Freilach Express ‎– East Goes West

Klezmer music was originally an eastern European folk genre, heavily influenced by other existing native folk genres endemic to that area, i.e. Roumanian, Russian, Polish, Ukranian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, with a strong dose of Gypsy.

What makes this music particulary individual is that it was filtered through Jewish ears and consciousness. The tradition of the khazn (cantor) and the nigun was practically inborn for the Jewish musician, a personage growing up in an ethnically segregated, religion-centered society. It must also be remembered that we are dealing, in essence, with utilitarian, dance-oriented music.

Urbanity and sophistication did, indeed, begin to appear in klezmer music by the late 19th early to mid-20th centuries, aided in no small measure by the development of the phonograph record, but equally by urbanisation, as large numbers of “shtetl” Jews, including many klezmorim, moved to the cities, both in Europe and America. The resulting contact with concert music, European theater and salon music, and American ragtime/jazz and popular songs, gave polish and some smoothness to the old folkstyle, and formed, for better or worse, a kind of second and third-generation klezmer music for a more modern era.