A Film by Michal Goldman
For nearly a millennium, vigorous and soulful klezmer music was part of the
celebration of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and in the early decades of this
century the music continued to flourish in America. Klezmer musicians learned
hundreds of tunes by ear and their ears were open to Gypsy, Ukrainian and Greek
melodies of the old world, as well as to the jazz they heard in America. Music
born in Eastern Europe lived on in the imaginations of composers for New York's
Yiddish Theater, men whose tunes entered the mainstream through such unlikely
adapters as the Andrew Sisters. Assimilated and commercialized, this quintessential
expression of Yiddish culture was virtually extinct until a mid-1970 revival.
A Jumpin' Night in the Garden of Eden traces the efforts of two contemporary
groups, Kapelye and the klezmer Conservatory Band, to recover a lost history.
The film observes that process in rehearsals, Yiddish lessons, meeting with
musicians now in their eighties, a Jewish wedding, klezmer camp and a live radio
concert on Prairie Home Companion. Making the past live in the present is at
the heart of the klezmer revival, and this film shows three generation s of
musicians involved in this process.
"Klezmer knocks everybody's socks off." - Garrison Keilor
"Music of joy and iwt in this fine, exuberant and somehow very touching
movie." - S. Louis Post-Dispatch
"The discovery of klezmer is comparable to the uncovering of the tomb of
Tutankhamen." - NY Post
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