A Klezmer Revival in South Seattle?

The Royal Room has become home to local bands embracing their Eastern European musical roots.

In the 1920s and ’30s, a Ukrainian ethnomusicologist named Moshe Beregovski traversed his country with a phonograph, recording Jewish folk songs. The result, a collection of 2,000 recordings on 700 wax cylinders, was presumed to be lost after Beregovski, a good Soviet Jew, was sent to the Gulag in 1951. Although he survived and lived until 1961, the recordings were not unearthed until around 1990, when they turned up in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, after the Iron Curtain fell. The discovery was seismic for the klezmer world. And selections from this collection are what will be performed on October 1 at the Royal Room, in Columbia City, by local musicians who are not only excited to resurrect Beregovski, but also to create a klezmer scene in Seattle.

To be sure, there’s been a Yiddish and klezmer scene in Seattle for a long time. Bands like the Mazel Tov Klezmer Band and the Mazeltones of the 1980s and ’90s gave way to an outcropping of newer, younger bands, like the Debaucherauntes and Shpilkis. Since the pandemic, the Royal Room, with the help of the South Hudson Music Project, has become a hub for the sorrowful, raucous, eclectic Eastern European music that’s so central to Jewish culture.

Mark Lutwak of the self-described “klezmer-ish” band The Klein Party can be credited with bringing klezmer culture to the Rainier Avenue restaurant-bar-live music venue. “A lot of the older klezmer folks I meet live up in Greenwood, and there is music happening at the different synagogues,” he says, “but there hasn’t been a steady home for this.”

Royal Room owner Wayne Horvitz has been supportive of the klezmer comeback and worked with Lutwak to put on a klezmer series named Klezmer Starts Here! (It’s a play on the Royal Room’s Piano Starts Here! series.) This year, the Royal Room has hosted concerts featuring the music of Naftule Brandwein and Belf’s Romanian Orchestra. Lutwak is excited about the next show, featuring the relatively recent discoveries of Beregovski.

“This whole culture existed generally before recording,” he says. “All these musicians were wiped out in the Holocaust.”

Lutwak describes the process of arranging a Beregovski tune for his band using his computer: “I finished the whole thing, and I had the computer play it back for me. Suddenly there was this amazing emotional music where I was face to face with this musician who 100 years ago played into Beregovski’s machine,” he says. “Somehow time travel had occurred through this music.”

Despite the seeming prevalence of klezmer as emblematic of Jewish culture today, for decades the genre was far more limited, if it was played at all.

“I’m 74, and when I went through the bar mitzvah circuit in the early ’60s, in Philadelphia, you weren’t going to hear klezmer music,” says Carl Shutoff, who plays in the duo Kesselgarden. “Maybe you heard Hava Nagilah, which is not klezmer. It’s not something that boomers like myself grew up listening to. We came upon it late in life.”

For Shutoff, a lifelong clarinetist, discovering klezmer as an adult hit a kind of nerve in his soul. “It wasn’t just that I liked it, but it did something to me somehow,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily make any sense, because I didn’t grow up listening to this stuff. It reinforced my belief in a tribal memory.”

Klezmer has grown in popularity with younger generations, too. On November 1, the Seattle band Shpilkis will perform at the Royal Room with renowned violinists Jake Shulman-Ment and Abigale Reisman as well as tsimbalist Pete Rushefsky. Jimmy Austin, Shpilkis’s trombonist, sees klezmer as roots music. That younger Jewish people are turning to it isn’t a surprise. “There’s almost this idea of de-assimilation,” says Austin, who is 32. “Our grandparents turned in their Jewishness to become white. We’re a little further from the Holocaust and the trauma…maybe it’s a little less painful for our generation to look at that stuff.” 

Yiddish culture also holds an affinity to anarchist culture. Jews seeking a connection to their heritage free from religious practice and identification with Israel find a home here.

“There’s something somewhat subversive or radical about returning to Yiddish culture,” says Austin. At his monthly klezmer jam sessions, people like to sing klezmer anti-fascist songs. “There is such a history of Yiddish activism.”

“I think it’s totally cool that there are so many people getting married who want klezmer music at their wedding,” says Shutoff. “We’ll play a set and then the DJ will come.” It’s sort of an homage to the old days. “There have been itinerant Jewish folk musicians for centuries. And that was almost lost entirely with the Holocaust.”

Still, they’re not purists. Lutwak emphasizes that everyone who plays klezmer is bringing something new. That’s the spirit of klezmer, even for the music of Beregovski.

“It’s not museum music. It’s not preservationist,” he says. “We’re not going to play for you how this music sounded 100 years ago…. The klezmerim of Europe for 600 years played every kind of music that came their way. They embraced Hungarian music and Romanian music and classical and every kind of new music. True folk music always embraces new music. Every ensemble had to be the ultimate cover band.”

“For me and a lot of folks I know in the Jewish Seattle music community,” Shutoff says, “there are two things at play: the enjoyment we get from playing it, and also a sense of mission that this music not die, that it continue.”

Check out The Klein Party, The Talne Trio, and Kesselgarden playing the music of Moshe Beregovski on October 1 at 7pm at The Royal Room. Tickets here. On November 1, see Shpilkis perform at the Royal Room with Jake Shulman-Ment, Abigale Reisman, and Pete Rushefsky. Tickets here.

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