Klezmer, as a musical form, is a bit of a rambler.
Like any music of a people scattered by diaspora, danceable Yiddish rhythms pop up at music festivals everywhere from New York and Chicago to our own International Festival at the Overture Center each spring.
The difference between klezmer, or Jewish secular music, and its Brazilian, African and Celtic stage-mates is that there’s no “old world” where the history still lives. Instead, about 5,000 klezmer recordings made in the U.S. between 1895 and 1942 are essentially the wellspring of the entire genre.