When were you first exposed to Klezmer music?
I grew up in the Bronx in the 60s. Those were the last moments of live Klezmer: there were still weddings, and of course parties at bar mitzvahs. An ensemble played at these events whose members all came from Klezmer families. When the old people wanted to dance, they planed a Doina, or a couple of Bulgars, Freylekhs and of course a Hora - but this was just ten percent of the repertoire. Everybody from my generation was embarrassed that they didn't play Jimi Hendrix. That's why they gave it up: it didn't speak to our cultural context, or at least that's what we believed.
How did the decision come about to involve yourself with music from the Carpathian Basin?
When I first came to Hungary in '72, I saw a report on TV with Béla Halmos and Ferenc Sebő. It was as if an arrow pierced my heart: I too had to do this. Fortunately, my uncle was a simple man, a butcher, in Veszprém, and knew a lot of people in the Bakony region. He bought me a violin and took me to a Gypsy village where they played music well. At the time, Bakony and Vas Counties were like Transylvania: there was a Szekler flautist in the neighbourhood, and there was a zither player in Veszprém from whom I started to learn to play the zither. After a year, I went to Transylvania too. I didn't just look for Jewish music, but for Eastern European folk music.
From whom were you able to learn Klezmer?
I was fortunate to meet with the Balkan Arts Centerfolk dance ensemble in the US around '74 and '75. The members of the group looked for the old members of New York's ethnic groups, such as Italians, Greek lyricists and Macedonian bagpipe players. Among them were two living legends of Klezmer: Dave Tarras and Andy Statman. When I moved to Boston, I got to know Matt Darriau and Frank London, musicians about the same age as I was who had been drawn to Klezmer. At the time, I still didn't play Klezmer, rather Balkan and reggae music, and I mostly played percussion. Then I almost got into the first Klezmer conservatory band. I went to the first rehearsal, but I couldn't read the music well enough....But from them I got my first repertoire cassette, and, because you could buy vinyl LPs for 25 cents at the time, I bought a record player and an awful lot of records. There was a time when I only listened to music from before '35, including a lot of old Klezmer.
In '88 you decided to move here because you wanted to be closer to this treasury of song?
Yes. I got to know Téka and the group Új Stilus in America. I helped them with their tours, I translated for them, and I tried to learn to fiddle a little. And when I got a free plane ticket, I came here. I planned to go back to America, but I got a job right away as an English teacher. I started playing dance house music only in pubs, but in '89 Méta pulled me into a dance house. At the time, dance house was like a big jam session. I couldn't really play Transylvanian, but everybody was interested in Jewish music. Jewish intellectuality was a tabu subject at the time, which is why it was so popular. Later, the writer János Kőbanyai looked me up and wanted to make a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof. I had 8-10 cassettes, we got together and made a programme of them. That became the Budapest Klezmer Band.
Did you feel you had other musical plans?
The biggest problem was that here, unlike in New York, there wasn't a Klezmer community and there weren't sources. Sándor Kányádi's Transylvanian Yiddish Folk Songs was the only book to be published on the subject. Basically, I could only rely on what I asked and researched from the old people in the Jewish Charity Hospital or in Transylvania. Then there were Gypsies who also played this music. I met Itzik Schwarcz, the director of the last Yiddish theatre in 1990, when he was 90 years old. He became my mentor, and it was under the influence of his direction that we put together the first Di Naye Kapelye album that was to sound like a Moldavian band from the '20s.
Today Hungarian or Yiddish folk music is played by Gypsies in areas of Ukraine and Romania - because of this it obviously can change. What were the final results of the huge collection efforts on your earlier trips to Transylvania or of the recent Yiddish-Roma Music project?
I came to realise in the course of collecting that I have to examine my own people as an ethnographer in America would study the dying or dead cultures of Afro-Americans or Native Americans, making it my own in the process. Did the culture disappear? Did it get smaller? Did it move away, did it hide? These are important questions waiting for answers. In Hungary, researchers of folklore culture whine "Oh no, the Csangos are being Romanianised", but there is never a pure culture, neither here nor there. I think that we Jews, and Gypsies too, find a rich base for our cultures in the Carpathian Basin. Some people play Klezmer like jazz, I play it like an ethnographer. I don't approach it as something retrospective, rather, like a foreign language, I learn the grammar, the vocabulary, then I use these tools. Because Klezmer is not just a repertoire or a celebration, but an aesthetic. It is our responsibility not to allow it to be damaged. For this reason, we played our last several concerts together with the Técsői Band, who have an hour-long Jewish repertoire, so the tradition could live further. Because tradition is behind us and ahead of us.
Interviewer: András Párniczky / Source: Fidelio
