Dave Tarras, a clarinetist and a key figure in helping popularize the klezmer movement in America, died of pneumonia on Monday at age 95.
Tarras, born in the Ukraine of a long line of klezmer musicians, emigrated to the United States in 1921 to escape the persecution of Jews in his homeland.
“Klezmorim,” as these musicians are known, perpetuate a unique brand of Yiddish folk music that utilizes mostly horns and accordions and that has pervaded European Jewish culture since the Middle Ages.
Henry Sapoznik, a prominent klezmer musician and leader of the Kapelye orchestra in New York, praised Tarras for having “created . . . a klezmer “a new venue in America.”
Incorporating elements of American Jazz without relinquishing his Yiddish roots, Tarras pioneered the use of the B-flat clarinet among klezmer players, abandoning the traditional E-flat and C clarinets.
He recorded for major labels, including Columbia, Decca and Victor, and accompanied some of the most popular Yiddish entertainers of the 1920s and ’30s.
Sapoznik said there was “not an event in the lives of immigrant Jews in the first half of the twentieth century in America that Tarras didn’t play at,” and that a klezmer aficionado of the time “couldn’t think of Jewish music without thinking of Dave Tarras.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
