Michael Alpert

Michael Alpert (born 1954, Los Angeles, California) is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s.
He has performed in a number of groups since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and collaborated with clarinetist David Krakauer, hip-hop artist Socalled, singer/songwriter/actor Daniel Kahn, bandurist Julian Kytasty, violinist Itzhak Perlman, ethnomusicologist and musician Walter Zev Feldman and numerous others.

He is the recipient of a 2015 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's highest lifetime honor to its folk and traditional artists.

Alpert is also a pioneering teacher and researcher of Yiddish traditional dance and has been central to restoring Yiddish dance to its time-honored place alongside klezmer music as a key component of East European Jewish expressive culture.

As of 2023, Alpert continues to teach and perform worldwide from his home in Scotland as a soloist and in various configurations, including duos with Scottish fiddler Gica Loening and American fiddler Craig Judelman.

In addition to performance and teaching, Alpert has travelled throughout Eastern Europe and the Americas conducting ethnographic research and documentation of Jewish and other traditional musicians and singers. His audio and video fieldwork archive of over 1,000 hours of interviews and field recordings was acquired by the American Folklife Center of the U.S. Library of Congress, and his scholarly publications include an article in ''American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots'' (University of California Press, 2002, ed. Mark Slobin) on Warsaw-born klezmer drummer Ben Bazyler (1922-1990)
readable here on Google Books
, and ''Jewish Instrumental Folk Music: The Collections and Writings of Moshe Beregovski'' (Moisei Beregovsky), translated and edited by Alpert, Mark Slobin and Robert Rothstein (Syracuse University Press, 2001)

Alpert can be credited with initiating the revival of rhythmic and harmonic ''sekund'' violin playing in klezmer music, a key technique and voice in traditional European klezmer ensembles that had fallen out of use prior to the klezmer revitalization. He was among the first figures of the klezmer and Yiddish culture revitalization to re-introduce, perform and teach the traditional solo a capella style of Yiddish folksong and folksinging worldwide.

As a late teenager in the early 1970's, Alpert lived in Yugoslavia, researching traditional music and dance and learning the languages of the western Balkans, particularly the former Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian.

Alpert was musical director of the 1995 PBS Great Performances special ''Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler's House'' (1996 Emmy Award for Outstanding Cultural Music-Dance Program and Golden Rose (Montreux) for same) and co-producer of the two Perlman klezmer CDs on the Angel Records/ EMI label.

Discography

*''Night Songs from a Neighboring Village'' (2014) with Julian Kytasty (Oriente Musik)
*''In Der Heym'' (2023) with Craig Judelman ( Borscht Beat)

References

External links

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Michael Alpert
2015 article, bibliography, discography, and filmography, at Masters of Traditional Arts of Documentary Arts
Interviews
with some klezmer revivalists including Alpert
In the Fiddler's House
link on Amazon.com

1954 births
Living people
American violinists
Klezmer musicians
Jewish American musicians
National Heritage Fellowship winners
Musicians from Los Angeles
21st-century violinists
20th-century violinists

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