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Writing the Book on Klezmer
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I'm personally indebted to Yale Strom.
I keep a hardcover copy of his reference work "The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore" (Chicago Review Press, 2002) on the bookshelf that rings the ceiling in my apartment. Whenever I need to check a fact relating to the origins and history of klezmer, I haul myself up onto an unsteady bar stool and snatch it from its perch. I figure that Strom has kept me in pretty decent shape over the past few years.
His latest offering, last year's "The Absolutely Complete Klezmer Songbook," should keep me fit for the next few, as well.
Transcontinental Music Publications, a division of the Union for Reform Judaism, asked Strom to prepare the songbook in response to the large number of amateur klezmer ensembles that have sprung up within Reform congregations. They came to the right man. Strom is a one-man klezmer industry; in addition to playing violin with his klezmer band, Hot Pstromi, he has produced numerous books and documentary films on klezmer, all of them based on 25 years of fieldwork in Central and Eastern Europe. (He has a special interest in the relationship between Jewish and Rom, or Gypsy, musicians.)
His intimate knowledge of the subject, shows in the book's brief...