As a professional performing and recording ensemble focused on recreating the lost sounds of early 20th century klezmer bands, The Klezmorim achieved crossover success, garnering a Grammy nomination in 1982 for their album Metropolis and selling out major concert venues across North America and Europe, including Carnegie Hall (twice in 1983) and L'Olympia in Paris.
[6] Liberman spent months cataloguing the treasure trove of Yiddish records salvaged by Seymour Fromer, firebrand director of the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley CA and studying the music.
But failing to connect with the organized Jewish community—which at the time regarded The Klezmorim's unique repertoire of long-forgotten Yiddish instrumental tunes as disturbingly alien—the band made its initial reputation performing at mainstream public venues such as folk clubs and dance halls.
Ticket sales were boosted by same-day live radio or TV broadcasts, or by unannounced appearances on streetcorners and in public plazas – which were sometimes, to the band's amusement, broken up by the police.
The Klezmorim acknowledged their own street-busker roots in a series of collectively written minimalist stage spectacles melding New Vaudeville with agitprop, evoking the social turmoil that propelled 19th-century Eastern European klezmer musicians into jazz-age America.
[15] The Klezmorim's rowdy genre-bending reached its peak in a 1983 collaboration with The Flying Karamazov Brothers, appearing jointly as a juggling/klezmer supergroup at Stanford University and San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts.
Their audiences spanned the spectrum of demographic diversity, including small children, "screaming teenaged girls,"[21] prison inmates, "college students and white-collar workers in their 20s and 30s,"[22] Jews, African-Americans, and Indian people.
[31][32][33] European audiences, approaching klezmer music via familiarity with Romani musicians and traveling circus acts, responded to The Klezmorim's street-party vibe[34]—particularly in The Netherlands, Germany, and France, where the band headlined at jazz festivals and achieved minor popstardom.
[37] The Klezmorim's repertoire mostly consisted of pre-1930 Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian Yiddish instrumental music – bluesy, moody doinas or lively dances such as the joc, sirba, bulgar, volakh, freylekhs, honga, and kolomeyke – gleaned from 78-rpm discs and manuscripts made available by the Judah Magnes Museum,[38] Professor Martin Schwartz of UC Berkeley,[39] and other collectors including jazz historian Richard Hadlock.
By 1979 the band had coalesced into a sextet featuring clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and drums – with members sometimes doubling on additional instruments like xylophone, banjo,[48] Marxophone, or baritone horn, and occasional guest artists adding piccolo, piano, or violin.
In the span of an estimated twelve hundred performances, The Klezmorim experienced substantial turnover of personnel; this musical evolution gave a distinct character to each of the band's record albums.
Sitting in on various gigs, broadcasts, or recording sessions were another two dozen players, including violinists Miamon Miller and Sandra Layman, Bob Cohen of Di Naye Kapelye, clarinetist Marcelo Moguilevsky, and Terry Zwigoff and Robert Crumb of the Cheap Suit Serenaders.
[1] New Orleans one-man band Rick "Professor Gizmo" Elmore and trumpeter Brian "Hairy James" Wishnefsky introduced streetwise theatrics early in The Klezmorim's career.