On a balmy spring night last March, trumpeter and composer Frank London leaned into his microphone at the Community Theatre in Morristown, New Jersey, a prosperous suburb about 35 miles west of Manhattan, and said the next song the audience would hear was called "Mizmor Shir le-Hanef." He then mischievously described the number, from the latest disc by his group, The Klezmatics, as "probably the first Jewish reefer song."

The Klezmatics

The crowd, a casual mix of white-haired seniors, middle-aged couples with small children, and a dollop of twentysomethings, reacted with applause, gasps and a few nervous giggles. No one, it seemed, knew what to make of this. Was it the unrestrained rambling of a post-hippie enfant terrible? A stab at shock value? An attempt to relate to the baby boomers occupying the well-padded seats? Just how did someone’s ode to hemp find its way into a klezmer song?

After all, klezmer has been anything but a controversial or provocative music. For generations, klezmer has usually served as the soundtrack of choice for weddings, bar mitzvahs and other simchas – happy occasions that are marked by religious ritual and a call for celebration. In short, klezmer – derived from the words kley z’mer, which mean musical instrument – is party music.

To be sure, much of today’s klezmer music continues to fill this role. Rooted in age-old traditions, klezmer is still defined by the musical styles and, to a limited extent, the social customs that gave rise to this genre more than two centuries ago. Yet the emergence of such popular groups as The Klezmatics, which have aggressively woven other forms of music into their songs and have come to symbolize Jewish cool, underscores a significant transformation in how klezmer is being played and perceived.

No longer viewed as an exercise in nostalgia, klezmer today is just one of many symbolic badges displayed by a new generation of Jews in this country for whom ethnic pride is highly preferable to the assimilation embraced by their parents and grandparents. For some, listening to klezmer is in itself a statement, a way to assert an identity while forming a link to a culture ruptured — some say erased — by migration, war and genocide.

"A lot of Jews actually don’t have access to or can’t relate to the deeper material, which served a specific set of functions and was part of a living, breathing community" throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe, said Andy Statman, a clarinetist who is one of a handful of revered musicians credited with reviving klezmer in the late 1970s. "But for many Jews, both musicians and listeners, klezmer has become a way to express their own Jewishness."