Klezmer in the context of "Slavic people"

Parting traditions or parting customs are various traditions, customs, and habits used by people to acknowledge the parting of individuals or groups of people from each other.

In Klezmer music tradition, parting melodies are played at a Jewish wedding day, such as the Zay gezunt (be healthy), Gas-nign, Dobriden (good day), Dobranotsh or A gute nakht (good night) etc. These types of pieces were sometimes in
₄ which may have given an air of dignity and seriousness.

Jewish music is the music and melodies of the Jewish people. There exist both traditions of religious music, as sung at the synagogue and in domestic prayers, and of secular music, such as klezmer. While some elements of Jewish music may originate in biblical times (Biblical music), differences of rhythm and sound can be found among later Jewish communities that have been musically influenced by location. In the nineteenth century, religious reform led to composition of ecclesiastic music in the styles of classical music. At the same period, academics began to treat the topic in the light of ethnomusicology. Edwin Seroussi has written, "What is known as 'Jewish music' today is thus the result of complex historical processes". A number of modern Jewish composers have been aware of and influenced by the different traditions of Jewish music.

American popular music (also referred to as "American Pop") is popular music produced in the United States and is a part of American pop culture. Distinctive styles of American popular music emerged early in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the American music industry developed a series of new forms of music, using elements of blues and other genres. These popular styles included country, R&B, jazz and rock. The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of important changes in American popular music, including the development of a number of new styles, such as heavy metal, punk, soul, and hip hop.

American popular music is incredibly diverse, with styles including ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, rock, bluegrass, country, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, pop, punk, disco, house, techno, salsa, grunge and hip hop. In addition, the American music industry is quite diverse, supporting a number of regional styles such as zydeco, klezmer and slack-key. Though these styles were not always in the sense of mainstream, they were commercially recorded and therefore are examples of popular music as opposed to folk or classical music.

Shtetl or shtetel (English: /ˈʃtɛtəl/ SHTET-əl; Yiddish: שטעטל, romanized: shtetl, pronounced [ʃtɛtl̩]; pl. שטעטעלעך shtetelekh) is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the context of former Eastern European Jewish societies as mandated islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination. Shtetls (or shtetels, shtetlach, shtetelach or shtetlekh) were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire (constituting modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Russia), as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia and Bukovina, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.

In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, is called a shtot (Yiddish: שטאָט), and a village is called a dorf (Yiddish: דאָרף). Shtetl is a diminutive of shtot with the meaning 'little town'. Despite the existence of Jewish self-administration (kehilla/kahal), officially there were no separate Jewish municipalities, and the shtetl was referred to as a miasteczko or miestelis (mestechko, in Russian bureaucracy), a type of settlement which originated in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and was formally recognized in the Russian Empire as well. For clarification, the expression "Jewish miasteczko" was often used.

The Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków (Polish: Festiwal Kultury Żydowskiej w Krakowie, Yiddish: ייִדישער קולטור־פֿעסטיוואַל אין קראָקע) is an annual cultural event organized since 1988 in the once Jewish district of Kazimierz (part of Kraków) by the Jewish Culture Festival Society headed by Janusz Makuch, a self-described meshugeneh ("crazy person"), fascinated with all things Jewish. The main goal of the festival is to educate people about Jewish culture, history, and faith (Judaism), which flourished in Poland before the Holocaust, as well as to familiarize them with modern Jewish culture, developing mostly in the United States and Israel, and finally, to provide entertainment.

Each festival is held in late June or early July and takes nine days, from Saturday to Sunday. During that time concerts, exhibitions, plays, lectures, workshops, tours, etc. are organized. The two most important concerts are: the inaugural concert on the first Sunday, and the final concert on the last Saturday of the festival. The former usually takes place in one of seven synagogues of Kazimierz and features cantoral music; the latter is always held outdoors, in Ulica Szeroka, the main street of the Jewish part of Kazimierz, and features klezmer music. In between, there are many more concerts, usually with some variations of klezmer music.

Dave Tarras (c. 1895 – February 13, 1989) was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, who was instrumental in the Klezmer revival.

Naftule Brandwein, or Naftuli Brandwine, (Yiddish: נפתלי בראַנדװײַן, September 20, 1884 – October 2, 1963) was an Austrian-born Jewish American Klezmer musician, clarinetist, bandleader and recording artist active from the 1910s to the 1940s. Along with Dave Tarras, he is considered to be among the top klezmer musicians of the twentieth century, and has a continuing influence on musicians in the genre a century later. Along with Tarras and other contemporaries like Israel J. Hochman, Max Leibowitz and Harry Kandel, he also helped forge the new American klezmer sound of the early twentieth century, which gradually gravitated towards a sophisticated big-band sound.

Sidney Beckerman (1919–2007) was an influential klezmer clarinet player. He learned the style from his father Shloimke, who was himself a well known klezmer soloist.Sidney played Jewish weddings and celebrations in New York City and the Catskills throughout the 1930s. After World War II ended, he returned to New York and started working for the US Postal Service.

Upon his retirement in 1982, he was convinced by fellow klezmer musician Pete Sokolow to join the band Klezmer Plus!. A recording of this band in 1989 (with Howie Leess) was named an Outstanding Folk Recording by the Library of Congress