Joel Rubin

In San Francisco from 1986 to 1989 he played with the Joel Rubin Klezmer Band, which included Michael Alpert and Stuart Brotman.

[1] In 1988, he started a new duo with accordionist Alan Bern, which Brotman and Alpert soon joined as well; the group eventually became Brave Old World.

[7][3] In 1994, he founded his next project, which still performs to this day, the Joel Rubin Ensemble, which includes Kálmán Balogh on cimbalom, David Chernyavsky on violin, and Claudio Jacomucci on accordion.

[10][11][3] Over the years, Rubin has appeared on stage with a number of other traditional performers such as the Epstein Brothers, Moshe "Moussa" Berlin, Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, Leon Schwartz, Sid Beckerman, Pete Sokolow, Danny Rubinstein, Ben Bazyler, and Leopold Kozlowski, Vladimir Terletsky and Bronya Sakina.

He noted in a recent interview that there was very little information available in English about klezmer at that time, which motivated him to begin his own research into the genre in the early 1980s.

[1] Rubin's research into the Epstein Brothers Orchestra in the 1990s led to the creation of a documentary film directed by Stefan Schwietert called A Tickle in the Heart (1996).

[16][17][18] His 2001 dissertation at City, University of London, examined the performance style of klezmer clarinetists Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein.

[19] His most recent book, New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century: The Music of Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras (University of Rochester Press, 2020) revisits those two clarinetists.