Replying to
I completely understand the function of this (wig making) but also wadda name for a union.
#HumanHair #WigMaking
Remote
🕵️old klezmers🎻
@carkner@klezmor.im
mastodon 4.7.3Library technician working in an accessibility library in Vancouver BC. admin of klezmor.im. MA UBC History 2019. YIVO fellow 2025. Independent researcher interested in klezmer musicians, migration, Yiddish literary world, Dutch East Indies political & journalism history, Indonesian anticolonial movement. Sporadic Wikipedia editor. He/him.📜😯🌈🎻 Current projects about New York City klezmer musicians & their milieu (1890–1945), klezmer copyright manuscripts in the US Library of Congress.
463 Followers
317 Following
50 Posts
Joined June 01, 2023
Other account:
Blog:
instagram:
@old.klezmers
also tomorrow is the day i'm being interviewed by a journalist about klezmer AI slop 😂 I may have to watch some heinous examples to refresh my opinions on this plague
glad this is coming together; a year ago when I was in NYC Pete Rushefsky met me and was telling me a trove of handwritten scores from cimbalom player Joseph Moskowitz had been uncovered in DC. I'll probably speak at this zoom about the old NY klezmer characters who appear in these scores.
https://ctmd.org/events/joseph-moskowitz-online-archive-launch/
#klezmer #JewishMusic #MusicHistory #RomanianMusic #MusicManuscripts #archives
Replying to
a lot of this article is "local guy is angry at something he saw" they are just quoting about how mad he is at the concert
reminder, I'm co-teaching this song workshop tomorrow at the Vancouver Peretz Centre at 12:30. with such gems as "S'loyfn s'yogn shvartse volkn" and "Khanele iz fun der arbet gegangen"
https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/revolutionary-yiddish-singalong-chaia-dan
tickets have gone on sale for the event I've been working on preparing for a year, the Vancouver Peretz Centre's 80th anniversary banquet on May 23rd. I've been helping bring to life co-director Itamar's idea of a shtetl wedding themed gala, along with award-winning writer Jess Goldman and music arrangements by me🤓there are limited low cost tickets that will probably go fast if price is an issue.
https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/peretzs-80th-anniversary-a-wedding-between-peretz-and-the-past-present-and-future
#klezmer #Yiddish #SecularJewishCulture #shtetl #anniversary #Vancouver
I had a nice zoom chat the other day with members of this extended family and just now I took the time to rewrite the blog post. I had a lot of it right, but they explained some family lore around the name changes, who was related to whom, and why they left Egypt. Aside from the klezmer manuscript that exists from one of them, and their membership in the PMBS, I'm now less sure of any klezmer connection. The family were pretty sure they were classical musicians.🤔
https://alte.klezmor.im/2026/01/13/rosenbergs-halmescos-and-brauns-egyptian-families-in-the-p-m-b-s/
sadly I won't be going (don't trust ICE) but this festival in #Portland looks great.
includes some good friends of mine like Chaia, Christina Crowder, Shpilkis, and some cool artists I hadn't heard of before.
https://collections.humanitix.com/the-portland-jewish-music-festival-2026
Replying to
as it's #BandcampFriday I bought these other two recent #klezmer albums I had been waiting for this occasion to buy as well.
Night Bird by my friend Rebecca Mac, violinist from the Boston area: https://borschtbeat.bandcamp.com/album/night-bird
and Through The Walls, by British violinist Anna Lowenstein
https://annalowenstein.bandcamp.com/album/through-the-walls
#violin #fiddlers #JewishMusic #Yiddish
salute to Dan Blacksberg and his cohort featured in this article. also lol @ the subtitle "A rag-tag group of younger adults has rediscovered the West Germanic language"
https://whyy.org/articles/yiddish-language-culture-west-philadelphia/
About to sing with my choir at the Peretz Centre's annual Seder, the hagode was heavily rewritten by community members this year
My piece on organized labour and klezmer in NYC before WWI is in the second print issue of Der Spekter. Along with various pieces on diasporism and the Bund. check it out:
https://derspekter.bigcartel.com/product/der-spekter-2-year-anniversary-magazine
salute to Arun Viswanath for this excellent catalogue he made of his great-grandmother Lifshe Schaechter-Widman's Yiddish song recordings
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bZOh9sLMlOW5cnRa6RUM9uQ6SlYgr3fYgruRo-mtVyY/edit?usp=sharing
I'm teaching this workshop here in Vancouver on May 10 with my friend Chaia if you're interested. the same songs we explained online for Workers Circle a few months ago, but this time teaching people to sing them in person.
https://www.peretz-centre.org/event-details-registration/revolutionary-yiddish-singalong-chaia-dan
#Yiddish #Bundism #1905revolution #JewishMusic #Vancouver #SongWorkshop
Replying to
truly artless slop lol
the sad thing is all the brainless appreciative comments. I don't know if they're bots or just people with no sense.
#AIslop
too short-notice for me to fly cross country, and I'm way too busy in May anyways, but dang this looks cool and I'd love to go another year. perhaps a dulcimer-head in #Toronto on here would be interested in this?
https://agakhanmuseum.org/series/hammered-series/
Replying to
@acb@mastodon.social @r343l@freeradical.zone
that's excellent. I don't think i've ever heard that one. of course we have all kinds of odd and funny ones in Canadian French here. I've always loved "Sacréfice!" and "Bout d'viarge" (piece of a virgin) which I still to this day don't understand the literal meaning of lol. maybe you have to be catholic
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacre_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois
Replying to
@acb@mastodon.social @r343l@freeradical.zone
yup, I grew up in Eastern Ontario French speaking area so heard every variety of swearing lol. also even after being in school I worked in a working class French speaking part of Ottawa (Vanier) at the front desk of the library, where I would not say the old timers were swearing a lot there, but they had excellent old timey dialects and terminology for common things.
Replying to
just one Turkish track by Isaac ben Solomon Algazi (1882–1964), a Sephardic chazzan born in Izmir who later lived in France and Uruguay. recorded in Istanbul in 1909.
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/1000004356
#78rpm #TurkishMusic #Sephardic
Replying to
for example these two tracks by unidentified Greek orchestras in Germany, recorded before WWI, not sure if they're both the same musicians or not. very prominent #accordion with a sound you'd never hear today
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000747381
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000747380
#78rpm #GreekMusic
ah, the papers of Joseph Moskowitz, klezmer cimbalom player and owner of Moskowitz and Lupowitz restaurant, are listed in the Library of Congress. they were found by a relative in some old boxes and donated a year ago, but they're still unprocessed.
hundreds of handwritten music scores (mostly Romanian-style klezmer music, but lots of American and popular music), an unpublished memoir in Romanian, lots of old photos and newspaper clippings. great stuff.
https://lccn.loc.gov/2023575121
Replying to
@automattack@counterforce.social that's a really good question tbh. back when I played in some punk bands 25+ years ago it totally was not a question anyone would have asked in my circles. yet some of those people went on to be creeps or harmful 😬 I know today of some code of conduct type documents for festivals after abuse/incidents happen but they feel too formal and structured to apply for a band
Replying to
@r343l@freeradical.zone love a good wiktionary entry lol
do you remember the British band Zounds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zounds
in my Peace Punk era in the late 90s it was never my fave but I always liked them & their logo was great
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJRAF6OYkgc
Replying to
@magcbertrand they're truly not subtle / editing the slop output lol like almost every frame has a nonsensical Jewish symbol like a magen-david-shaped window on a stone wall or whatever
Replying to
this one is beautiful too, if google is being accurate it's "The song of the crane" by Macedonian-born composer Dramalı Hasan Hasgüler, recorded in #Istanbul in 1931
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/200023374
#TurkishMusic #OttomanMusic #78rpm
Replying to
here is Anna's new album of original klezmer compositions:
https://annalowenstein.bandcamp.com/album/through-the-walls
#klezmer #StringQuartet #violin #fiddle #JewishMusic #London
Replying to
"And so, in misfortune and fortune, I return here to my beloved shtetl.
A Yid like me isn't so welcome here. They've gotten used to my absence.
Now people look at me with suspicion. I'm like a stranger among friends.
Every shit-talker smiles at me.
Who really loves what they're not allowed to hate?"
(Comes across more wryly funny in the tone of the song)
Replying to
For #German speakers or appreciators, the original...
https://youtu.be/YMMa1TGsQ_8?si=OU_MbHSXHoQLUXz7
Replying to
I talked to Lorin Sklamberg, music archivist at YIVO, about lost test pressings of klezmer musicians when I was doing a fellowship there last year and he was very interested in it too but didn't know where such things existed. he was telling me about remastered recent releases of early Edison test presses, not klezmer but of old European art singers and stuff, and how astounding they were.
Replying to
in their mad libs generating of music slop they came up with this "original" response to , I dunno, relaxing study slop videos? I tried listening to it and the music is almost exactly the same as everything else, maybe dialed down to 6/10 intensity 🤷
#AIslop
Replying to
so far across 3 platforms the only real suggestion I've got is Uri Schreter who I do know online but had forgotten about today for some reason. great guy who had me in tears with his Mickey Katz presentation years back
https://www.queensu.ca/history/people/schreter-uri
Replying to
We're giving an in person version of this in Vancouver on May 10, will share the details when I get them.
Replying to
@Nozika and the visuals are totally heinous nonsense. like you don't have to like the sexism of Haredi communities to see how nonsensical it is for the slop video to show blonde women in silk gowns circle dancing with Haredim in front of the Western wall or whatever. it's just nonsense the computer puked out
Replying to
I listened to a few of them, and I'm still not sure if they're Yiddish songs performed by non-Yiddish speakers from somewhere between Israel and Central Asia, with some kind of autotune/effects, or simply AI generated creations of known Yiddish songs.