Customer Reviews

Future & Past

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I bought this album as an LP when it first came out and was really glad to be able to get it as a CD. This is an excellent klezmer band, one of the pioneers of the Klezmer revival of the 1970's

This was the first Kapelye recording and it is, in my opinion, one of the great works of what I suppose should be called the klezmer revival. Klezmer music recorded in the United States over the last thirty years has been of remarkably high quality, whatever a particular group's shtick may have been; Kapelye remains my own favorite. I have a particular affinity for historical consciousness, what klezmer fan doesn't, but this ensemble addresses the historical reality of a given piece even more pointedly than Henkus Netsky and his fabulous Klezmer Conservatory Band. You might say that K.C.B. reproduce old music, but Kaplye get into the spirit of it. Henry Sapoznik, the leader of the group who had wandered out of the generalized folk/bluegrass milieu of the Sixties and Seventies into Jewish music, has since become the top authority on klezmer, associated with YIVO and the Yiddish Book Center in Amheart Mass. (though he has, boruch hu, a lot of competition; Yale Strom comes to mind, as well as the aforementioned Henkus Netzky).
If I had a criticism of this memorable album, it would be that it is unusually "euro-centric"; one might say that klezmer really blossomed in America, yet the only really American pieces here are "Motl der operator", a hurdy-gurdy ditty about a kleyn menshele obeidently walking the picket line and slain by a company goon ("a gengster mit a botl")and Abe Schwartz' Famous Sher. Just a hypothetical criticism, and anyway Kapelye makes it up on the later issues, which are a lot more norteamericano.