When the Klezmer Conservatory Band put on its first concert in 1980, musician Hankus Netsky says he thought it would also be their last live performance.
The band consisted only of him and 15 others, mainly students from the New England Conservatory of Music and musicians from the local Jewish community in Boston. After a rapturous reaction from that premiere concert, Netsky says he got offers for three more performances – all paying gigs.
“Many people were affected by [the music] so viscerally that they knew this was something that could really have a wide audience,” he told The CJN on the phone from Boston.
Thirty-five years after Netsky started it, the Klezmer Conservatory Band (KCB) is still going strong. It will return to Toronto on May 13 for a concert of klezmer and Yiddish music at Holy Blossom Temple.
When Netsky started the group, klezmer music was mostly defunct in the United States. Netsky credits its recent resurgence in North America and Europe to the interest among Jews in reconnecting to their ancestry.
As a teenager, Netsky said he felt as if he was missing an integral part of his heritage, as he was not learning much about where the Jews came from.
“The very languages, the Yiddish and the Ashkenazi Hebrew… they were buried at that time,” he said. “The accents of my grandfather, my father even, were not what I was learning in Hebrew school.”
He also knew that his grandfather and uncle had played in klezmer orchestras back in the 1920s, so the traditional music intrigued him.
Netsky said that watching Irish musicians jam together to revive their own culture influenced him to embrace his ethnic roots in music.
“Any of us who were attuned to culture or the arts, we tended to want to work for something that might resonate with where we came from and who we were,” he said.
Although members have come and gone, nearly all of today’s nine-piece band have played with the KCB for 25 years. Bassist Jim Guttmann and frequent vocalist Judy Bresler have been with the band from the beginning.
The group still works constantly. Last summer, members of the band worked on a film score for a documentary, Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholom Aleichem.
In April, they unveiled an updated version of In the Fiddler’s House, with Itzhak Perlman and Andy Statman, at Carnegie Hall in New York. Netsky said he hopes the band will bring that concert to Canada.
Netsky also has a new book coming out in June: Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Netsky has a personal connection to Holy Blossom cantor Benjamin Maissner. As a young man, Netsky said he has fond memories of Maissner, who worked in his hometown of Philadelphia. Maissner was a hip cantor in the city’s Jewish community, doing services infused with rock and jazz music that were popular with young adults.
“I did not belong to his synagogue,” Netsky said. “But if you wanted to hang around with interesting kids who were fun to be with, you went there.”
Like Netsky, Maissner had ancestors connected to a Jewish music scene. His great-uncle, Israel Alter, was a chief cantor in Hanover, Germany, before World War II.
Without an Ashkenaz Festival this year, Maissner said he wanted to bring the group back to Toronto. The KCB has performed at Roy Thomson Hall in recent years for Chai Life fundraisers.
“The music that they play is very nostalgic, reminiscent of Jewish and eastern European culture,” Maissner said, adding that their performances are more traditional and less jazz-infused than those of many current bands that play Yiddish music. “It’s a very unique sound.”
