves of European Jewish immigrants who began to arrive in the igth century, klezmer was familiar to many of the Jewish musicians and composers who helped shape the music of the jazz age.
However, after WWII, klezmer's popularity sharply declined in America partly because of the painful memories evoked by all things Old World in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Not until the 19703 did a new generation of Jewish musicians decide to exhume their musical heritage, thereby creating a klezmer comeback.
Several of the early klezmer...