Related and not-so-related Jewish Music pages

Links from specific klezmer bands, are located with the specific information about each band--consult the klezband list. Similarly, personal websites are listed in people's entries on the klezcontacts page.

• The Jewish Music WebCenter, http://www.jmwc.org, attempts to bring an academic perspective to Jewish Music on the web. The mission of the JMWC is: "to provide a forum for gathering and presenting information on academic, organizational, and personal activities in Jewish music today. Information is provided to encourage and support the enjoyment, study, creation and pursuit of knowledge of Jewish music."

• Klezmer Academy, curated by clarinetist Sherry Mayrent, has klezmer tunes, discussions of klezmer theory, practical lessons on style, musings on current and past trends in the music and its performance, and other topics on all aspects of klezmer and its history.

• One of the fascinating stories of early klezmer is that of the Belf Romanian Orchestra. About all we know about them is that they now appear to have been Ukrainian, and recorded some wonderfully florid klezmer tunes that continue to be prized. Jeffrey Wollock summarized what little we know of the band in his lovely "European Recordings of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, 1911-1914," (ARSC Journal V28, N1, Spring 1997). But where can you get the recordings? Fans such as Kurt Bjorling have been known to make recordings. Anthologies of early recordings usually have one or two. Now Mark Rubin has made 27 MP3s available for everyone's listening pleasure: www.belfsmusic.com.

• A French contact writes: "A great website about the wonderful Yiddish singer and actor Aaron Lebedeff opened at the address aaronlebedeff.free.fr There is a French version and an English version. Maybe I will make a Yiddish and a Russian version. Enjoy with the lyrics, the mp3s, the complete 3-pages biography, an enormous number of pictures (available in a fews weeks), and buy the two-CD set with many songs of Lebedeff for only 25 $ (available in 2 weeks)!

• Peter, of the Aaron Lebedeff site, spotted this interesting source of digitized, out-of-print Jewish recordings: savethemusic.com. The website states that it exists to:

  Save the Music is a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of cultural music through its digitization and placement on the Internet. Founded by Roman Ajzen a few years ago, Save the Music has already become the leading collector of Jewish Music LP's in the world. Just as important is our goal to become a virtual meeting place for performers to interact and post upcoming concerts, events and releases. We aim to preserve the past and assist its renaissance in the future.

• It looks like someone at the Chicago Public Library has created a study guide for Klezmer - the first on the web, I think. This is great! www.chipublib.org/008subject/001artmusic/jewish/jewishlinks.html

• KlezmerGuide.com is a comprehensive cross-reference to klezmer recordings and sheet music sources. It is maintained by Allen Lutins.

• Elie Rosenblatt points out that there is a list for the Israeli Klezmer scene: see groups.google.com/d/forum/israelklezmer?hl=en

• Merlin Shepherd writes: "Just to let any clarinetists amongst us know that there is a brand new section of the Greek and Turkish clarinet forum dedicated to Klezmer clarinet. I'm moderating it, so you'll be on friendly ground straight away! … www.gtc-music1.com … If any of you want to go there then we can all discuss the various issues involved … subjects currently under scrutiny include: Ornamentation, Phrasing, Tonality, Timbre and general technical section Vocal Ornaments transferred to instrumental playing Repertoire, Genres and Crossover. There's also a category dedicated to Jewish cooking!

• In the San Francisco Bay Area, KlezCalifornia has a guide to Yiddish culture resources. Check out their website at www.klezcalifornia.org.

• I have heard of two lists for discussing Israeli music this month. "IsraelMusic" seems to be a calendar of Jewish music in Israel (as opposed to Israeli music, which may not have a Jewish-specific context?). The listings come out about once a week. See groups.yahoo.com/group/IsraelMusic/ for more info. At the same time, Ben Bresky has started up a discussion group for discussion of Israeli music (some of which he plays on his radio show, The Beat. For information about his mailing list, see hgroups.yahoo.com/group/TheBeatOfIsrael.

• Hello, I would like to invite anyone who is interested, to visit (and use) a klezmer bulletin board that I have started up. This bulletin board, The Klezmorim Forum, can be found at http://www.sneezy.org/clarinet/BBoard/list.html?f=2 . Although sneezy.org is a clarinet website, anything related to Jewish music is fair game on The Klezmorim Forum. [This seems to be a site of particular interest to K-12 students just being introduced to clarinet and, in this case, klezmer. ari]

• Where would klezmer be without klezmer dancing? Helen Winkler writes: "I have set up a web page about Yiddish dance and would like to invite ... feedback and input. My goal is to share information about these dances and to make it more available. I welcome additional dance descriptions, articles etc. etc. I am new to the area of Yiddish dance. The latest location (7/23/99) is at: www.yiddishdance.com/"

• Speaking of dancing, every few months I get a question about the origins of that great traditional Jewish dance, "Miserlou." The dance was created in 1945, in Buffalo, I believe. Or, I could go read the details myself, and know for sure. Great story! And it turns out that there is more. We all know of the great Dick Dale surf guitar version, but did ya'll know that the rap group Black-Eyed Peas sampled that cut on their album Monkey Business? (Listed to "Pumped Up")? In the meantime, folk dance maven Helen Winkler has come up with the Israeli connection., as well as additional info here explaining how international folk dancers traveling to Israel helped popularize the dance there. Ah, but the song, itself, goes way back. For the (definitive to me) best detail and lots of great samples, check out Dinosaur Gardens.

• Christina Crowder, formerly of Di Naye Kapelye, has started a fascinating page on Jewish Music in Romania.

• Shawn Weaver, of Seattle's Mazeltones and Shawn's Kugel, has put together a wonderful musician's klezmer resources with sheet music gifs, some sound files, musician jokes--the whole kugel! Visit at http://members.aol.com/shawnkugel/kugel.html. This is the sort of site I always hoped someone would put together--lots of good resources and a whole different perspective and set of klezmer interests from my own!

• Seattle Klezmer is a page maintained Bernice Maslan: "Seattle's klezmer resource for klezmer theory, rhythm, modes, local klezmer performances and bands, open klezmer jam, camp and event listings."

• Here is another source of online klezmer sheet music, from the irrepressible Yakov Chodosh.

• Dick Rosenberg spotted this one: "For any of you who are interested, the Manchester Klezmer of Manchester, England, maintain an excellent website with a very nice library of sheetmusic of klez tunes for C-intruments, Bb-instruments, and "C2" (e.g. Cello). There are midi files to hear the tunes and .pdf files of the sheetmusic for free download. Here's the web address: www.manchesterklezmer.org/pages/repertoire.html

• Free downloadable Jewish sheet music for Chanukah with melody line, Hebrew text, English translation & transliteration. Enjoy singing with your family or congregation: excellent for sing-alongs. Great supplementation for Jewish homeschoolers & Bar/Bat Mitzvah preparation. I will be adding music for Shabbat & the other holidays soon. hebrewthroughsong.blogspot.com

• Detlev Mueller began the first German Klezmer Pages several years ago, and these have grown nicely. Materials are available in English and in German.

• More recently, Stefan Bauer has added a second German Klezmer site, www.klezmer.de focusing on german and international klezmer music. "It is supposed to give an overview to the music, especially what's happening in germany. The site has grown rapidly since the last few month with 3 people's writing." (Stefan Bauer, 11/21/99). Very attractive. Primarily in German.

• From Guenther Schoeller, posting to the Jewish Music mailing list, following a discussion on the availability of the much-requested Isak Loberan klezmer books: … a website where you can get more information about Isak Loberans' klezmer books and the CD. And where you can order. Here is the URL: www.loberan-klezmer.de.

• At last! A page for French Klezmer devotees. Here is "La Gazette Klezmer": lagazetteklezmer.free.fr.

• Michel Borzykowski maintains this Geneva, Switzerland Klezmer page in French and English.

• There is now a Swedish Klezmer Association, which maintains www.klezmer.nu. The text is in both Swedish and English, but the music is still klezmer.

• From Helen Winkler: "... there is a large collection of Yiddish song videos taken recently: www.youtube.com/user/aheymproject/videos. The videos are part of the Aheym project, www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/index.php/projects/aheym-project.html described as: ”The Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories (AHEYM—the acronym means "homeward" in Yiddish) includes approximately 800 hours of Yiddish-language interviews with 350 individuals, most of whom were born between 1900 and 1930. The interviews were conducted in Ukraine, Romania, Moldova.” There aren’t 350 up there yet, but there are quite a few to view.

• The burgeoning interest in Jewish music is bringing more and more incredible cantorial resources online. The newest is the Shul Music Web page where you will find online scans of music from the Blue Book and growing collections of Sulzer and Lewandowsky. (posted by ari, 16 Dec 2001).

• The Chazzanim Farband (Jewish Ministers Cantors' Association of America and Canada) has a new website. Jeffrey P. Lieuwen invites everyone interested in Chazzanut to have a look at www.thejmca.org.

• There is also a Cantor's mailing list, the shulmusic list: launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/jewishshulmusic.

• In addition to the shulmusic materials, above, Irwin Oppenheim maintains a "comprehensive site on Jewish liturgical music, with a large collection of cantorial sheet music, annotated links and background information." The site is sponsored by the Dutch Jewish portal "joods.nl". w.chazzanut.com

• Steve Weintraub writes to the Jewish-Music mailing list: "This may be old news, but while searching for a tune for "Shoshanos Yaakov" for Purim, I came across this incredible site of online, full-length nigun recordings, www.chassidus.com/audio/nigun/. There must be about 100 recordings, most with commentary in a real geshmakt chassidic yiddish. Many sound like vintage recordings. A real treasure trove."

• But wait, there's more! Andy Tannenbaum writes about www.piyut.org.il (and www.piyut.org.il/english/). They have well over 1000 recordings of piyutim (including nigunim).

• Yoel Taieb has set up a website devoted to nigun, www.nigun.info

• One of this site's first links was to a page about the Abuyadaya Jews by Matthew Meyer. That page is long gone, but it's best successor is probably this webpage by Kulanu, Kulanu: Abuyadaya who made contact with the Abuyadaya as a direct result of Meyer's webpage. A few years later, Rabbi Jeffrey Summit, of Tufts University, did a Smithsonian Folkways Recording of the music of the Abuyadaya Jews.

• It's full of cheesy, cheesy bad stuff, but also the occasional gem--and I like its spirit!: The Israeli-Jewish-Yiddish-Hebrew-Folk-Cultural Music Midi Free Library (There are lots of RealAudio sound files on this site, but no single place to find them, except by band, for performance extracts, on the Klezbands page. Look for the RealAudio logo (). and RealAudio is not the same as MIDI.

• Benjamin Laden, of "Benny and the Vildachayas," brings notice of a second midi page: http://www.redrival.com/shalom1/jewish/7.html

• A whole series of (polyphonic) klezmerarrangements are available on www.stifterhof.de. The arrangements are in different grades for 2-3 melody instruments, bass and Piano / git. of some famous trad. melodies. You can download midi, pdf und cap files

• There is a format called "abc" that is apparently a great way to encode music. If you know about the format, go directly to http://eddie.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/Klezmer/. Otherwise, Ernest Murphy has explained it on our mailto page.

• Pete Rushefsky located a wealth of good holiday-specific sound files from different Jewish communities in the Jerusalem National University Library Sound Archive, jnul.huji.ac.il/eng/music.html

• Yshai Ariaz writes: "I would like to signal you about the possibility of downloading the new jewish music generation on mp3, on the sites: www.jewishmp3.net. [It looks to me like these are new religious pop. ari]

• One of the most famous American Yiddish to pop music crossovers is "Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn," originally written by Sholom Secunda in Yiddish, then translated and made into a big hit. The Delaware Valley Rhythm and Blues Society, has gathered the relevant information about the song together on their "Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn" page, located by Michael Makiri.

• For the non-Orthodox religious song world, here's a site: Sounds Write Productions, Inc. is proud to announce a new website, www.jewishmusicdownloads.com, to help Jewish artists promote their downloadable music, websites and recordings. This centralized LISTING of websites where Jewish music is available to download legally keeps pace with our modern age of technology! We welcome any Jewish musician who has their music downloadable (either for purchase or for free) to join us in this endeavor. This applies to all artists, not only those who are currently distributed by Sounds Write. At www.jewishmusicdownloads.com you will find links to a wide variety of sites including iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch, MSN Music, RealRhapsody, eMusic, MainStreetMusic, YahooMusic, and others!!! Purchasing songs by your favorite Jewish recording artists like Debbie Friedman, Rabbi Joe Black, Julie Silver, Rick Recht, Dan Nichols, Sam Glaser, Beth Schafer, and others is now only a click away!

• Zemerl is the database of Jewish song. The website is a collection of Jewish song lyrics, clips, inforomation, as well as links to other resources. I've already accumulated a solid collection of songs and now I would love your feedback as well as your expertise in building the database even further. Visit www.zemerl.com. Come, check it out, add some of your favorite songs, add additional information to existing listings, and let me know what you think.

• The Yidlid—Yiddish songs—website, ייִדישע לידער. Each song in the site (almost thirty, and growing) is complete with Yiddish and translitterated text, French and English translations, vocabulary, score, audio file, links to recordings, etc. Visit rama01.free.fr/yidlid

• There are a slew of Yiddish song recordings available for listening online at Dr. Joe's Ethnic music page, joeschwartz.net/ethnic/.
• The most exciting website in this regard is probably the "Yiddish Song of the Week" blog, maintained by Itzik Gottesman, of The Forward. Each week, a new song, with words, commentary: yiddishsong.wordpress.com

• If your interest is in early cantorial recordings, you absolutely must check out http://sunsite.kth.se/feastlib/mrf/yinyue/youtai/cantors/cantoren.html

• Mark David, of The Yiddish Voice radio show asks: "Looking for information about Jewish, or especially a Yiddish, song? Try searching the wonderful Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Music archive's Yiddish Song Database:http://www.cs.uky.edu/raphael-cgi-bin/yidsong.cgi. Info at the home page:http://www.library.upenn.edu/friends/freed/freed1.html.

• Richard Aylward announces the launch of 'Der yidisher gramofon,' www.yidisher-gramofon.org which includes articles, broadcast info, and discographies of early Yiddish recordings. (posted 12/25/08)

• Itzik Gottesman, of the Forverts, notes that there is now a site offering Soviet Yiddish MP3s. The interface is crude, but check it out (in Yiddish and English) at yiddish.lenin.ru/indexen.html.

• Judith Pinnolis, who runs the Jewish Music WebCenter, found a site that demos on the web (and sells on CD) an amazingly useful, synthesizer-based Torah chanting tool. You can adjust the pitch and speed. Pick your Torah portion, and follow along with or without trup (the music markers). Visit the site at "Max Synagogue" (name derived from Max Headroom?). This is a "must-have" for anyone who occasionally (or more frequently) does Torah reading, or would like to. Bar and Bat mitzvoth will also appreciate it!

• Philip "Fishl" Kutner is a wonderful and warm person who lives south of San Francisco. He puts out a lovely (print) newsletter, Der Bay networking folks doing anything with Yiddish around the world. Check out his website at http://www.derbay.org/

• Mendele: Yiddish Literature and Language, is a wonderful mailing list about all things yiddish. For more information, they have a web page at http://yiddish-sources.com/mendele-mailing-list-yiddish-literature-and-language

• Sandra Layman reports that there is a very active Yiddish e-mail discussion group that started March 2003 called Yiddish Forum. Subscribe via groups.yahoo.com/group/1-YiddishForum/

• Helen Winkler spotted this one: The Yiddish American Digital Archive, yiddishsong.org. Some Real Audio versions of 78's available for listening.

• There are a growing number of online Sephardic Music resources. Judith Pinnolis discovered this archive, part of the Digital Libraries Initiative at UC Davis. They have mounted "much of the archive online from the collections of Samuel Armistead, Joseph Silvanman and Israel Katz. Armistead, of course, did one of the largest bibliographies and collection of Sephardic materials, starting nearly 50 years ago. This is an online bibliography, but also a searchable database of recorded music, field recordings, oral history and oral literature. It is truly remarkable. There are transcripts to follow while you listen to the field recording excerpts! It's keyword searchable in Spanish. There are also extensive histories online and other explanatory notes and articles full text. Try it, it's incredible. This is for everyone interested in the Sephardic heritage. flsj.ucdavis.edu/home/

• Bruce Rosenstock maintains a website for Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews, a multimedia archive of ballads and other oral literature in Judeo-Spanish collected from 1957 to 1993 by Samuel G. Armistead (University of California, Davis), the late Joseph H. Silverman (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Israel J. Katz. Web: www.sephardifolklit.org.

• Peter of the Aaron Lebedeff site spotted this French-language site about Judeo-Arabic music from Algeria: yafil.free.fr. It contains pictures, biographies, old recordings, MIDI files, sheet music.

• Paula Kirman maintains a world music site, and has a nice section on Jewish and Israeli music. She's always looking for additional links.

• One of these days I'm going to set up a section called "not klezmer but close enough." In the meantime, be sure to check out the Balkan tunes. A wonderful presentation of a favorite subject!

• All I know about them is that they printed an article by Tamar Adams, daughter of Sephardic music maven and ethnomusicologist Judith Cohen, and were gracious enough to let us make the article available here on the KlezmerShack. On the other hand, I am very pleased to be able to provide a link to the Canadian Society for Traditional Music, members.tripod.com/~sherretg/cstmhome.htm, publishers of "The Canadian Folk Music Bulletin".

• The Association of North Country Fiddlers (ANCF) of Northern New York State, USA, is the website of a regional fiddlers' association, but also strives to be an international clearinghouse for all things fiddle and other related acoustic music. Check out www.fiddlers.org for the world of fiddling.

• For accordion players, there is an amazing website maintained by Jack Woehr, www.well.com/~jax/rcfb/freereed.html who has also been heard to play a fine bulgar or accordion doina on occasion.

• "My brothers, Pooyan and Parham established two Yahoo groups. One for Hammered Dulcimer such as Persian santoor and so on...and the other for Plucked Stringed Instruments such as guitar and so on... groups.yahoo.com/group/hammered_dulcimer: 'This group is for all those instrumentalists interested in the hammered dulcimers of the world.' And if you know anybody around yourself that might be interested in plucked stringed instruments, then please let them know about: groups.yahoo.com/group/plucked_stringed/: This group is for all those instrumentalists interested in the plucked stringed instruments of the world."

• Djembe Online is the Scandinavian forum for world art, world music, world culture. They have numerous reviews of Klezmer and Jewish music, in both English and Danish. Web: www.djembe.dk

• For those whose Swedish is better than mine, do visit the online version of Lira magazine, the Swedish review of folk and world music.

• Likewise, for German lovers of folk musics around the world, the new site of Folker Magazine looks promising, at http://www.folker.de/.

• If you are more adept in English (or also adept in English) take a look at Roots World

• For folk music mavens, Sing Out! Magazine has been an essential stop since 1950. The site, so far, doesn't have much more than general information and ordering, but that's a start.

• Australians interested in Israeli Folk Dance (it may be worth reminding the site publisher that Israeli Folk Dance is NOT synonymous with all of Jewish dance, only a small part thereof!) or Hebrew Song may be interested in two sites maintained by Aura Levin Lipski. The organization and little things like copyright notices seem to be lacking, but over time these may develop.

• Marsha Edelman notes: There's an amazing site at www.rokdim.co.il where you can get virtually everything you can imagine—old songs, new songs. They don't have the old albums, per se, but collections of things, organized by dance type (beginners, couple dances, horas, line dances, etc.) or you can make special requests and they will burn a CD for you. Most impressively, they pay rights to ACUM and others for everything they sell!

• Andy Tanenbaum has located another Israeli folk dance site, complete with israeli dance music stream, forums, and chat: www.interikud.com

• Dunav is an Israeli-based website (organization?) devoted to Balkan Dance. Dunav invites you to come download music, song lyrics, and dance videos from our site. The site will be presenting five new songs, a dance video, and new song lyrics each month. The material on the site is from our dynamic folklore database, an ongoing, 10 year project with access to more than 12,000 digitized songs, 2000 dance video clips, and a growing collection of song lyrics, dance notes, maps, and folk costumes. Some of the music is from proprietary sources that aren't widely available outside of Israel . The dance videos are from Dunav's project to document dances that haven't been available commercially. You can find out more about us at the Dunav web site: www.dunav.org.il.

• I am not fond of web rings. If you have nothing to do and you'd like to tour the web's worst designed websites, in this case, those claiming to be related to klezmer (but mostly about clueless people screaming: "me! me! me and my 500K JPEGS!), you, too, might want to check out the Klezmer web ring. And, to be honest, not every site on the webring sucks. Just enough to make this a bad idea when compared to an actual directory or participation on the jewish-music mailing list or other forums. But, belonging to a webring doesn't hurt--to some people, it's a social thing. And no one is forcing you to follow along. My job is just to ensure that you can find the klezmer webring if you really want it.

• Klezmer is Jewish wedding music. There should be a link to a Jewish wedding site, of course! Here's a site to accompany "The Creative Jewish Wedding Book (Jewish Lights, 2004). I haven't reviewed either the book or the site: www.creativejewishwedding.com. Let me know if this is useful!

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe www.yivoencyclopedia.org

What about you? Do you have a page that should be listed here? E-mail me with comments.