Here are a few recordings of klezmer music. A couple are fairly traditional, and a couple of the arrangements are bit more contemporary.

davemckeown.co.uk

Jewish Music, Dave McKeown

Some of you know I gig regularly with a Klezmer band called Hazaar. We haven't got around to making recordings yet so I thought I'd represent that for now with a couple of "one take" recordings of my favourite Klezmer tunes on clarinet. This one is a Nigun, a melody from the Jewish liturgy that has  migrated into a secular instrumental. This is quite a common and acceptable thing in Jewish music. The Christian equivalent would be a tune from the mass being played as a wedding dance I guess. Anyway, it's a wonderful melody; the abrupt key changes and shifts in mode are very typical and suggest emotional ambiguity and complexity; this is what attracts me to Jewish culture in general and Jewish music in particular.

Long Live The Nigun, Trad. arr. Dave McKeown

Here is the second of recent klezmer clarinet recordings. This one is a dance that neatly describes the hustle and bustle of the 7.40 evening rush hour in Odessa, Ukraine.

7.40, Trad. arr. Dave McKeown

I recorded two contrasting klezmer tunes recently and that was all I planned to do, but my good friend in Chile, Francisco, sent me an intriguing track he had made, mixing my Long Live the Nigun with a drone, a rabbi, and a beautiful Jewish cello melody. This track produced all sorts of gorgeous accidental sounds, but to do full justice to the melody and Francisco's idea I decided to record a brand new clarinet part to fit. 

The clarinet you hear on this track was the very first take, and is completely unedited. Things don't usually come that easily! Listening back I got a strong feeling for Gustav Meyrink's powerful novel, The Golem, a hallucinatory depiction of the Ghetto in Prague, full of flickering shadows and dark alleys. If you ever visit Prague, read it before you go. So I added the bells of St Vitus' Cathedral in Prague…impossible to describe how physical an experience it is to stand in the square and listen to these bells in full swing…almost frightening.

In the meantime, I can thoroughly recommend Francisco's page, https://soundcloud.com/ttaattoo
He is a master of combining samples in meaningful and wonderfully creative ways and his gentle spirit shines through everything he does.

The Golem's Lullaby, Dave McKeown, with TTAATTOO (Francisco Casas Errazuriz)

Old klezmer tune gets the electronic treatment...most parts are played on the WX11 wind synth...this is a remixed and generally improved version...uploaded November 2011


Firn di Mekhutonim Aheym, Trad. arr. Dave McKeown

I am a working full-time musician, teaching, performing, composing, recording and arranging, and my gigs in the last few years have included jazz combo, big band jazz, folk, Irish traditional, rock, soul, latin, klezmer, funk, orchestral, chamber, minimal techno, musical theatre and more, so, safe to say, I’ll have a go at anything. 

I'm a firm believer in demolishing boundaries between genres, cultures, languages and ultimately people, and Soundcloud is a terrific place where all this can happen.