Maxwell Street Klezmer Band Celebrates 40 Years with June Concert

The Beatles were together for almost eight years. Gilbert and Sullivan’s partnership lasted twenty-five years. In 2023, Maxwell Street Klezmer Band celebrates 40 years of bringing the “Joy of Klez” to Chicago and the world. Twenty musicians and singers from around the country will be flying in for a lively reunion. The 40th Anniversary Concert, June 4th, at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music will be a retrospective of the band’s five albums as well as a premiere of new music.

In 1983, Lori Lippitz, a vocalist and guitarist from Evanston, Illinois, put out the word to local musicians to join the Klezmer Revival which was burgeoning on the East and West Coasts. The name that she chose for the band – Maxwell Street Klezmer Band – tips its fedora to Chicago’s fabled Sunday lively morning market, established in the late 1800’sby newly-arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Over the past 40 years, the band has collaborated with artists across genres, including the premiere of a classical-klezmer violin concerto with Chicago Sinfonietta, and an album of klezmer-folk music with singer-songwriter Rabbi Joe Black. While Maxwell Street has played at venues from Carnegie Hall and Lyric Opera of Chicago to festivals in London, Munich and Vienna, the band’s central mission is to bring back the lost art of klezmer music to its rightful place at Jewish celebrations. “We are restoring a link in the chain of our heritage that was broken in the Shoah,” says Lippitz, referring to the Holocaust by its Hebrew name. “Every one of our performances is a celebration of that culture coming back to life.”

The band has played for successive generations of family celebrations: for a wedding couple in the 1990s, the bar/bat mitzvah of the wedding couple’s child in the 200s, and then at the grown child’s wedding in the 2020s.

Of the original roster of musicians, only Lippitz and Shelley Yoelin (clarinet, sax, flute) are still playing. Yoelin, who was nominated for CV Music Awards Best Jazz Instrumentalist in 2019, wrote the arrangements in the 1980s that gave the band its distinctive Chicago Jazz sound. In 1990, Alex Koffman, an emigree violinist and graduate of the Music Conservatory in Minsk, Belarus, sat in at the band’s weekly gig at the erstwhile Cafe Continental on Lincoln Avenue. Today, Koffman is the band’s musical director, composer and arranger, creating the band’s signature quirky, quasi-classical originals. He and Yoelin will be creating compositions especially for the 40th anniversary concert.

Not all of the performers at this concert have been on board from the start. Clarinetist Bartek Warkoczynski immigrated to the US only four years ago, after leading his own klezmer band in Poland. And high school musicians from the Junior Klezmer Orchestra, a youth ensemble that Maxwell Street musicians coach in the klezmer style, will play at the beginning and end of the concert.

Maxwell Street shows feature Yiddish vocals. For this concert, Lisa Fishman, recently Yente the Matchmaker in off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish” directed by Joel Gray, will fly in from Los Angeles. Black, featured on the band's most recent album, will premiere a new song virtually from Denver. Other featured vocalists will include Cantor Pavel Roytman, who has sung on stages across the US and Europe, as well as Bibi Marcell, Natasha Bodansky, Tanya Melamed, and Marcia Sterling. Lippitz will sing and emcee.

The Old Town stage has been graced by Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchel, Steve Goodman and John Prine, and hosted Maxwell Street’s 30th Anniversary Concert in 2013. Still loyal to the cause, the Maxwell Street musicians who will ascend the stage on June 4th will continue to put their stamp on the klezmer revival, playing with a schmear of folk music, a dollop of classical, and a bissel of brassy Big Band jazz.

Maxwell Street Klezmer Band 40th Anniversary Concert
Sunday, June 4, 2023 at 2:00 - 4:00 PM
Old Town School of Folk Music,
Maurer Concert Hall, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, IL 60625
($36 General Public, $34 Members)
Ticket link: https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2023/06-04-2023-maxwell-street-klezmer-band/