By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
If a word-association game began with klezmer, the next phrase out of any Louisvillian acquainted with that genre of celebratory Jewish folk music would likely be Lost Tribe.
Established 15 years ago, Lost Tribe Louisville’s current membership comprises Mark Perelmuter (clarinet, soprano saxophone and flute), Fran Weinstock (vocals), Aaron Boaz (violin), Aviv Naamani (guitar), Carol Savkovich (concertina) and John Thornberry (bass). They are a happily ubiquitous presence at synagogues, libraries, outdoor stages, weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs – anywhere where music from the Old World meets New World sensibilities.
The latest of those eclectic performance venues is Vernon Lanes (1275 Story Ave in Butchertown), where Lost Tribe will mark its 15th anniversary and highlight the release of the ensemble’s two latest CDs this coming Sunday, Nov. 2.
“We formed in March 2010, when Aviv was working on the first “KlezmerFest” at the old JCC, Perelmuter – the group’s designated spokesperson – recalled during a recent interview. “We learned four songs to be able to do that.”
At the time of that May 2010 performance, the band consisted of only four musicians – but as interest in klezmer grew, so did the band. Perelmuter recalls listening at Temple Shalom while another group was playing, “and this guy sits next to me and – not realizing I was going to be one of the musicians – asked if I knew of any local klezmer bands that might be interested in a violinist.”
That guy was Boaz, who’d become one of Louisville’s busiest, most highly regarded freelance classical string players.
“He told me who he was,” Perelmuter said, “and that he had played in the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band in Chicago, which is a very famous klezmer band. He’d just moved to Louisville and was looking to get into another klezmer band, so eventually we brought him on board.”
Perelmuter wasn’t a career musician – a graduate of the University of Louisville’s dental school, he was a partner in a thriving orthodontics practice who’d studied clarinet as a teenager. The klezmer bug bit him in 1993, when the Klezmatics, the best-known klezmer band in the country, played a concert at the JCC.
“That was kind of the beginning of the klezmer revival, in the mid-1980s and 1990s,” he said. “That’s what turned me on to klezmer music.”
“I hadn’t played much music while I was raising my kids,” he said, “but as they were getting older, I started getting into it a little bit more. I got a klezmer book and a CD and began learning how to play” in that style, unaware that Savkovich, Naamani and Weinstock had already formed the core of what would become the expanded Lost Tribe. “The next thing you know, they were asking me to join their band.”
Rooted in 19th and early 20th-century Eastern European secular Jewish music, klezmer (the word is derived from the Hebrew phrase “kli zemer,” which translates to “instrument of the voice”) instantly recognizable with its wailing clarinet and an energy that makes anyone listening want to sway, smile and dance. Its Yiddish aesthetic is exemplified by such standards as “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” (“To Me You’re Beautiful”), composed in 1932 for a musical titled “Men Ken Lebn Nor Men Lost Nisht” – roughly, “You could live, but they don’t let you.”
The song became one of the first great crossover numbers, made famous in a version sung by the fledgling Andrews Sisters in 1937. Their cover confirmed what remains true today: You don’t have to be Jewish to love klezmer (“We played in Bardstown Road Presbyterian church a number of years ago,” Perelmuter said).
Lost Tribe has recorded its own take on “Bei Mir Bistu Shein,” alongside an abundance of lesser known (and virtually unknown) examples of klezmer repertoire (cue “Yidl Mit’n Fiddle”). The band has also recorded klezmer arrangements of such liturgical songs as “L’cha Dodi,” sung Friday nights as part of the Kabbalat Shabbat service (you can hear all three of these performances on Lost Tribe’s 2013 album, “Beyond the Sambatyon”).
The band’s members hail from a broad swath of musical backgrounds. “Aaron, of course, is classically trained,” Perelmuter said, “but he also has a blues kind of style, as does Aviv – we grew up together as kids, and we were in a jazz group for a short while when we were college-age. John, our bass player, has played rock and bluegrass.
“Carol is a folk music (player) with her concertina,” Perelmuter said. “She’s also an accomplished recorder player. And Fran comes from the liturgical side – she’s sung in choirs probably all her life. I come from more of a classical background with my clarinet, but then there’s rock and jazz with my saxophone. So (we’re) a melding of different styles, which makes our music a little bit more eclectic than straight klezmer.”
Why the enduring interest in klezmer, spurred by its revival decades ago? “I think there may have been some nostalgia when baby boomers were growing up,” Perelmuter said. “They hadn’t really learned Yiddish, because our parents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about, rather than teaching it to us. The other part was that it was new; it was different.”
Though much of Lost Tribe’s repertoire reaches back in time, several of its members have composed fresh material for the band. “We are constantly adding new tunes,” Perelmuter said. “That makes it fun –‘How are we going to express this? How are we going to format it? Who’s going to take some solos, and what are we going to do in those solos?’ So each performance is a little different.”