Klezmer, Jazz, or Something

Pop Rock, Swing Jazz, Folk Rap, there are dozens of blended music genres, some better than others (Electro Swing is absolutely worth your time). So one day, while looking for something new to listen to, I tried out “Klezmer Jazz” in Google, just to see what I’d get.

What I got was a result from the Roaring Twenties: Joseph Cherniavsky’s Yiddish-American Jazz Band, an odd ensemble assembled by a young composer and cellist from Russia who gained fame for scoring the first American production of S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk. Cherniavsky’s band only lasted a few years, and they put out ditties such as “Dem Zaydn Tants,“ “Oy Vey Titina,”and my personal favorite, “Nokh havdole baym rebn,” which comes in with a staticky turntable before launching into a bombastic clamor of strings and brass that could be straight from a film score—maybe Max Steiner’s The Searchers, or Franz Waxman’s score to Sunset Boulevard.

As it happens, sometime after Cherniavsky’s not very Klezmer and very not jazzy band dispersed, he found himself an appointment out west. A B’nei Brith Magazine article from 1928, brimming with pride, declared that “Hebrew Musician Heads Universal Music Dept”:

Joseph Cherniavsky, for years leader and conductor of the Hebrew Symphony Orchestra known as “Hazimrah,” with which he traveled over three-fourths of the glove in the interests of Hebrew culture . . . has recently been appointed musical director at the Universal Studios by Carl Laemmle . . . When asked what his greatest ambition is, his eyes dimmed with tears and he replied in a voice filled with emotion: “To build in Palestine a symphony orchestra which will remain an integral part of the spiritual life of the people and a pride to national Jewish culture.”

The same issue celebrates the generosity of “Outstanding Jewish Financiers of Los Angeles,” including Carl Laemmle. Yet despite Cherniavsky’s passion for Jewish culture and Laemmle’s apparent generosity as a financier, their collaboration seemed to have ended on a sour note. B’nei Brith Magazine neglected to report it, but less than a year later Variety announced “Cherniavsky Leaving” in a news update with no further details. I’ve dug around for more, but nothing’s turned up, so if any readers know what axed the relationship between the Klezmer cellist and the film titan, let me know.

Klezmer is a hard genre to enjoy—or at least I find it hard to enjoy without feeling as though I’m just engaging in shtetl kitsch. That’s been a problem for a while, though. In Henry Sapoznik’s 1999 book Klezmer! Jewish Music From Old World to our World, he writes that Cherniavsky’s band was really a vaudeville act:

The idea was simple: get some of the most accomplished Jewish-style players, dress them up alternately as Cossacks or Hasidim, and give them tight, sophisticated arrangements.

To top it off, the musicians played “before a curtain painted with huge grotesque caricatures of klezmorim.” Cherniavsky was a great musician, and maybe his act shows that there isn’t really a clear line between kitsch and serious performance—for klezmer, or any genre. Just as the members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band knew all too well.