But why is this performance titled Klezmer Then and Now? Aaah. That's a good question. When most people hear the word "klezmer," they think that it refers to music originally played by itinerant Jewish musicians wandering the countryside of exotic places like Romania, playing for coins or entertaining wedding guests, and eventually winding up at Jewish festivities in East Coast American cities. However, the fact is that what we have known as "klezmer" is a late-twentieth century invention, largely consisting of re-recordings of Yiddish musical theatre tunes from the 1910s to the 1930s. The music played by Jews in the homes and halls of Eastern Europe was much more varied, and enormously richer. That is not to say that the klezmer we've been acquainted with is not Jewish music, so long as it is remembered that the music was composed and copyrighted, the words were sung in Yiddish (the language of just one branch of Judaism, the Ashkenazi), and the musical foundations were mainstream, Germanic, major scales with a minor scale thrown in for leavening.

However, this recording has very little of that kind of klezmer music in it. Instead of focusing on the supposed folk melodies of the past, it explores the broad historic roots of Jewish folk music – the actual music played by Eastern European Jews – which "klezmer" derives from. A large sampling of this music was collected by Abraham Z. Idelsohn in his Thesaurus of Jewish Music, published in 1929. On a quest to rediscover the extensive wealth of this musical heritage, Talbot found what may be the only complete set of Idelsohn's Thesaurus in the National Library of Israel. It has been digitized, and so he was able to download and print the volume that interested him most, Volume IX, titled (in English) Jewish Folk Songs of East Europe.

These are secular pieces of music, with origins that Idelsohn was sometimes able to trace back to the 16th Century. In his introduction, he writes, "The Jews in Germany during the period running parallel to these generations of song creation, cultivated a folk song based on German Folk tunes, but these tunes did not penetrate into the body of East European Jewish song. In the Slavic countries the Jew instinctively swung toward his neighbor's Oriental folk music, so much more closely akin to his own song."

Part One: Talbot explains and illustrates musically, the various influences on Jewish folk music from Eastern Europe, showing how its melodies are the result of an organic process rather than a series of discrete steps of composition. He plays some of the music of Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to Eastern Europe, particularly to the Ottoman Empire, from their long-time homes in Spain. He compares and contrasts that music with the "klezmer" of Yiddish theatre.

Talbot's discovery is that there is a mode common to both Muslim and Eastern Orthodox peoples, adopted by Sephardic Jews who had immigrated to the Ottoman Empire from Spain. That mode is like a marker gene, in that when it is found in Jewish music, it originated from the area controlled by Ottoman Turks, an area that stretched from the northern shores of the Black Sea to the edges of Italy and the Hapsburg Empire. It is a mode that does not exist in the Ashkenazi branch of Judaism, the largest group of Jewish emigrants to America. He shows how the Ashkenazi style of music was that of Western Europe and the Roman Catholic Church, and illustrates how easy it was for Yiddish theatre music and what is called "klezmer" to morph into Broadway musicals. Then he illustrates how the more sophisticated music of Sephardic Jews cannot be harmonized according the rules of music based on the Roman Church.

In the last theme of the DVD's first section, Talbot plays the rhythms found inside the Roman Europe and the simple music of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to Ukraine from Germany, and then plays Sephardic rhythms. He concludes with the observation that in five hundred years of coexistence in the Ottoman Empire, it is very difficult to distinguish between music of Jews and music played by Jews on behalf of their neighbors. It is all "Jewish music."

Part Two: Talbot returns to perform some of the music he has discussed. He introduces the listener to a dozen of the tunes collected by Idelsohn. Then he begins to blend music from the Balkans, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, demonstrating that the listener cannot tell the difference between Jewish, Islamic, and Eastern Orthodox folk music. And that Jews not only adopted the music of their neighbors, but often played it for weddings, festivals, and religious events.

This performance was originally given as a fundraiser for the Idaho Foodbank sponsored by Temple Emanuel, one of only two long-standing synagogues in the state of Idaho.

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