Tag Archives | Klezmer

Klezmer is Cool and the Roma Rock

All Around This World Eastern Europe
This week in our online class we depart from our usual country-by-country routine to go off the beaten track with the Roma/Romani people and with Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European-descended) Jews. Both groups have lived at one point or another in almost ever corner of Eastern Europe, and have been evicted from the same. Both groups have long histories full of unfathomable struggle, yet have somehow managed to survive. Both make music that bursts with joy and at the very same time can be so, so sad.

We Traffic in Joy


This week in class we we learned about two infamously musical peoples, the Roma and the Jews, so how can we not dance? In this video I do some informal Romani-style dancing — ’tis true, I do it terribly — and teach “the grapevine,” the most basic of basic steps one may use to dance to klezmer. Remember, our mission when we dance in class is not perfection! Technically we’re terrible; we traffic in joy.

Classic Klezmer Standoff from “Train of Life”

Today we ride the “Train of Life,” and make joyous music as we do.

We can surely all get along, at least if we’re making music! In this exuberant clip from “Zug des Lebens” (“Train of Life,”) Jewish and non-Jewish, presumably Roma, musicians find common ground in song. (The party really kicks in at about 1:30.) The 1998 film, a French-language collaboration between French, Belgian, Dutch, Israeli and Romanian filmmakers and musicians, tells the tale of Jewish village’s attempt to escape the Holocaust by masquerading as a Nazi transport train while really heading away from the concentration camps, toward Palestine.

Klezmer Still Lives in Ukraine

Konsonans Retro is a family brass band from Ukraine that performs klezmer music in the secular tradition of the once-thriving Odessa Jewish community.
Klezmer music is functionally the instrumental music of Eastern and Central Europe’s Ashkenazic Jews, but in essence, since the Nazis obliterated Eastern and Central Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust, it has become much more. Today, musicians who play klezmer are not only embracing one of the world’s most inspiring bittersweet musical styles, but with each performance they’re also rebuilding lost Jewish culture, striking a note by note blow against the Nazis who tried to wipe it from the face of the earth. Enjoy this video of Konsonans Retro keeping klezmer history alive.