Dispensing a good dose of music and fun

Founded in 1998, the student musical group Klez Dispensers is hosting "Klezmerpalooza" this weekend, in which several other klezmer bands will play. Manager Inna Barmash '01 and musical director Alex Kontorovich '02 recently enlightened 'Prince' Executive Editor Rob Laset on the tradition of klezmer music.

'Prince': Now, I'm curious. What exactly is klezmer music?

Barmash: It's an eastern European Jewish folk music that grew out of a mix of Hungarian, gypsy, Romanian and of course Jewish influences. It has since been infused with American jazz and other world music.

Kontorovich: The infusions are more from what people have been doing with klez music in modern times. It started out in eastern Europe, but what most people know nowadays is mostly through the transformations. In the 1900s and 1910s there was a lot of immigration to the States from eastern Europe from the klezmorims — klez musicians.

It's not that it started in America, but it grew in America.

B: Klezmer music revivals, which started in the 1970s, are going around the world. Its centers are New York and surprisingly Germany. There are really no Jews in Germany, and most of the bands in Germany are not Jewish. It's become not really just Jewish, but one of the world music movements, like Celtic and bluegrass.

P: You aren't exactly the normal Princeton musical group. Can you tell me a little about the Klez Dispensers' founding?

K: [Our] trumpet player Ben Holmes '01 and I — he and I have been playing jazz stuff since high school — were trying to put together a jazz quartet [freshman year] to do regular gigs around town. And Inna, who I knew through my brother, came to us and asked, "how about starting a klezmer band?"

So we said sure, why not. I think we both knew organization-wise we weren't going to be able to put something together.

B: So I set up the first show. We had our first concert in early November. Within a month we put an ad out looking for musicians. We used our personal contacts in the jazz community here.

K: The thing that was instrumental was that most of the musicians that came to play for us came from the jazz background. Klezmer music is a very oral tradition, passed down from people to people. You're going to learn tunes by ear. We've had a number of classical musicians who stop by and looking to play klez music and get turned away because we have no music on paper to play from.

B: There's also the improv aspect.

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K: You play a melody and you play it a second time, so you don't want to play it the same.

B: I put up a Website and people started to call. There's a huge market for it. Our first outside concert was in Queens [New York]. This synagogue just found us on the Web.

P: Your most requested song?

K: Without a doubt, "Bay mir bistu sheyn" [You are beautiful to me] is our number one requested song. It gives us a chance to put in some jazz improv.