On June 20th, Kalamazoo’s Temple B’nai Israel will host the concert “Klezmer and More.” It brings together classical Jewish-themed music with the old klezmer music that’s probably more at home at a bar mitzvah than inside a concert hall.
The performers include retired Kalamazoo Symphony assistant conductor Barry Ross and Western Michigan University voice professor Carl Ratner. But the featured players are from Kansas -- percussionist Linda Maxey and her husband, clarinetist Larry Maxey. Both are acclaimed classical performers, so how did they end up playing light-hearted, bouncy klezmer?
"It started little by little," says Larry Maxey. "I played for a friend’s bar mitzvah party. That was my first exposure to the music."
Slowly, Larry and Linda started collecting klezmer music, piece by piece. They learned together. Now, 30 years and several bar mitzvahs later, the two have performed several of their own klezmer concerts.
"With Klezmer you can really make the clarinet kind of talk," Maxey says. "Kind of talk to the people. Do words. You do so many vocal inflections with the tongue, swoops and bends and drop-offs, so on. It’s a very flexible way of playing the instrument."
"It offers pathos and dance and lyricism and virtuosity," he continues. "Joy. It’s all there. These pieces last only a minute or two but they reflect all of these moods."
Maxey explains that because Klezmer has so much improvisation and movement, it’s been influenced by all sorts of genres.
"Jazz and folk music of various countries," Maxey says. "Swing, latin, dance, just it’s of constantly changing form. It’s not frozen in a time capsule."
But the traditional, Eastern European klezmer – the kind that makes you want to get up and hop around – has a somewhat tragic history. It began in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in the 1400’s -- countries like Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia. But the Holocaust devastated klezmer and Jewish culture as a whole.
"So the musicians really fled that part of the world to come to this country," Maxey says. "Things really changed then. There no longer was much of a call for klezmer music, and it almost died out."
Not all was lost, though. And about 30 years later, hope for klezmer sprang up once again, this time in America.
"There were a few Jewish-American clarinetists, primarily, in the 1970s who resurrected this music and brought it back from the dead," Maxey explains. "Because it was dying. The old klezmer musicians were dying off. The tradition was on its way out. We’re very fortunate that those gentlemen came along, we’re very fortunate they came along and saved this music from oblivion."
It’s that history that’s part of why the Maxeys say they’re excited to play klezmer. To show audiences music that could have easily faded away decades ago.
"I’m sure there’ll be some people who will be there Saturday night who haven’t heard the music before," Maxey says. "It’ll be a revelation for them. A shock. Linda used to play community concerts for Columbia artists, and we would play a klezmer piece on each of her concerts, and you know that audience had never heard that music before. And they loved it! So yeah, we’re glad to be prosthelytizing for the music a little bit."
