Romanian roots of pop music via klezmer

Aaron Lebedeff (1947)

Klezmer (Yiddish: כליזמר or קלעזמער (klezmer), pl.: כליזמרים (klezmorim), כליזמר from Hebrew: כלי זמר‎ — instruments of music) is a musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. Played by professional musicians called klezmorim, the genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display pieces for weddings and other celebrations.

In the United States the genre evolved considerably as Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who arrived between 1880 and 1924, met and assimilated American jazz. During the initial years after the klezmer revival of the 1970s, this was what most people knew as klezmer, although in the current century musicians have begun paying more attention to the "original" pre-jazz traditions as revivalists including Josh Horowitz, Yale Strom, and Bob Cohen have spent years doing field research in Eastern/Central Europe.

Additionally, later immigrants from the Soviet Union such as German Goldenshtayn took their surviving repertoires to the United States and Israel in the 1980s.

Compared with most other European folk music styles, little is known about the history of klezmer music, and much of what is said about it must be seen as conjecture.

Starting in 2008, "The Other Europeans" project, funded by several EU cultural institutions,[3]spent a year doing intensive field research in Moldavia under the leadership of Alan Bern and scholar Zev Feldman. They wanted to explore klezmer and lautari roots, and fuse the music of the two "other European" groups. The resulting band now performs internationally.

As with this ensemble, groups like Di Naye Kapelye and Yale Strom & Hot Pstromi have incorporated Rom musicians and elements since their inceptions.

Klezmer is easily identifiable by its characteristic expressive melodies, reminiscent of the human voice, complete with laughing and weeping. This is not a coincidence; the style is meant to imitate khazone and paraliturgical singing. A number of dreydlekh (a Yiddish word for musical ornaments), such as krekhts ("sobs") are used to produce this style.

The Romanian influence is, perhaps, the strongest and most enduring of the musical styles that influenced traditional klezmer musicians. Klezmer musicians heard and adapted traditional Romanian music, which is reflected in the dance forms found throughout surviving klezmer music repertoire (e.g., Horas, Doinas, Sirbas, and Bulgars)