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Klezmer Conservatory Band

A leading voice in the world of klezmer music and Yiddish song for close to 40 years, the Klezmer Conservatory Band (KCB) continues to thrill audiences all over the world. With a repertoire ranging from Yiddish standards to rousing dance medleys and little known gems, the KCBs musicians have served as important ambassadors in promoting the universal appeal of Jewish music.

Over the years, the band has appeared at dozens of international music festivals in major venues across the U.S.A., Europe and Australia and on ten international broadcasts of “A Prairie Home Companion.” The KCB provided the musical accompaniment for “The Fool and the Flying Ship,” a 1991 video featuring Robin Williams, played an integral role in Joel Grey’s “Borschtcapades ’94, and performed the music for the much acclaimed American Repertory Theatre production, “Shlemiel the First.” Since the late 1990s, Itzhak Perlman has featured the KCB in his CD, video, and touring project, “In the Fiddler’s House,” including performances at Wolftrap, Great Woods, Radio City Music Hall, the Ravinia Festival, the Saratoga Music Festival, Moscow’s Barvikha Concert Hall, the Mizner Park Amphitheatre in Boca Raton, and the Mann Music Center (Philadelphia). In December of 2002, the KCB performed a concert of orchestral arrangements of klezmer and Yiddish vocal music with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. In 1988, world-renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones choreographed a piece based on music from their CD, “A Jumpin’ Night In the Garden of Eden” for the Boston Ballet.

Recently, the band re-joined Maestro Perlman as an integral part of his cantorial/Hassidic/klezmer/Yiddish folk music project, “Eternal Echoes,” and received rave reviews for their recent Sony CD release and live concert performances at venues including Boston’s Symphony Hall, Brooklyn’s Barclay’s Center and the Hollywood Bowl. The band is featured in 2014’s “Rejoice!,” a full-length PBS Great Performances music special.

The bands recordings include Yiddishe Renaissance, Klez, and A Touch of Klez on the Vanguard label; Oy Chanukah, A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden, Old World Beat, Live! The Thirteenth Anniversary Album, Dancing in the Aisles, A Taste of Paradise and the highly acclaimed Dance Me to the End of Love on Rounder Records. The KCB was prominently featured in the 1988 documentary film, A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden.

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Album Review

Klezmer Conservatory Band: A Taste of Paradise

Read "A Taste of Paradise" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


A Taste of Paradise opens with one of those freewheeling, madcap klezmer tunes, full of whimsey and near-daft musical energy, a swirling break-neck mix of rollicking piano and and loose-jointed horns. “Sarba Miracinae" is The Klezmer Conservatory Band's version – learned from a 1938 recording – of Alexander Olshanetsky's New York based orchestra's take on the tune.This is klezmer, the Jewish music rooted in Eastern Europe and transplanted, in the last part of the 19th and early part ...

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Streaming On Jan. 24: '40 Years In Yiddishland: The Yiddish Book Center Celebrates The Klezmer Conservatory Band'

Streaming On Jan. 24: '40 Years In Yiddishland: The Yiddish Book Center Celebrates  The Klezmer Conservatory Band'

Source: Braithwaite & Katz Communications

In 1979, 24-year old Hankus Netsky began organizing student jam sessions at Boston’s New England Conservatory to play the little known Eastern European folk music known as klezmer. The Klezmer Conservatory Band’s first gig followed in 1980 at NEC’s Brown Hall. Meanwhile, in Western Massachusetts, 24-year-old Yiddish literature graduate student Aaron Lansky launched a campaign to save the world’s Yiddish books, hoping to rescue the estimated 70,000 Yiddish books believed to be salvageable, a goal Lansky’s Yiddish Book Center surpassed ...

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