Don Byron reflects in the "Forward"
One of the most meaningful parts of the KCB reunion held for KlezmerShack's 10th birthday about five years ago, was listening to Don Byron show how much he had absorbed of Klezmer, and then to spin it with his own magical sense of jazz. Truth be told, that mixing of jazz and Jewish is so different from the European klezmer that it is really another genre, entirely. But, I digress. What Byron does with jazz and klezmer is his own, and a treat. Here, he talks with folks at the Forward about his Mickey Katz discovery:
How Don Byron Brought Klezmer Music And Mickey Katz Back To Life: Clarinetist Looks Back At His Triumph, by Jake Marmer, published Mar 29, 2013
"… If you were trying to be hip, and hip meant being assimilated, it was going to be hard to face the thing you ran away from, especially at first. I know many of the downtown types had never seriously thought about doing that music, though many would deny my impact on them; however, you couldn't really argue with the crowds we were getting. That probably broke the ice for many of them. The first anniversary of the premiere of 'Mick at the Knit' suddenly became a downtown festival, including all the revival acts and the downtown folks.…" [More]