Klezmer Is Alive, Well, And In Capable Hands
Clarinetist Michael Winograd talks about innovation, but with a firm grasp of tradition
Klezmer clarinetist, composer, and educator, Micheal Winograd, doesn’t see a dichotomy between innovation and the revival of a severed tradition. “There’s room for all of it,” he says in reference to recent, modernist wrinkles made in the Yiddish musical canon. “As long as it’s done with good intentions, I think it’s a pretty open canvas. But that said, it does require a certain amount of learning like anything else. Klezmer is complicated like every genre.”
Winograd first discovered klezmer as an early teen. At 14, he started going to KlezKamp, an annual festival devoted to klezmer music and Yiddish culture, and continued attending well into adulthood, until its final season in 2015 (today, he’s the artistic director at KlezKanada, a Canadian offshoot of the original festival). It was at KlezKamp that he became acquainted with the international Yiddish music scene, and met many of its principle players. He was also a regular at the Klezmer Brunch, a weekly event curated by clarinetist David Krakauer and held at the iconic, downtown avant-garde haunt, Tonic.
“The Klezmer Brunch was mostly concerts by professionals, although Krakauer also ran a few sub-series,” Winograd says. “Every once in a while he would have a program called ‘Klezmer of Tomorrow,’ which featured kids. But there weren’t too many kids—just me and violinist Jake Shulman-Ment—so it was always just me and Jake doing something.”
After graduating from the New England Conservatory in the early 2000s, Winograd relocated to Brooklyn, where he leads his own band. He is also part of numerous projects like the Tarras Band, which plays the repertoire of klezmer legend, Dave Tarras; Ahava Raba, a group that revisits music from the Ashkenazi spiritual tradition and features trumpeter Frank London, and cantor Yanky Lemmer; and spent about a decade with the band led by Canadian beat-maker and mashup artist, Socalled.
If that wasn’t enough, Winograd is also busy with Sandaraa, his fruitful collaboration with Pakistani vocalist, Zeb Bangash. “One of the fun and exciting projects we started working on in late-2018/early-19—before this long break—was with an Urdu poet from Lahore who did these beautiful translations of Yiddish songs for us in Urdu,” he says about one of the seemingly endless avenues they’ve explored. “These are not just word-for-word translations. It was important that the art of the poem remained, and we got someone who was really great. I’m look forward to getting back into that. We were at that moment where we thought, ‘This is going to be amazing,’ but haven't had the chance to finish it.”
Winograd spoke with me from his home in Brooklyn. We talked about his decades-long love affair with klezmer, his thoughts about the dual role of the klezmer musician as innovator and revivalist, how his recent album, Kosher Style, is state-of-the-art 1958, the wonders he’s discovered fusing Yiddish and Pakistani music, and why he feels hopeful about klezmer’s future in a post-COVID world.
What’s your background and how did you get into Jewish music?
I was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island. I started as a saxophonist—I took piano lessons as a little kid—but saxophone was my first calling. I was about 14 years old, and a couple of things happened that sparked my interest in Jewish music.
I was playing jazz, and my father bought me a soprano saxophone. We were at the music store, and there was a klezmer book, the Mel Bay Complete Klezmer Book. I got that book, started listening to a few recordings, and then, very quickly, started going to concerts. Being near New York City, it was easy to go to klezmer concerts in the 1990s.
Another thing—which was parallel to this—is that my father was made the head of the cantorial search committee at the Shelter Rock Jewish Center. Overnight, we got these tapes in the mail from all these people auditioning to be the cantor—tapes and tapes—and it totally sparked my father’s interest in cantorial music. He’s now a connoisseur of chazanus [cantorial singing], which is a riot. It became his main musical interest and a big part of the second half of his life.
Between all of that there was this uptick of Jewish music in my house. We started going to concerts. Some of the most memorable of them were from the In The Fiddler’s House tour, with Itzhak Perlman playing with the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, Andy Statman, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. We saw that at the Tilles Center on Long Island. We would also go into the city and there were all these crazy avant-garde klezmer experiments going on downtown at the Knitting Factory, as well as the John Zorn stuff. It was dumped on me all at once when I was about 14 years old, and I ate it up.
All the things were meeting. It was a musical language. It was a cultural language. I [realized] that I was not going to become a jazz musician. This was my calling. I went to summer camp—Camp Ramah in the Berkshires—and I had a friend there who, oddly enough, now lives around the block from me in Brooklyn. I showed up in summer camp that summer totally gung-ho over Klezmer music, and he told me to go with him to KlezKamp, where he had been going since he was a little kid. His mother taught Yiddish folklore there.
I tagged along with his family that December, and that point was really the beginning of it all. I would go to KlezKamp yearly, and KlezKamp was the hub for international klezmer music. It was where I met pretty much everyone who’s everyone within the scene. KlezKamp finished up after 30 years about five years ago, but it was one of the biggest sparks in the world of klezmer music, and so many offshoots grew out of it. It was a place where musicians and non-musicians would go, and it was inter-generational. That was the most beautiful part about it. You could be, as I was, a 14-year-old, sitting on a couch with a 90-year-old musician and get the stories. I had these teachers who were incredible, especially Sid Beckerman, who was my first teacher there. When you’re that age, you can so easily get lost in the sea of content. It was a blessing. I drowned in the soup of klezmer for a long time, and that’s how it started.
A number of people have told me that exploring Jewish music enhanced their Jewish identity as well. Has that been your experience, too?
Definitely. In many ways, and I think everyone has their unique calling. For many people who don’t have a connection to their Jewish identity beforehand, this can be a real in to that. For me, I had a [connection], however, I was at odds with a lot of it. When I came to this, I thought, “This is a part of Jewish culture that I can connect with.” Culturally, historically, and ultimately politically. One of the things that I really grabbed onto—especially as I was a later teenager and into my early 20s—was that the Klezmer world is a hub for left wing politics. I needed that in my life, and it really helped shape me in many ways. A lot of people come to that question: “Did you end up getting more Jewish in one way or another?” That’s very case-specific and for me, it was about finding myself. There is so much Jewishness in there and it definitely affected my Jewish identity. It’s kind of impossible to play klezmer and Yiddish music for a living and for it to not affect your Jewish identity, whether you're Jewish or not.
When did you switch to clarinet?
I started going to KlezKamp in 1996, when I was 14. There was also the downtown jazz world and how it mingled with the klezmer world in the 1990s, at places like the Knitting Factory. One of the great klezmer events that happened in New York, happened at a club called Tonic. Tonic was a venue on the Lower East Side that was mostly for avant-garde and improvised music, and it was one of the John Zorn hot spots. On Sundays, starting around that time, David Krakauer curated a weekly klezmer brunch there every Sunday afternoon. I was there many Sundays for years, and everyone played. You’d get bands that you knew about who were on tour and passing through, and there were also these great musicians in New York who would try different side projects there.
There were workshops that would happen as part of that series, too. One time, David Krakauer was teaching a workshop, and I showed up with my alto sax. Afterwards, he said, “If you’re serious about klezmer, you really ought to learn to play clarinet.” I had a friend on Long Island where I lived who had played clarinet in the school band up and then stopped. He sold it to me for $35 and that’s when I got my first clarinet. Around that time, I started studying with Matt Darriau, who is now the clarinetist from the Klezmatics. He started teaching me clarinet. When I got to the New England Conservatory, I stopped playing sax more or less, and just worked on clarinet.
Tell me about the Tarras Band. Is that still happening?
It hasn’t happened in a while, about four years or so. It could happen again. I would love to because it gave me an opportunity to play with Pete Sokolow, the piano player. He was, as he claims, Dave Tarras’ last regular accompanist. He played with him on and off for 30 years. He started playing with Taras when he was just a teenager. Back then, if you were good, it didn’t matter if you were 18 years old, you would be playing tons of gigs. The Tarras Band is really fun, but it doesn’t happen too regularly. But I do play with some of those musicians all the time, like Ben Holmes the trumpet player and Dave Licht the drummer—guys I still work with.
Have you transcribed a lot of Dave Tarras’ music?
I still do. Transcribing Dave Taras is something I’ve spent a lot of time with. Back when I was at the New England Conservatory, that’s when I got the itch about transcription and how much I really love it. That continues until today. I spent a lot of time slowing down those Dave Taras recordings. Along with other guys, but he was the one I spent the most time with.
What’s your role? Are you a revivalist or do you see yourself more as an innovator?
There is a lot to unpack in there. First off, I think that saying I am not a revivalist is purely because of generation. It’s not as if the role of revivalists is to play straight. Some of the greatest innovators in the klezmer world over the last 40 years are from the revival time.
Like Cookie Segelstein and people like that.
Cookie and Josh Horowitz and Frank London and Don Byron—all these guys. Klezmer music is a style, the community is small, the resources are small, so it does take a fair amount of preservation from everyone involved. However, it is a living and breathing music that is surrounded by other living breathing musics, like it’s always been. It’s not an outside concept to expand the music in certain ways. When it comes down to it, you’re looking at the taste of each individual player, what they’re interested in at certain times, and everyone has different periods.
Packing it into a little box like that is tough. For me, at some point I settled into a stylistic thing that—I lead my own band now—and it kind of sounds like a mid-1950s klezmer band. It’s a time of that music that I love, I love the recordings from that point. As a clarinetist in New York, it adds up to me, and I try to write in that style. I write a lot. Not everyone in the klezmer world does that—some do some don’t—and when I am on tour playing music, I usually try to play the stuff that I am writing, or the stuff I am interested in.
But it is not a clean black or white. Everything is mushed into each other, and everyone who’s good at this music is innovative in one way or another. You might hear Veretski Pass, and on first listen, think it’s a traditional Eastern European klezmer band. But they happen to be the most innovative klezmer band on the planet. They do this crazy stuff, and some is more tangible than others. There are times where they use weird harmonies that immediately to the ears sound out there. But what you might not know is they have songs that sound traditional, but they composed it by taking a melody, flipped the paper upside down, or inverted it, or took one melody from one part of the world—all this crazy stuff—and yet it still sounds like them.
I’ve always found it tough to address that question. It’s just like any other music, everything that’s going on around it affects it, and there are many places within it to exist. That’s what makes it great. However within klezmer, it’s pretty fragile, its existence is fragile, and for it to exist, no matter where you exist in there, it’s important and responsible to be a preserver and to do that work as well. The music requires a certain amount of that kind of work from its performers.
About a century ago, as those musicians from Eastern Europe immigrated to the United States, how did the music change?
You see the trends in the music grow parallel to the growth of popular music in the United States. You see how much jazz and swing and orchestration and the way the band worked absolutely affected the trajectory of klezmer and Yiddish music in New York and in these parts. Other Eastern European musics continued to progress linearly, whereas klezmer music and Yiddish music got cut off, and had to grow out of nowhere. It is tough to put your finger on what that means, and how that affects what the musicians need to be doing. It’s like, “How does a culture jump back in? Are they perpetually going to be 20 years behind? What does that even mean?” Before the World War II, this sound of klezmer and Yiddish music was part of Jewish people’s lives. To come back in as a fringe culture and as a fringe music, it has such a different character. God bless the revivalists for the work that they did. People like Hankus Netsky, Henry Sapoznik, Cookie Segelstein, Adrienne Cooper, and so many more. It’s crazy that they were able to make a world where I could join in in the 1990s, and take it to where I did. But the music definitely comes back with a different character and it’s not the same ingredients that you’re using post-revival.
I had a fascinating conversation with Ilya Shneyveys. He looked at Turkish music and saw how it merged with psychedelic rock in the late 1960s. Had there not been a Holocaust, maybe klezmer would have done a similar type of thing.
Isn’t it fascinating? I made this record, Kosher Style, a couple of years ago. I wrote tunes in the style of 1958—pretty much the period when things were about to fall off the plateau. It’s really interesting to think about it, but nonetheless, it happened, and there’s no way to backtrack. As an artist thinking about that stuff gives you ideas. Anyone who plays this music is going to find in some way that they’re dealing with this reality that there was just a severing of the music. How does something bounce back from a severing? It kind of doesn’t. It is a brand new thing in many ways, even though it’s dealing with older sources.
What’s the story behind Sandaraa?
That’s a collaboration with a singer from Pakistan, Zeb Bangash. She had a band with her cousin, which was a popular Pakistani band. They were doing really well and had a couple of big radio hits over there. A friend of mine from the New England Conservatory had been doing a State Department tour around 2009/2010, and he met them when he was there. They played a concert together in Pakistan, and couple of years later, Zeb’s band was invited to play a concert at the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC. They asked my friend if he knew any musicians who would be good.
The funny part is that earlier that year Zeb and her cousin had been in Abu Dhabi. They met an ethnomusicologist, Walter Zev Feldman, who teaches at the NYU School in Abu Dhabi. He turned them on to klezmer music—this was just a few months before I met them—and he gave them my record. They came to do this concert and I showed up. They said, “Wait a minute, we have your CD.”
We played that concert in DC and it was amazing. Zeb and I became totally infatuated with each other’s music. We started putting together a project. We worked hard on grant proposals that we ended up getting, which facilitated her coming over to work with me and some of my musicians for a month back in 2013. We were able to spend a ton of time listening to source recordings and transcribing. She introduced us to less mainstream music from parts of Pakistan that we had never heard, like in Baluchistan, which is in the southwest and borders on Iran, and the northern music from the mountains, in the Hunza Valley. That music is interesting because many generations ago there was a migration of Eastern Europeans from the Balkans who ended up there, and the music is so influenced by it. You have this strange pocket of music from the most northern regions of Pakistan that has this Balkan influence. You say that to me, and lightbulbs start going.
We started making music and our band, Sandaraa, came about. We did a bunch of tours. We got a commission from Chamber Music America to write music together. We wrote a 10-piece song cycle and three of those songs are good, and we recorded those. It’s been a couple years now since we’ve been able to do anything. Zeb had some visa problems in 2019 and then 2020 went down the toilet. She’s living in Baltimore now, which is great. But that’s the irony of not being able to make music, given that she’s in the States now. But we’ll get back to it.
Is the project a synthesis of Jewish and Pakistani music?
We started playing music purely from over there with our sensibilities, but because all of us are really into old recordings and digging in, we started doing that. But it got really interesting once we started writing, because then more of the influences started morphing together.
What are your plans for when the world reopens?
I am working on a recording coming up, we’re hoping we can do it in this time. We have plans to do it in March, but it’s complicated. I’ve been trying this whole time to continue writing every day, which if I continue, then I won’t stop. I have a ton of stuff to record. I’d love to get the klezmer band on the road as soon as possible.
Also, I am the artistic director of KlezKanada, which is an offshoot that came out of KlezKamp. I’ve been doing that for the last four years. We were virtual in August, and we’re working on next summer, which is going to be some kind of hybrid. I am looking forward to those experiences, the festivals, to start up again. Although we have been able to include so many more people doing it online. Obviously, it’s not as ideal. A concert will never be a concert when you’re not playing to people. But being able to include people who generally can’t be included is a big deal.
I am looking forward to everyone coming back and hopefully having learned something through all this. I hold my klezmer in high regard, and I think we’re going to take away a lot from this.
Photos courtesy Michael Winograd
From The Archives: ICYMI: Cultural Appreciation
Genre-smashing enthusiast, Yoshie Fruchter, talks about his organic relationship with Jewish music, moving to New York City and getting involved with John Zorn and the Radical Jewish Culture scene, the origins of his group, Sandcatchers, and the inspiration he draws from his years-long association with the Hadar Ensemble.
Go here to read our interview with Yoshie Fruchter.
Subscribe To Our Premier Tier And Get Even More Great Stuff
In addition to the incredible interviews you receive every week, we’re now offering a special premium tier. The premium tier does not replace the great content you already receive, rather, it gives you even more.
The premium tier is only $5 a month, or $50 for an entire year (2 free months!), and for a limited time, we’re offering 40% off the annual price. That’s right, you get a one-year subscription for just $30.
Yikes!
Specifically, paid subscribers get:
Deep, probing essays about the spiritual nature of music. We’ve been working on this content for a while, and it is powerful stuff. It offers a uniquely Jewish take on music and spirituality. Not to be missed.
Incredible curated playlists. These playlists include more than just music from the artists featured in the Ingathering, but also things we stumble upon in our research, and amazing things we need to share. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re someone who needs to hear this.
The opportunity to support the Ingathering. The Ingathering is fun to produce, but it takes a lot of effort and time to research and write. A paid subscription is an amazing way to show your support.
Become a Founding Member. If you love the Ingathering, and you’re looking for a way to show even more support, become a founding member. The suggested founding donation is $180. You can give less if you want—as long as it’s more than the cost of an annual subscription—and obviously, you can always give more. The amount is up to you.
If you’d rather just give a donation, you can do that, too. The Ingathering is a project of Vechulai, a registered 501(c)3 tax exempt organization. Go here to donate and learn more.
If you don’t want to be a paid subscriber, that’s not a problem. Stay a free subscriber and keep enjoying the great content you already receive.
The first premium newsletter goes out late-January/early-February. Also, if you have any questions, reply to this newsletter and we’ll get right back to you (or email us at: jewishmusicandspirituality@gmail.com).
Thank you being a regular reader and part of the Ingathering team. Your support at whatever level—founding member, premium subscriber, or free subscriber—is invaluable, and we can’t do it without you.
Thank you!