Klezmer

Klezmer is the instrumental dance and celebration music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, performed by small ensembles led by clarinet or violin. Its repertory of freylekhs, bulgars, horas and doinas is built on synagogue-derived modes, decorated with characteristic ornaments, bends, trills and sobbing slides called krechts, and shaped by the phrasing of Yiddish song and cantorial singing. Carried to the United States by immigration around 1900, klezmer was recorded extensively in the 1910s and 1920s, faded in the middle of the century, and was revived from the 1970s by musicians who rebuilt it from early records and surviving masters.