Edition: U.S. / Global

Don Byron

By Stephen Sherrill;
Published: January 16, 1994

"I'm very much into Yiddish culture, so I know a little bit," says Ann Weiss, a petite older woman. "I'm no connoisseur, but I do know a little bit." She has come to the Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn for an evening of a sometimes raucous Eastern European instrumental music called klezmer, as played by a sometimes raucous clarinetist named Don Byron. Intermission is almost over.

"I was in Florida in 1957. I went to a nightclub and I saw Mickey Katz perform," she says. That was during Katz's heyday, the brief years in the late 50's when his wild, mischievous brand of klezmer flourished. Katz became famous for his parodies of American popular music, transforming "Home on the Range" into "Haim Afen Range," "April in Portugal" into "Pesach in Portugal." Since then, Katz has been known mostly as the father of the Broadway actor Joel Grey. But with the release of "Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz," his music is drawing crowds again.

"The way Katz did 'Davey Crockett' in Yiddish, your side split," recalls Ms. Weiss. "He was a short man, but he was outstanding." Byron is larger than the diminutive Katz, and he stands out in other ways as well. Over his usual orange T-shirt and slide-rule wristwatch, he wears a black suit; a round canvas hat sits over dreadlocks, which flank his schoolboy glasses. Ms. Weiss is unimpressed, though, especially with the two Jewish vocalists who have been singing tonight. "They don't have the language," she comments. "They're doing it by transliteration, so you don't get the real Yiddish expression."

The 10 musicians reassemble for the second set, and the audience files in from the back. It's the usual St. Ann's crowd, mostly young professionals sporting public radio tote bags and Friends-of-the-Arts buttons, but here and there can be seen a Lubavitcher T-shirt declaring, "Moshiach Is Coming."

"I know klezmer from growing up with the real thing -- it's not loud," says Ms. Weiss, taking her seat. "This to me is a rock band, so I put a little cotton in my ears."

"This is good klezmer music," objects a friend who has accompanied her. "It is entertaining, and they are fine musicians."

"Excellent musicians," says a second friend.

"Sure they're good. What, are they going to put up a bunch of amateurs?" retorts Ms. Weiss. "But this is blown out of proportion."

A young man, overhearing, approaches the group. "Ma'am, do you know the Mickey Katz recordings? I do."

"Katz didn't do it like this," Ms. Weiss insists. "I was there."

"It's exactly like this on the records, ma'am. It's an exact translation."

On stage, Byron, clarinet in hand, introduces the next number and the discussion tapers off. "Who wants to dance?" asks Byron. "We need a little dancing here. We need to desecrate the temple, know what I'm sayin'?" With that, Byron brings the reed to his lips, raises the bell of the clarinet above his head, and, bringing it down sharply as a signal to the band, plunges into "Litvak Square Dance." As he pumps his torso back and forth to the music, his dreadlocks sway, and Byron looks to all the world like a rabbi davening.

BYRON'S MUSIC HAS prompted debates like this one almost since the 35-year-old clarinetist started playing it. Byron prides himself on the authenticity of his music. Indeed, the orchestrations he played at St. Ann's were, note for note, the same as Katz's, except for the clarinet parts. But not even Ms. Weiss could fault Byron for his occasional departures. Byron, according even to his detractors, is a virtuoso, and only improves on Katz's merely adequate clarinet work.

If Byron doesn't look the part of a klezmer musician, well, that's the point. Authenticity for him involves not fulfilling expectations but upending them -- presenting the music so out of context, and mastering the music to such a degree, that listeners will be forced to disconnect what they're hearing from any preconceived notions of what someone playing such music looks like. "I don't want to be the mainstream guy. I just want to be the weird guy," Byron later explains. "I want to be the guy who's got the weird thing of his own, and then I want to be that in several different contexts." These days, those contexts include the Don Byron Quintet, which plays jazz; Semaphore, a modern classical music quintet, and Music for Six Musicians, an Afro-Cuban ensemble he toured with in Europe this fall. He's also busy writing a classical piece commissioned by the avant-garde Kronos Quartet.

Byron is primarily a jazz musician, and he uses that genre as home base for his many ethnic music travels. But his journey through the klezmer world is turning out to be more arduous than he had planned. Byron has so singularly transcended categorization that to the public he has become, Broadway Danny Rose-style, the Black Guy Who Does Klezmer. "Sometimes it's like I'm going to be the klezmer man for the rest of my life," he says wearily. "I just didn't think it was going to get this big."

Byron's predicament is oddly fitting, given the history of klezmer music. Klezmer, a Yiddish word meaning "vessel of music," was a product of Eastern European Yiddish culture and followed Jewish immigrants to the United States in the 1880's. It's not what one would call sacred music. Instead of humility, it evokes celebration, cheekiness, frivolity; it could back up a traditional wedding, or a wild cartoon chase scene. Byron says it sometimes sounds like Jewish hip-hop.