With his red beard, black shtetl cap and tawny violin, the only thing klezmer fiddler David Chernyavsky needs is a roof.
He just might raise the roof at KlezCalifornia’s annual Yiddish Culture Festival on Nov. 7-8 at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay. Chernyavsky will perform at the opening night “Cabaret & Cabernet” party, then teach a class the next day titled “How to Make a Tune Sound Jewish.”
He would know. The Russian-born, Juilliard trained classical musician has been playing klezmer since childhood, refining his artistry over the years joining such world-class masters as clarinetist Joel Rubin.
Chernyavsky is one of many Bay Area artists and workshop leaders participating in this year’s festival. They include violinist Cookie Segelstein, bassist Stu Brotman and keyboardist Joshua Horowitz (collectively know as Veretski Pass), singers Heather Klein, Anthony Russell, Jeanette Lewicki and Sharon Bernstein, and dance leader Bruce Bierman.
The opening night party band will be Saul Goodman’s Klezmer Band, the “Klezmer Mondays” house band at Saul’s Deli in Berkeley. Actor and playwright Arje Shaw will emcee the affair.
The festival closes with a performance by Veretski Pass, followed by a klezmer dance party.
The weekend isn’t just about music. Yiddish poet Jake Marmer, performance artists Sara Felder and Naomi Newman, and others also will be on stage or lead workshops.
The sessions will cover such diverse topics as transcribing klezmer tunes from recordings, Yiddish theater choreography, and the history of Eastern European Jewry. There are instrumental
classes for musicians of all levels, and even a workshop for families and kids.
Chernyavsky’s workshop is geared toward more advanced players who want to give their fiddling a Yiddish accent. He says the key to making a tune sound Jewish is ornamentation. “This is how, where and when you add grace notes,” says Chernyavsky, who lives in San Bruno.
“What klezmer musicians do is collaborate on melody. The first time you play it straight, then add more and more ornamentations.”
Those could be trills or what he calls “glisses” (short for glissando, the musicological term for sliding up and down the string).
“A lot of these elements come from the singing voice,” Chernyavsky adds. “When you sing, if you know the aesthetics of the music, you automatically add some little phrases, little glisses. When you play this music a lot, you have a pretty good idea what sounds good or not.”
He started down the road to klezmer at age 13, several years into his classical violin studies in his native St. Petersburg. Chernyavsky, 37, the son of refuseniks, was lucky enough to grow up in those post-glasnost days when the Soviet ban on Jewish traditions began to lift.
Suddenly, after decades of repression, Mother Russia went mad for Jewish music.
“There was a general renaissance of Jewish culture after it became allowed,” Chernyavsky recalls. “Chabad people were coming over from Israel, setting up Jewish youth camps. There were new Jewish community organizations in St. Petersburg.”
At his Jewish Sunday school, a youth klezmer band was in need of a fiddler. Chernyavsky took to it immediately. As he came to master classical violin, so, too, did he master the fiddle dialect of klezmer.
“It’s just different in how it works,” he says of the two styles. “Technically, as with many other kinds of folk music, the sound is not as refined, the intonation not that important. It’s less precise than Mozart.”
After winning a streak of music competitions in Europe, Chernyavsky moved to the United States with his family in the late 1990s. He continued his education at Indiana University and Julliard, from which he graduated in 2002.
Since then he has performed as a soloist, concertmaster and member of various string quartets. He was a member of the Washington National Opera Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for nearly a decade before moving to the Bay Area in 2009 to join the San Francisco Symphony.
He has recorded with the Saint Petersburg String Quartet and the Joel Rubin Ensemble, and released his own solo klezmer CD.
Mozart and Mahler may pay the bills, but Chernyavsky loves to moonlight playing klezmer.
“I like the music and it comes naturally,” he says. “I never had to work hard to make it work like I would practice a classical violin concerto. [Klezmer] definitely has some connection to my soul.”
KlezCalifornia Yiddish Culture Festival
Nov. 7-8 at JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley.
www.klezcalifornia.org or (415) 789-7879