Bringing Klezmer Out of the Attic

Hankus Netsky is a pushover for nostalgia. If it’s old and forgotten and retro, he’s bound to be its champion.

Take, for instance, the music of his Klezmer Conservatory Band, opening a four-day run Saturday at the University of Judaism in Bel-Air. It comes from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, brought to New York’s Lower East Side in the 1920s by Jewish immigrants with pushcarts. Hearty music. Sad music. Infectious music.

But, for a first-generation American, it also represented pre-assimilation music. And Netsky’s father, grandfather and uncles--who were all klezmer musicians on arrival here--did not want to recall the past when the future promised better things.

“So it was only with a certain amount of prying and prodding that I got them to bequeath me my heritage,” Netsky says.

“They didn’t think klezmer (which means vessels of sound) was relevant anymore. And, to boot, they regarded it as self-deprecating. After all, what’s good is the country club you can’t belong to.”

The youngest Netsky--now 37 and named after the cartoon character Hankus the Horse (“because my mother hated the standard Herman or Harry that became the American alternative for anyone named for a relative called Hershel”)--didn’t share their sense of progress, however.

“I always found myself listening to the old guys in the synagogue,” he says. “Their strange Yiddish mutterings and melodies had a kind of fascination for me because it was the exotic culture I was drawn to, not the actual religion.”

All the other kids whose families were members of the congregation, he says, rebelled against the elderly immigrants with their long beards, smelly breath and black hats. (Remember Woody Allen’s encounter with just such a rabbi in “Radio Days”?)

But Netsky, once in college, got busy in the attic--digging out sheet music from the ‘30s and ‘40s and even older klezmer recordings, stored there in his grandfather’s Philadelphia townhouse.

He found an old photograph, dated 1922, of a band that included his grandfather on drums and uncle on trumpet. From that moment there was no stopping him.

Already a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he pursued jazz and gospel (“because it was exciting and expressive and full of inflections that pop music couldn’t touch”), Netsky went to work taping the scratchy recordings and painstakingly recreating orchestrations from them.

But by the time he graduated and became a teaching assistant there in the Third Stream Department (non-Western music), his destiny was all but sealed. Within a short period he founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band. In fact, the group--which has several non-Jews as members--calls this 13th season its “Bar Mitzvah” year and plans to release a new CD, “Today You Are a Band.”

Netsky has been chairman of the Jazz Department at New England Conservatory for the past seven years, but his band plays as many as 50 concerts a year and has produced seven albums.

So successful has it and the whole klezmer movement become that Netsky, who plays alto sax and keyboard, has even transformed his family into a cheering section.

“Two things made them repossess the music,” he says. “Young people and non-Jews liking it.”

Before that, he had been aware of why upwardly mobile American Jews had rejected this part of their cultural past. They had long since become interested in the spirited, affirming Israeli folk music, the music of a modern country where the people speak Hebrew. Klezmer , with its Yiddish base, was relegated to history, connected with persecution and the Holocaust.

But Netsky never shared that point of view.

“I see the turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jews as having been at the pinnacle of their culture,” he says. “It was a time of enlightenment, a time when Hassidic chanting came into its own and so many other influences were absorbed. Even now we see Dixieland as a strong element of klezmer .”

The Yiddish language is full of rich humor, he says, “plus the tsuris (grief) gave it, in toto, a weight of emotion and wisdom and depth rarely heard outside of the blues.”

In these multicultural days, when one’s origins can have greater value than an assimilated state, there is less reason to hide. At least that is a theory held by Judy Bressler, a third-generation Yiddish performer and the band’s vocalist.

“But we don’t put up walls around ourselves,” she explains, citing the new material constantly finding its way into the repertory. On the latest album, “Old World Beat,” she sings a song (in Yiddish, of course) that makes comic reference to credit cards, microchips and MTV.

Nevertheless, she feels that the band has been entrusted with a treasure-- klezmer music--”especially because we saved it from annihilation.”

Yet Netsky eschews the costumes most often associated with klezmer --the black hats and long black coats that band members donned for the movie “A Stranger Among Us,” where they portrayed Hassidim singing and playing for a wedding.

“That would be a false image for us,” he says. “We’re not vintage shtetl Jews. But more to the point, the music is timeless. It doesn’t need costumes.”

Neither did the Andrews Sisters think so in 1938 when they recorded “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen, “ the tune that came from the Yiddish theater before catapulting to the Hit Parade, or, in today’s parlance, the top of the charts. Nor did the song “If I Were a Rich Man” keep “Fiddler on the Roof” from being an enormous hit.

Whatever way it slips into the culture at large--through a commission from the Boston Ballet, as part of the score for the movie “Enemies, A Love Story” and a children’s video narrated by Robin Williams, or a spot on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion”--the music captivates.

“I defy anyone to resist it,” says Hankus Netsky.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band performs 8:30 p.m. March 27, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. March 28, and 8 p.m. March 29 and March 30, in Gindi Auditorium at the University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air. Tickets: $17-$22. Call (310) 476-9777.