Chicago Klezmer Ensemble

Description

Chicago Klezmer Ensemble is known for its elegant and knowledgeable performance style that retains the earthy, human, and expressive qualities that give klezmer music a direct contact with its listeners. Klezmer music – Jewish instrumental music of Eastern Europe – possesses a unique language to be discovered, developed, and extended to create a balance between past and future. The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble musicians meet this task through their remarkable ability to draw out and amplify the unique characteristics from the core of the klezmer repertoire which enables them to perform the music in an authentic manner and extend the style through new ideas and compositions.

Work Sample

A medley of freylachs. Freylach, which literally means 'happy', is a standard dance form in klezmer music; as you can see, the audience availed themselves of the open dance floor. This is the first nine minutes of a medley that eventually lasted nearly 30!

Here, Kurt Bjorling takes the lead on clarinet, with Eve Monzingo on tsimbl, Joshua Huppert and Liz Johnson on violin, and Al Ehrich on bass.

A medley of 4 'KHOSIDLS,' three of which we learned from recordings Dave Tarras made in 1924. With Kurt Bjorling, clarinet, bass clarinet, accordion; Eve Monzingo, piano; Joshua Huppert, violin; and Alan Ehrlich, double bass.

The first work sample is an excerpt from a live performance at Evanston S.P.A.C.E., June 2010. It shows some of our typical performance repertoire, taken from the history of Jewish instrumental music and the Klezmer tradition. The second work sample comes from an early recordings of ours we did in 1989, showing the genesis of the group and the longevity and consistency of our band. 

History

The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble began forming in 1983 and gave its first performances under that name in the Spring of 1984. Over the next five years many friends and colleagues joined at various times, with different combinations of instruments, large groups and small, as 'Chicago Klezmer Ensemble.' In December, 1987, the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble made its first recordings. The band had five members then, but the most effective pieces were recorded by smaller units: two trios and a duet. At the beginning of 1989 the band solidified into a core group of four musicians, all of whom are still in the band now, thirteen years later; Kurt Bjorling (myself), Al Ehrich (since 1984), Joshua Huppert (1988) and Eve Monzingo (1989). Since then,  the group has played in countless traditional and contemporary settings, including for weddings, bar-mitzvahs, performance art centers, music venues, and synagogues.

Artistic Vision

Musicality is the central value of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and it is this value that they have discovered in the Jewish klezmer repertoire and style. While many Jewish-American klezmer music groups have subordinated musical taste to ethnic nostalgia, this ensemble looks to the essence of the musical structures underlying klezmer music and takes these as the starting point. For that reason they are both extremely "traditional", reflecting pre-immigration East European Jewish musical style, and "avant-garde", creating original arrangements and successful new compositions.