Kleztory made their third appearance at Toronto Summer Music Festival Monday July 20th at Walter Hall although this was my first chance to hear and see them, as much a visual as aural experience.

Kleztory sometimes play music that we might call “klezmer”. But that’s not all.

They have their own style. Sometimes they veer into something resembling jazz. Sometimes they seem to be improvising. They’re a very tight ensemble of six players.

Airat Ichmouratov plays clarinet, bass clarinet and duclar (when I looked it up, I discovered that the instrument combines features of a duduk and clarinet. Perhaps it’s meant as a simple combination:
du-duk + clar-inet = duclar). Mostly he was on clarinet. For the first tune I thought maybe he was leader, as his clarinet invoked the familiar klezmer flavour to the music. But no I was wrong.

Immediately I saw violinist Elvira Misbakhova seizing the initiative with solos & melodic decoration that had me thinking sometimes perhaps she was leader.

And soon enough David Ryshpan undermined my sense of klezmer with his jazzy piano stylings, a lovely way with melody. I suppose I have to admit they’re playing a sort of fusion, but then again, klezmer is itself a sort of fusion of styles. I didn’t hear enough klezmer in my life to know enough about the style to say whether Kleztory are a typical klezmer band. Suffice it to say that they are a tight energetic ensemble, creative, a delight.

With each tune I felt the centre of gravity shifting, my sense of who might be leader undermined by the new orientation they threw at us, as much in the playing as in their physical array onstage, moving & changing with fluidity.

Okay maybe the whole idea of “leader” is wrong, defunct, irrelevant.

Sometimes they play a klezmer-sounding music, sometimes entirely veering away. And sometimes neither jazz nor klezmer but entirely different sorts of music, embracing the idea of ethnic crossover in all seriousness, even as they are playful in their exuberant performance style. The eye-contact between them is a kind of magic. The pleasure they take in making and sharing their music is infectious.

Mélanie Bergeron on accordion was mostly working in support yet a few times she was the only one playing, to start a piece or as the ensemble paused to regroup and shift its focus.

At least once she was as jazzy on her accordion as if she were emulating David’s jazz piano. I suspect being in the same band they must influence one another.

There are two other members who also took a moment to tell us of a piece they had composed. Clearly everyone is welcome to contribute. Double bass player Mark Peetsma announced his piece, and later guitarist Raphaël D’Amour came forward a couple of times, his pieces taking us in an entirely different direction.

Although we were told to take pictures & share to social media, I didn’t feel right about it, only pulling out my phone briefly at the beginning and end. While it may have been okay with Kleztory I was aware that the TSM audience, accustomed to classical decorum, might be disturbed by too much picture-taking.

But of course the other thing to consider is that when you’re taking pictures, head down looking through your smartphone, you miss a lot of the fun, so in fact I’m glad I didn’t take more pictures than the few I got.

We were encouraged regularly to clap, being told by Mélanie that our clapping energized their playing, and so we did a lot of that throughout the concert, at least on the quicker klezmerish tunes. A couple of times the players led us in the clapping and sometimes started dancing.

It was lots of fun.