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The Klezmatics
The Klezmatics formed in New York's East Village in 1986 and won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album for "Wonder Wheel: Lyrics by Woody Guthrie," built around 12 previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics the band set to new klezmer-rooted music — making them the only klezmer band ever to win a Grammy. Guthrie's estate had been sitting on notebooks full of unused lyrics, some touching on Jewish and Hanukkah themes from his years living in a Coney Island building with many Jewish neighbors, and The Klezmatics' project turned a selection of them into a genuine cross-genre collaboration decades after Guthrie's death. Across nearly four decades together, the band has released 13 albums blending traditional Yiddish material with jazz, gospel, punk, classical, Latin, and Balkan influences, and topped the Billboard World Music Chart along the way. Their combination of the genre's only Grammy Award and their nearly 40-year run blending klezmer with everything from punk to gospel has made The Klezmatics the most significant band of the klezmer revival movement.
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Kapelye
Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.
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