Election Section

For many generations, the Jewish musicians of Eastern Europe played the raucous, emotionally charged dance music called klezmer. They absorbed the Slavic, Gypsy and Turkish musical styles of their neighbors into their own music and invested their playing with a soulful intensity. This coming week, as the Berkeley Jewish Music Festival (BJMF) begins its annual celebration of Jewish music from around the world, the focus will be on klezmer, celebrating its passing from one generation to the next and its connection to Berkeley itself.  

Festival Director Ellie Shapiro explains that this year’s BJMF is “a great immersion course in klezmer music. The range is from pioneer Jewish folklorists to classic Philadelphia klezmer to David Krakauer, who’s taken klezmer as the root and used it to create new music that integrates jazz and hip-hop.” 

Clarinetist Krakauer brings his band Klezmer Madness! to Wheeler Auditorium on Saturday, March 20 at 8 p.m. Krakauer is a versatile virtuoso who has soloed with the New York Philharmonic and Kronos Quartet, and is a fixture of New York’s jazz avant-garde. He plays with a mastery of the highly vocal inflection of klezmer clarinet, and his formidable band is sure to raise the roof at Wheeler.  

Krakauer is steeped in Jewish musical traditions, but he’s also pushing klezmer into the future, augmenting his band with electric guitar and bass, and more recently, the hip-hop sampling of DJ So-Called, aka Josh Dolgin.  

Krakauer explains, “Adding the electric guitar, not only does it give it the sound of modernity, but I also realized that the raw energy of the electric guitar brought my music closer to the music of the 1920s, that had that raw, rough element to it.” 

Krakauer’s band has strong Bay Area connections, with bassist Trevor Dunn, who was active in the local jazz scene for many years, and guitarist Sheryl Bailey, who teaches at the Stanford Jazz Workshop each summer.  

From his home in Montreal, Dolgin discussed his contribution to the band. “I sample old Jewish sources and I try to get authentic Jewish kind of grooves looping. Hip-hop should be about representing who you are. So I couldn’t make music about being a gangster, I had to talk about Jewish stuff, because that’s what I am.”  

Two events spotlight the heritage of Philadelphia klezmer and that city’s remarkable Hoffman family, a musical dynasty stretching back to 19th Century Ukraine. The third and fourth generations of family musicians, drummer Elaine Hoffman Watts and her daughter, along with trumpeter Susan Watts, will lead a jam session on Thursday, March 25 at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center. All instruments and skill levels are welcome. Two nights later, on Saturday, March 27, they’ll close the festival with a Philly Klezmer Swing Dance Party at 8 p.m. at the Crowden Music Center at Rose and Sacramento. Jewish dance and swing expert Steven Weintraub offers a pre-party dance lesson at 6:30 p.m. 

Now in her seventies, Elaine Hoffman Watts discussed her family legacy. “My grandfather, Joseph Hoffman, came to America in the early 1900s,” Watts says. “He wrote two books of music by hand that he remembered from Russia, just great music, and it was popular in Philadelphia at that time. Every city had its own distinct klezmer because they all came from different places and they all brought different music from their shtetls.”  

Beginning in the 1950s, she says, “American Jews wanted to be Americans, they didn’t want klezmer, and that music died out. But thank God, we have people who brought it back. It’s gorgeous music. Susan and I will be playing some of the music that my grandfather wrote when we come to California.” 

The dance party also reveals Berkeley’s special role in bringing the music back to life. Shapiro explains, “The whole klezmer revival started at the North Berkeley branch of the public library with the first concert of The Klezmorim,” the 1970s band that spearheaded the music’s revival. A former member of The Klezmorim, Sheldon Brown, a well-known local clarinetist, will play at the Swing Dance Party.  

Folk music legend and longtime Berkeley resident Ronnie Gilbert performs on Sunday, March 21 at the JCC. In the 1950s, Gilbert was a member of the Weavers, whose version of the Hebrew folksong Tzena, Tzena sold two million copies in 1951 and sparked the era’s folk music revival.  

Gilbert suffered during the era of the McCarthy blacklist because of her radical politics, but continued to pursue both music and activism. As Shapiro notes, “She’s the daughter of a Yiddish-speaking union activist. Her life story is of a generation of people who grew up with very strong politics integrated with their art, and being Jewish was just part of the gestalt of that world.” Gilbert’s show, A Radical Life With Songs, will feature a rich selection of stories and music from her remarkable life. 

On March 23, a program at the JCC called Back To The Source offers audiences a rare chance to discover early documents of Jewish music in pre-Soviet Russia. The talk and musical demonstration will be presented by Dr. Izaly Zemtsovsky (a former UC visiting professor and leading expert on Russian Jewish music) and by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Alpert. 

Although the focus is on klezmer, the festival is presenting an additional series of concerts, films, and talks that highlight the diversity of Jewish music, from Argentina to Azerbaijan. As Shapiro says, “We pride ourselves on being a festival of Jewish world music, so even though this year we’re focusing on klezmer, we have nine additional events that represent other kinds of music as well.” 

The Berkeley Jewish Music Festival runs March 20-27. Information and tickets are available at (925)866-9599 or www.brjcc.org.