Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics in America
Scholar-performer Walter Zev Feldman traces the largely hidden history of klezmer's 1960s American revival, drawing from his memoir of learning from Greek immigrants and Dave Tarras.
Why we picked this
Feldman is both the scholar and the primary source — he was inside the 1960s klezmer revival he's describing. His account of learning from Greek immigrant musicians before studying with Dave Tarras fills a gap in the standard narrative of American Jewish music.
The klezmer revival of the 1970s and 80s is well documented, but the decade that preceded it — the crucial 1960s work in New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities that made revival possible — remains largely invisible in the standard histories. Walter Zev Feldman, scholar and performer, was there, and in this lecture he draws from his memoir From the Bronx to the Bosphorus (Fordham University Press) to fill in that concealed background.
Feldman’s path into the music was circuitous in the way that New York’s immigrant cultures made possible: he learned initially from Greek immigrant musicians before eventually studying with Dave Tarras (1897-1989), one of the great klezmer clarinetists of the twentieth century. This cross-cultural transmission is itself part of his argument — that klezmer’s American survival depended on adjacency to other displaced musical traditions, on the sonic commons of immigrant New York, not only on insular Jewish community preservation.
The lecture is virtual and free, hosted by YIVO, the foremost repository of Ashkenazi Jewish history and culture in the world. Feldman’s work reframes the familiar story of klezmer revival as an American immigrant story with a longer and more tangled genealogy than the folk music boom account usually allows.