The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars came together in the early 1990s almost by accident. Guitarist Jonathan Freilich, bassist Arthur Kastler, and clarinetist Ben Schenck — all working the Crescent City's Kermit Ruffins-adjacent scene — wanted to book a gig playing tunes from around the world: some swing, a little Martinique, and, on a whim, some old klezmer melodies. The klezmer material turned out to be the crowd favorite. In a city built on marathon four-hour dance gigs, second-line rhythms proved a surprisingly natural home for Yiddish secular music, and what started as a novelty set became the band's whole identity.
Accordionist Glenn Hartman signed on as co-founder soon after, and the lineup kept expanding as New Orleans musicians — accustomed to playing in half a dozen bands at once — drifted in and out of rehearsals. "Mean" Willie Green, then drumming for the Neville Brothers at the height of their fame, joined for what was supposed to be a single gig and stayed. The band's sound became a genuine hybrid: wailing clarinet and minor-key melodies riding second-line grooves, swing, and funk, often sung in Yiddish, often laced with dry humor.
The band's studio output stretched from their self-titled 1994 debut through Manichalfwitz (1996), The Big Kibosh (1997), and Fresh Out the Past (1999), before 2003's Borvis closed out their most active recording stretch. One of the era's more quietly significant developments happened inside the band itself: drummer Stanton Moore, who held down the kit for years, befriended saxophonist Ben Ellman on the bandstand. Ellman went on to become Galactic's horn player and producer, a role he still holds today — making the Klezmer All Stars an unlikely but genuine incubator for one of New Orleans' defining funk acts.
After a nearly decade-long recording gap, the band returned in November 2023 to track Tipish (Yiddish for "typical") in just two days at New Orleans' Happyland Theater, finally documenting a lineup that had scattered across the city's music scene: Freilich and Hartman anchoring the songs they'd co-founded three decades earlier, bassist Joe Cabral and drummer Doug Garrison of The Iguanas, Ellman still on saxophone, Aurora Nealand sitting in on sax, Trombone Shorty saxophonist Dan Oestreicher, and Naughty Professor's Nick Ellman — Ben's cousin — on clarinet. The album mixes playful originals like "King Fela's Chicken Soup" (inspired by a kitchen mishap the night Ellman cooked for Fela Kuti at Tipitina's) with far more serious material, including "Dos Einte Kind," a Holocaust-era lullaby written inside the Vilna Ghetto that the band recorded at the request of the songwriter's descendants for a documentary film.
More than thirty years after three musicians decided klezmer tunes might liven up a swing gig, the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars remain proof of the city's ability to absorb any tradition placed in front of it and make something unmistakably its own.
