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56 New Klezmer Tunes for Dancing, Volume 1. Composed by Nat Seelen. New Klezmer Studios. 2023.

Reviewed by Christina Crowder

Boston-based clarinetist, bandleader, and music educator Nat Seelen has published a volume of klezmer-inspired melodies titled 56 New Klezmer Tunes for Dancing, Volume 1. The tunes are fresh and inventive, but the volume falls short in presenting tunes that could be used for Yiddish dancing. This may in part be attributed to the general revival-era decoupling of klezmer music intended for dancing from a living Jewish dance tradition as tunes were increasingly performed on the concert stage rather than mutual aid society balls or weddings. On the other hand, the 2010s brought a number of important resources online for performers and composers, including: a growing body of historical and musicological scholarship on klezmer dance music; [1] an ongoing effort within the klezmer community to teach both dance and playing for dancing; and, thousands of North American and European klezmer recordings now easily available online via the Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings (University of Wisconsin, Madison), the Recorded Sound Archive (Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton), YIVO, and other archives. While not all new klezmer compositions need to fit squarely within the traditional dance genres, when departures such as Seelen’s are intentional it serves the audience and the community writ-large to share their reasoning in notes on individual tunes or in introductory remarks. Because the folio presents the tunes specifically as dance music, this review will focus on structural analysis of tunes for danceability within the stated genre, and playability with regard to historically-informed klezmer practice in those genres rather than an evaluation of compositional issues.