The Klezmatics at YIVO on November 19th: 2nd installment of an interview with Lorin Sklamberg

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013, The Klezmatics will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at YIVO’s 88th Annual Benefit Dinner and will perform excerpts of a work-in-progress based on the Letters to Afar installation by Péter Forgács and The Klezmatics, (featuring YIVO’s unique collection of Polish Jewish home movies from the 1930s) at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Péter Forgács will also be at the event.

The Klezmatics are world-renowned superstars of klezmer. Since their emergence from New York City’s East Village in 1986, they have revitalized Yiddish music for the 21st century. The band has helped to change the face of contemporary Yiddish culture, not least through their career-long research and use of materials found in the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings. They have performed in more than 20 countries, released ten acclaimed albums and served as the subject of a feature-length documentary film, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

On October 9, 2013, The Klezmatics’ lead vocalist Lorin Sklamberg, who is also YIVO’s Sound Archivist, was interviewed by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman. (This is the second of a 2-part series.)

RN: The Klezmatics is one of the grand old bands of the klezmer revival. Many of the other bands that got their start 25 or more years ago are gone. How have you been able to keep yourselves fresh and exciting as a band?

LS: The way that The Klezmatics has kept going all these years is to find interesting projects and different kinds of focuses to keep us challenged. Those may be things like this film project, or working with other musicians in different disciplines, with dancers, or with playwrights, or other sorts of artists by whom we can be inspired, and who are, I hope, inspired by what we do, too. That, I think, has kept us going for a long time.

And we like playing together. I don’t know that I could find anything more fulfilling than this, having pretty much found my artistic expression as a grown-up through this music and through this band. For me personally, it’s been a great gift in my life.

RN: What keeps you playing Jewish music? As you mentioned, you do collaborations with other artists and other people working in different musical traditions.

LS: What keeps me interested in Yiddish music is, for one thing, that it’s my music – it’s the music of my family and my heritage. That might sound a little corny, but it’s true. It feels like at this point that I own this in my own sort of way. I don’t feel as grounded anywhere else as I do in this culture and this music. And there are always new things to explore.

Also, YIVO being one of the constants in my life as a Jewish musician, we’ve all explored what there are of these commercial recordings that were made from the turn of the last century until around the 1950s or the ‘60s, that form the core of the Max and Frieda Archives of Recorded Sound. People are now going back further, and going to things that are a little more rough-hewn. So people are really becoming more interested in the more one-of-a-kind materials that are here – the field recordings of Ruth Rubin and Ben Stonehill, of Benedict Stambler, and of the Hasidic community. My colleagues in the Yiddish music scene and I are delving into this material because there are things that haven’t been explored, and it’s a new source of repertoire and of linguistic and performance information. Finding out about all of these incredible amateur singers who really had something to say for their own culture is really exciting. One of the things that has certainly kept me going is this continued discovery of new things. Which aren’t actually so new! But they’re new to me, so that’s been very important. And, of course, like I said, YIVO’s been involved in all of this in a very major way.

RN: That leads me to my next question. What kind of balance do you try to maintain between tradition and innovation in terms of your interpretation of this music?

LS: I don’t think so much about balancing old and new. I think that it’s whatever feels good and whatever suits a given piece or a given project, and sometimes that means something that is more of an older style, and sometimes that means fusing it with something else. I think it just depends on the given situation. You know, I’ve been doing this for so long that it’s much easier to do that sort of thing – fusing different parts of my musical vocabulary, or what’s in my brain, and what’s out there. I think it’s still challenging, but it’s much easier to do than it was at the beginning when we were just sort of finding our way into this music.

RN: What kind of different musical backgrounds do people in the group bring into the mix?

LS: The people in The Klezmatics come from most contemporary musical backgrounds that you can imagine: classical music, jazz, Balkan music, music from Latin America. I grew up in L.A., in a by-and-large Hispanic community – my mom, in fact, was a Spanish major in college – and so I heard a lot of Mexican music growing up. As well as Afro-Cuban music, salsa.

I myself was influenced by Israeli popular music, to be honest. It’s a music that draws from a lot of influences, and there were creative, melodic things that Israeli musicians came up with when trying to create a culture where one didn’t exactly exist, that was specific to where they were, for instance, after 1948. Like a lot of suburban Jewish kids, I grew up listening to that. I didn’t hear much Yiddish music when I was growing up. So that’s definitely in my make-up.

There are two players in The Klezmatics who are well-versed in Irish dance music and song styles.  American folk music is also an influence, and now The Klezmatics have done this project with the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, so that background on my part and on the part of the other people in the band was helpful in understanding where Woody Guthrie was coming from. I’m sure there’s other stuff, too. Scandinavian – Paul [Morrissett] plays Scandinavian string instruments – so there’s that, too. There’s a huge range of styles and knowledge of repertoire from other musical cultures that we draw from.

RN: Where are you finding your most enthusiastic audiences these days? I know you tour frequently.

LS: It’s hard to say, hard to generalize about. I would say that when we play in the places where Yiddish music comes from – which is to say Poland or the former Soviet Union – that even the non-Jewish population really gets it. They understand this music in a way that people who didn’t grow up with it don’t. There’s a certain kind of simpatico reaction that we get from audiences there, which is ironic. It brings to mind Ruth Gruber’s book, Virtually Jewish, about places where there is Jewish culture but no Jews. Sometimes, those are the places that are the most enthusiastic.

RN: Is that because the music is rooted in those areas, so there’s something that people can relate to musically? Is it for emotional reasons? Or both?

LS: Certainly in Poland, I think it’s a little of both. I know that someone in Poland said to Lisa [Gutkin] in our band that she felt as if they’d been robbed of a culture that was in Poland, that had been taken away from them – that they wanted it back. So there’s definitely, on the one hand, sort of a familiarity, and on the other hand, it’s something that they feel emotional about, in a way that I think, for the most part, is genuine. It’s something that we experience all the time when we go over there. And there’s nothing like playing for a crowd of thousands of people, and having them all dancing. Poland – and in Germany, too – but definitely the Krakow Festival in Poland. Playing there in their big festival finale concert on Saturday night is one of the highlights of our year.

RN: How does it feel to be getting a Lifetime Achievement Award? Weird?

LS: [Laughs] It feels strange because I feel that my musical life is far from over. But I like to think of it as an encouragement. A Lifetime Encouragement Award to continue on the path that you’re on, and to sort of recognize what you’ve done. That’s really gratifying, especially since I’ve worked here at YIVO for about 20 years, all told. My mother, Libby Sklamberg [who died in 2010] would have loved this.

Interview transcribed by Alix Brandwein and edited for length and clarity.

Attend the event.