Yale Strom is a mainstay in the circuits of klezmer music, but perhaps not as well known as the "new school" as it were (
the Klezmatics, Hasidic New Wave, etc). While he's been around for a while and has a musical history of note, his release on Naxos a few years prior (Café Jew Zoo) is probably his best-known album. Here, there's a collection of music collected largely from non-Jews. Traveling through the Eastern bloc in the 1980s and '90s,
Strom spent a good deal of time collecting songs from the Rom musicians who once played alongside Jewish klezmer musicians: musical co-workers largely separated by the Holocaust (on a related note there are at least a few Rom songs kept alive by Jewish musicians under the same circumstances --
Strom collects both, but this album focuses on the former). On top of the almost-lost numbers,
Strom composes new music, new ideas: he keeps the music alive rather than archival. The album opens with a jumping (no pun intended) kozatshka from the Ukraine, followed by a Slovakian wedding song and a piece of Hungarian Hasidic music that uses both Hebrew and Hungarian. Belorussian, Russian, Polish, and Romanian entities take a run through, but the highlight may be the rarer German piece -- a little less standard in the klezmer repertoire, but probably older and more historically sound, prior to the intermixing with the Eastern European sounds. A fine outing -- possibly less exciting than much of the new klezmer available, but also more exciting than most of the more archival, scratchy recordings that are out there. A nice, middle-of-the-road album for all. ~ Adam Greenberg