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klezmer music • yiddish song • east european jewish dance • cultural historian • teacher • workshop leader • ethnomusicologist • producer • writer • yiddishist • dynamic figure on the scene
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Michael Alpert tells the story of the Jewish people and the human race, in song, music and the spoken word. Drawn from his deep family heritage and travels through the cultures and terrain of Europe and the Americas, his programs are sojourns through inner and outer landscapes. They are a saga of immigrant journey and an epic of the universal search for home. Alpert is a keeper of ancient lore who grew up on the Beach Boys and Mariachi as well as the plaintive melisma of the cantor, Yiddish folksong, tales of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, Allen Ginsberg, and the pop music of Bosnia in the 1970s. He tells the old stories and sings the old songs, in a contemporary yet timeless voice. Fluent in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Spanish, German, Serbo-Croatian and conversant in a dozen more languages, Alpert recounts human history and experience in the idiom of the people, through time-honored traditional forms that give voice to the global condition. Like a bard of old, Alpert recounts the tales of nations and peoples, weaving the tapestry of the ages into contemporary and original forms. He sings of love and majesty, of war, tragedy and sorrow, the yearnings of heart and mind, of hope and the struggle to survive. From these songs both the everyday and epic drama of history emerge, the sweep of generations, the music of mountains greening and fields aflame, of cities great and tall, the melody of the earth and its creatures from time immemorial. On top of all this, let's just say I was generationally supposed to have been born in 1925, and I come from an old-country, backwoods Lubavitcher logging and bootlegging family. I had a Thursday morning bar-mitsve in an Orthodox synagogue, and no party. But I did learn to fish well, fell trees and chop wood, and in Yiddish, at that!
Here's my bio:MICHAEL ALPERT (voice, accordion, violin, guitar, percussion) has been a pioneering figure in the current renaissance of East European Jewish klezmer music for over 25 years, and is internationally known for his performances and recordings with Brave Old World, Khevrisa, Kapelye, David Krakauer, Itzhak Perlman and others. Raised in a Yiddish-speaking home, he is considered the finest traditional Yiddish singer of his generation, and is noted for his original Yiddish songs on contemporary themes. Alpert was the Emmy Award-winning musical director of the PBS Great Performances special "Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler's House" (1996 Emmy and Rose d'Or Awards) and its subsequent concert tours, and executive producer of the Perlman / Klezmer CDs. An important link between Old World Jewish musicians and the klezmer revival, Alpert was a research associate at New York's YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and has conducted extensive documentation of traditional Jewish music and dance in throughout North America and Europe. A program director of Canada's "KlezKanada" and a longtime staff instructor at "KlezKamp," he is active as a scholar, producer and educator in the Jewish ethnomusicology and cultural history fields, and is the leading contemporary researcher and teacher of East European Jewish traditional dance. Alpert is translator and co-editor of "Jewish Instrumental Folk Music," (Syracuse University Press, 2001), the seminal 1938 work on klezmer music by Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moyshe Beregovski, and has taught and lectured at Oxford University, Columbia University, Yale University, and the New England Conservatory of Music. For Michael Alpert's complete bio, click here. |
