VESSELS OF SONG: Faces of New Jewish Music (Take II)

The revival of popular Yiddish music has to rank as the most distinctive development  in Jewish culture of the late 20^th century. As I have written elsewhere on this site (see Yiddish Music in Pictures on the Writings page), I only became aware in 1998 of the breadth of this revived interest in Yiddish music, some twenty years after it began. What distinguished this revival was the determination of young musicians not to merely imitate what was played by earlier generations of klezmorim (from the Hebrew klei zemer, meaning “vessels of song”) but to create new music inspired by the distinctive modes and rhythms of 19^th century Jewish Bessarabia as well as their transplanted early 20^th century, jazzier, American counterparts. The revival gave birth to Jewish music festivals all around the globe, including KlezKanada in Montreal and Ashkenaz here in Toronto. Since 1998, I have filmed and photographed a wide cross section of the new klezmorim at these events, both the seminal figures in the revival as well as scores of young people who are the genre’s latest practitioners and its biggest fans.