One Jew’s Views by Yochanan Sebastian Winston, Ph.D.

This is the music of a “Fourth Generation Klezmer”. Not that I come from a long line of musicians. My late father was an architect, his father owned a dry goods store before the Depression wiped him out and his father was a farmer in Lithuania. No, I am the first one in my family’s memory to pursue a life in music.

But I will never forget the first time I heard the “real deal,” the First Generation players like Dave Tarras and the Naftule Brandwein Orchestra on an old and scratchy Folkways record. They brought the music over. Klezmer. The real deal. The stuff they played in the old country for goyische and yiddische weddings alike. They brought it over and the sounds of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and later, Benny Goodman and Count Basie cross pollinated with it and created something new. Families danced to this stuff in Brooklyn and in the Catskills. The bands learned mambos and listened to comedians at Grossinger’s and the Concorde and ate at all-you-can-eat buffets. And the music changed. Second Generation Klezmer music was what they played at bar mitzvahs in Long Island. It was a new music. And soon a new king from Memphis, Tennessee reigned in the music world. Kids didn’t want to listen to the Barry Sisters, didn’t want to take mambo and tap lessons. “OK, OK, I’ll do my bar mitzvah and then that’s it!!!!!” A deal was struck. If the kid had a bar mitzvah, the parents would spring for a rock and roll band (later a DJ) for the party. So, Jewish music languished. Except in a few isolated communities.

But in those communities, Jewish music continued to develop. In Brooklyn, there were the Lubavitchers and musicians like Mordechai ben David who wrote in a new style of rock and roll that used holy texts from the Torah and the Siddur. There was “The Singing Rabbi”, Shlomo Carlebach (z”l) who was out on college campuses pleading for the youth to return to Torah-true Judaism. And the Israelis, when they weren’t being shot at or bombed by their Arab neighbors were sponsoring song festivals and writing marvelous new tunes. Americans like Henry Sapoznik and Hankus Netsky went back to the old recordings, studied with the old timers and revived an art form many had presumed was dead. There was a new generation of Jewish music. These are the Third Generation Klezmers.

And there is us. In New York alone, there are too many to count. Giants like Andy Statman and David Krakauer. Forward thinking artists like John Zorn and his band Massada. Observant Jews like “the Sephardic Santana”, the “Chassidic Hendrix” Yossi Piamenta. I align myself with these guys since we have a lot in common. A “Fourth Generation Klezmer” is usually not brought up on Jewish music, but has studied and absorbed it, melding together several different influences to form a post-Modernist creation. In the final analysis, the absorption of traditional Klezmer music allows its influence to appear without regard to historical performance practice; for a Fourth Generation Klezmer, it is no longer material to be replicated, but instead, interpreted. But, this is just one Jew’s view...