Michael Winograd / Tanz! Live

So smooth! When Dave Tarras made the original Tanz! recording back in 1956 with his son-in-law Sammy Musiker, he was the master of the klezmer clarinet. This recreation, by clarinet maestro Michael Winograd with a master band to replicate that original sound, is flawless and reminds me of how wonderfully ballroom smooth and jazz exciting that original recording was. The original was largely ignored at the time. Klezmer was on its way out. So was jazz, in truth. But Tarras and Musiker had fused the two in what would become, in the hands of folks like the Epstein Brothers, Howie Lees, Paul Pincus, Ray Musiker, and others, the American klezmer that was revived and transmogrified again in the 1980s. The is the album that defined that sound.

Above all, the music is smooth, compelling. It is hard to sit here typing while "Rumania" or Sam's Bulgar" dance out of the speakers and I could be moving about the room. This isn't the old-country jazz that Tarras, Brandwine, and so many others brought to this country at the turn of the last century. This is the Americanized version, with the confident assimilated swing of American Fifties Jewish optimism at its best and the kids moved out of the Lower East Side beyond the Bronx and Queens to the nicer suburbs.

It's worth noting the inclusion of song titles that evoke the "east"—Israel was new, and titles such as the sinuous "Der Yemenite Tanz" may have had little to do with Israel or Yemenites, but were intended to evoke just that to an American Jewish audience. By the same token, the jazzed up, confident "Papirosn," bears little resemblance to the sad, slow weepy song so very popular among Yiddish singers today. Smooth, silky, "Silkene Pajamas" captures the zeitgeist perfectly. ("Ari," my grandmother said to me during the 1980s when I lived briefly in the Lower East Side, "We worked so HARD to leave the Lower East Side. People say that the Lower East Side has gone downhill. Let me tell you, it had no downhill to go. It was terrible! And now you are back??")

We live in times when a reliable pick-me-up, played by the world's best klezmorim, is just the right tonic. If you don't have your own copy of the Tarras original, and even if you do and want the excitement of the music played LIVE! this is the recording you need. Don't thank me. Blame Winograd. And Dave Tarras, Sam Musiker, and an earlier generation of musicians who defined what was once (and will perhaps be part of our current intersectionality, again) the soundtrack of American-Jewish life.

Reviewed by Ari Davidow, 1-June 2026 .

Songlist

1. Rumania (0:52)
2. Tipsy 2:12
3. The Roumanian Fantasy 3:07
4. Tango 1:13
5. Tanz! Bulgar 4:28
6. Sam's Bulgar 5:30
7. Der Yemenite Tanz 7:25
8. Rumania 3:32
9. Der Neier Doina 3:57
10. Der Cholum Fun Yid 2:48
11. Sam Shpielt in D 2:56
12. Silkene Pajamas 3:02
13. A Bulgar 3:51
14. Papirossen 4:03

Music performed from transcriptions of the original recording made by Michael Winograd

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