@mycr_karenina Also I wouldn't call Daniel Kahn's performance of radical workers songs of the Jewish-American labor movement, or 11 year old Yair Keydar singing a Yiddish art song "nostalgia and self-parody"
@mycr_karenina Heaps of great talent on that stage last night, but please don't take it as a monolith of what modern klezmer culture is. This is the type of program that ends up on that giant stage, but there's other types of programs on smaller stages all the time.
@JOttoPohl1@BillyBlueBlaze1 What exactly do you mean by "social significance" here? it seems oversimple to say "yiddishkeit was largely destroyed" therefore klezmer lost significance... people didn't even call it "klezmer" until the 70s and there have been klezmorim playing simchas for a couple centuries
@JOttoPohl1@BillyBlueBlaze1 Klezmer certainly existed all through the 20th century. After the 78rpm era ended, key contributions in the 1950s and the rise of major Jewish record labels laid groundwork for the “modern” revivalists of the 1970s.
@ZachWeiner I don't like getting into "you haven't tried the right strain yet"-ism, but I think in general dismissiveness about ethnic culture is not good or well intentioned
@ZachWeiner I don't get why Klezmer is often your straw man for self-evident aesthetic crappiness. For some of us it's at the core of an ethnic heritage that we care deeply about maintaining and elevating. (authenticity argument aside)