Please enjoy the content below, but visit our new online home at TheFlyingKlezmerians.com

Hey there Flying Fans! Please enjoy our radio broadcast with interviews and performing from 8/24/22. Klezmer starts around the 4th minute:

https://www.wyso.org/show/kaleidoscope/2022-08-25/kaleidoscope-8-24-22

Here are our upcoming events, also available on our Facebook page:

Upcoming Performances

————–Now back to our regular site——————

Klezmer is traditional Jewish music from Eastern Europe that dates back to the 15th Century as far as the record goes.  Although it was originally used for wedding dances, today it is popular in concert.  The dances can be veryfast or slow and restrained and there are pieces just to show instrumental virtuosity.  Traditional instrumentation depended on where the particular Klezmer came from.  You can find more string oriented groups or more wind oriented groups, and in great variation.  There is often a clarinet and/or violin (1 or 2) in the lead or perhaps a trumpet, supported by cymbalon, accordion, cello, and sometimes tuba, bass, or trombone.  Accordion, trumpet, and trombone entered the picture later, in the 19th century.  In modernity this music is changing and the traditions are broken all the time.

I started the Miami Valley Klezmer Ensemble in 2018 and we quickly started working – past and future events include an adult education class at Beth Adam, a men’s club Mother’s Day brunch at Beth Abraham, the Dayton Jewish Cultural Festival (3rd time will be in 2020), Springfield Culture Fest, Art in the City, Dayton Porchfest, a Chanukah brunch at Beth Jacob, a performance the Cox Arboretum, children’s shows at two elementary schools and Wright Library,  a performance at Dayton Metro Library, a performance at the Cline Elementary auditorium with several partnering organizations, and a University of Dayton-partnered performance at Beth Or with a guest lecturer.

The pictures and videos below appear in reverse-chronological order so you can view from the bottom up to watch us gain experience or from the top down, Benjamin-Button-style.

Here we are at the Dayton Metro Library on December 13, 2019, featuring the mighty Erich Reith on the Darbuka:

You may have noticed the absence o four clarinetist on that last one, whom we replaced for the day with Dave Diamond on the trumpet (scroll way down to see a list of MVKE members):

Here is a sample from the 2019 Springfield Culture Fest with special guest Andrew Lyon sitting in on his 1920 soprano sax:

Here is a small bit of our first raucous children’s show at Wright Library in September, 2019:

Thanks to an “Innovation Grant,” on 1/27/2019 The Miami Valley Klezmer Ensemble collaborated with the Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton and performed with the Dayton Chorale Director Jenna Greenberg on Vocals and piano at the Cox Arboretum in Miamisburg, Ohio.  The band played for approximately an hour, then members of the community who RSVPed and were given music in advance performed with the Ensemble.  This made for a very special interfaith day: Jewish audience members were brought in by the Klezmer, others came to perform music, and everyone brought friends.  10 minutes before the show there was an audience of about 30, but by 10 minutes in we had over 125 on this icy January day.

Here are pictures of that event.

And here is that concert in parts labeled 1-17.

At this point in the show the audience joined in for a sing-along!

Then we brought in musicians from the community to join the band and continued through the end of the performance with our audience singing along!

The following pictures are from the Dayton Porchfest on 8/25/2018 and boy, do I wish I had recorded this one!  We used our largest ensemble to date, featuring Rich Begel (trombone), Bill Burns (clarinet) John Lardinois (violin), Steve Makofke (accordion), Erich Reith (percussion), and Irwin Dumtschin (percussion).  This job, we agreed, was a milestone for this young band, jiving and feeling things together.

This video below is from Art in the City in Dayton, OH, and it welcomed a new percussionist, Erich Reith.  Literally.  I just met him that day, and he was wonderful.  Other members on this performance include Rich Begel (trombone), Bill Burns (clarinet) John Lardinois (violin), and Steve Makofke (accordion).

The next video (below) is from the 2018 Dayton Jewish Cultural Festival, using Irwin Dumtschin, the drummer we adopted at our previous  gig!   Sorry about the poor sound quality: there was such a great sound system at this job that my camera was overloaded by their speakers.  Plus it was a windy day and I did not have a wind screen…I tried to edit the video to spare you from most of the wind noise.  The band sounded even better in person.

The next video (below) is from the Miami Valley Klezmer Ensemble’s 2nd performance, for a Mother’s Day Brunch. The group we brought was only a trio with Rich Begel (trombone), Steve Makofke (accordion), and Mark Funke (clarinet), who has moved an hour away, but we miss him and will bring him back in to play whenever it’s convenient! We always involve our audience so you can see me “volunteering” a drummer – he did a great job! The Terkisher is a Yiddish dance from the Jewish communities of southern Moldavia.

The next one is an Arabic Dance.  According to “The Compleat Klezmer,” the Araber Tantz has an Oriental-Sephardic melody. I like the hope produced by the ascension in pitch, only to be answered by a descent. It creates a great musical dialogue.

Now here is the most famous of all the Klezmer tunes although it didn’t start out that way. Chasidim influenced Jewish music with wordless tunes called Niguns which they sang to connect with the eternal. Table pounding, wordless drinking songs that lasted half an hour or more brought them into a trance-like or “vegas” state, meaning “union with God.” So Hava-Nagila came from a Chasidic Nigun, a wordless melody from the Ukraine, only gaining lyrics in the early 1900s. Throughout the 20th century, this song became faster and more popular, eclipsing traditional Klezmer.

Although it goes by many names, when recorded in 1913, this song, Mekhutonim tsum tish, was meant to accompany parents-in-law to the table for the meal at a Jewish wedding. This video was recorded at the very first performance of the Miami Valley Klezmer Ensemble. We thrive on audience participation, so the percussion in the background is being played by about a dozen young kids with toy hand percussion instruments!

You can’t see it in this vidoe, but this fun performance had a lot of audience dancing and playing along!

KLEZMORIM

* Denotes our most frequent 5-piece ensemble *

Tuba

Tim Olt

Trombone

*Rich Begel*

Clarinet

Mark Funke

*Bill Burns*

Trumpet

Dave Diamond

Violin

*John Lardinois*

Accordion

*Steve Makofke*

Cheyenne Olt

Jenna Greenberg

Percussion

Irwin Dumtschin

*Erich Reith*

John Taylor

Incidentally, if you need a smaller Klezmer performance, say just one player with pre-recorded backing tracks, I perform A Trombonist on the Roof, taking it’s title from the beloved Fiddler on the Roof.  It includes tunes from Fiddler as well as other Klezmer arrangements.  Besides the trombone, euphonium, and melodica, you can sometimes hear the tambourine that I am playing off-camera with my feet!

The melodica takes the lead in the next video.

And here is one of the traditional dances where I attempt the lead role of the clarinet or the fiddle.

A Ganef is A Swindler!

And I would be remiss not to include a complete Hava Nagila – Let us Rejoice!

Back in 2014 I had the opportunity to jump in on a performance with the incomparable Michele Gingras, showing the clarinet in its role as the lead.  Sorry about the focus; this first one is the only video with the problem.  As for the rest of them, did I mention I simply had the chance to jump in?  There was no prep time and I have learned a lot since then: