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 solo and in a number of ensembles since that time, including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa, The Brothers Nazaroff, Voices of Ashkenaz and The An-Sky Ensemble, and has 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, trumpeter/composerFrank London and numerous others.

He is the recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship awarded in 2015 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 collaborations, including duos with Scottish fiddler Gica Loening and American fiddler Craig Judelman.In addition to performance and teaching, Alpert has travelled throughout Eastern Europe, the Americas, Australia and Israel/Palestine 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).([1])

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 reintroduce, perform and teach the traditional solo a capella style of Yiddish folksong and folksinging worldwide.

As a 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.

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