Some thoughts on diegetic klezmer

Jewish music in the movies — who gets it right, who gets it wrong, who cares?

Over a year ago now, I was gearing up to do two senior projects for my BA in Religious Studies and Music. My religious studies capstone had switched from an unwieldy exploration of the intersection between religion and economics to kind of just being some thoughts on the music of Regina Spector (my fav). The music capstone, though, was going to be a culmination of all of the extracurricular study and work I’d done with klezmer music, but how?

Around that time the two shows I’d been binging were Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And as I was contending with these all. these questions, (whither klezmer? when klezmer? who klezmer? where klezmer? what klezmer?) klezmer coincidentally made diegetic appearance in both shows (diegetic meaning it existed not as a soundtrack for the audience, but was interacted with by the characters). It’s always a delight to run across my niche passion in broader culture, but I… I was irked.

What’s the big deal?!

Well, dear reader, cute clips, no? I am tickled by these little blips, little clips, but they both mythologize the idea of klezmer in a way I don’t like.

The Mrs. Maisel program takes place around 1960 and Brooklyn Nine-Nine is ostensibly taking place during its release in the 2010s, but klezmer, as a popular word used for a genre of music, only came about in the late 70s when Zev Feldman popularized the term as a genre (before this, the “klezmer“ was the word for the musician). Gotcha, Mrs. Maisel! Even though a handful of academics used the term by 1960, the idea that Mrs. Maisel or her secular audience would recognize or use the term klezmer is incorrect. Bad dramaturgy.

But I hear you reader. Okay, Miri, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in its foibles of Jewish nostalgia, got this one wrong, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine is more than three decades past klezmer music’s linguistic inception. While this may be true, the character Jake Peralta refers in an equally fallacious manner to “my grandma’s old klezmer records.“ Doing the math for Peralta who, like his actor Andy Samberg, is ostensibly between being a millennial and Gen X, his grandma would be a part of the Silent Generation at the youngest.

Grandma would’ve been buying these records in the 80s and beyond and would’ve only been able to start collecting her “old records,“ well into adulthood (I haven’t been able to identify if the visible LP in the clip is real or not). For grandma, that collection is the klezmer revival of the varied Jewish music (not called “klezmer music“) she might’ve grown up listening to.

I’m being overly-dramatic here, but it’s important to point out that klezmer music is a neologism, a young term.

Correcting the record

Going back even further in the past, the movies Maestro and Woman in Gold also use klezmer. In Maestro, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein around 1950 refers to how when he began pursuing music as a child his father “imagined [him] a klezmer.“ In Woman in Gold, a klezmer quartet was hired to portray the wedding band in a 1930s Viennese-Jewish wedding.

Simply put, Maestro got it right. For all the panning the movie’s received, Maestro got this one detail right. Bernstein’s father, coming from the Pale of Settlement, likely would know the term “klezmer,“ and know that it referred at the time to a type of person therefore he “Imagined [Lenny] a klezmer.“ For Woman in Gold, it has the opposite issue pushing Jewish musical culture to be monolithic. Vienna was a famously “assimilated“ city for Jews, especially for higher society ones who would be obsessing over a Klimt painting as are portrayed in Woman in Gold. They would not have hired a klezmer band for a wedding — that was the music of the riff-raff, hoi polloi Jews. But why is this happening?

Wither klezmer? From whether did it come?

A must-see for klezmer obsessives is a new movie “The Klezmer Project.“ The title is translated from the Spanish “Adentro mío estoy bailando“ (“Inside myself, I’m dancing“). In this movie, the young Argentine-Jewish Leandro gets caught up in a search for those good old klezmer melodies, going to Eastern Europe to look for them, only to find complication.

Rather than finding a mythical well full to the brim of pure unadulterated, old world, archived, totally-your-bubbies’ klezmer, Leandro finds some musicians who are just kind of playing the music they’re playing. Leandro doesn’t really find klezmer let alone Jewish music, he finds musicians who lived through complex history playing the music they like to play. Some of it they point to as being Jewish in particular, some not, but it could all potentially be klezmer through modern ears.

He felt emotion towards this idea that Jewish music was discrete and coherent and could be “found,” just like so many of us feel emotion when searching for our roots. But just like the various musicians and traditions that paved the way for modern klezmer music weren’t always klezmer music, an immigrant ancestor’s experience isn’t encapsulated by their name appearing on a ship’s arrival manifest.

Klez-who even cares?

Having honest and accurate cultural portrayals of music is important for music to keep evolving. In an algorithm-AI world, it’s too easy to freeze musical genres in time, when they’ve always been complicated and evolving.

I made this show-biz point as one meagre part in a lecture titled “Klezmemes!“ To those not overly invested in music, it certainly came across as the hand-wringing of a geriatric 22-year-old.

Post-lude

One of my favorite books is The Autobiography of Miles Davis and one is struck when reading it, just how human-centered the development of hard bop, modal jazz and jazz fusion were. There was intense passion, there were joyful transcendent jams and performances, there were arguments and judgments. Each came about in a different point in Miles’ life and was rooted in so many gorgeous and troubling circumstances.

And yet, today we have cynical producers mass producing jazz tracks. This article by Ted Gioia is elucidating to the amount of shitty producers on Spotify farming listens through an abundance of fake artist profiles. This, to me, is pure evil. It’s pure evil and we will begin to see it more with AI music’s accelerating development.

If this is your ideal of music, go forth and eat your slop — set your “vibes,“ cultivate your “aesthetic.“ Forget about the innovators for all I care. I, however, will stay where the living breathing musicians are toiling.

A musician can have copyright over their music for two lifetimes and day, but don’t hold your breath for honor and respect.

The mythologies so often promoted about the pure origins of music ironically contain a complete disregard for the artists who barely ever have purism in mind. This mythology invites an institutional legalism and rule-obsession about music as if there were a Ten Commandments of klezmer. This ironically dishonors the very innovators of those supposed rules by diluting their experience into a few scales.

The same belittlement that’s happening to jazz can easily happen to klezmer. Klezmer is not a list of rules to check. It’s not proper instrumentation. It’s not the proper balance of clarinet krekhts. It’s not proper scales played correctly.

Klezmer is the will, the feelings and the spirit of a community, many members of whom have intensely strong, but divergent feelings about proper instrumentation, the proper balance of clarinet krekhts and proper scales played properly.