MUSIC REVIEW : KLEZMORIM: GOULASH OF MUSIC, ANTICS AND FUN

In these days of dead-serious musicological exhumation, it’s nice to know that there’s at least one group of players who actually have fun with the music they’re re-creating.

Consider the Klezmorim, who opened a 15-performance stint at Theatre West in Los Angeles Thursday night: Six youngish zanies who deliver the musical goods--an antic goulash of swing, blues, Levantine melodies and turn-of-the-century Romantic--and also manage to make a spectacle of themselves, incorporating mime, stand-up buffoonery and even a light show straight out of a motel lounge act.

The players began with a raving klezmer tune, a fast but mournful melody, which established the intensity right off. Their cheerful musical anarchy--very close to a Dixieland band in feel--kept the group together even when the tunes threatened to self-destruct from all the riffing.

Yet the Klezmorim played it straight later on with an effective arrangement (by tubist Donald Thornton) of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”--though clarinetist Ben Goldberg called it the “last great work” of one Sergei Plagiarovsky, “after whom the modern practice of ‘borrowing’ is named.”

It’s possible one might grow tired of the basically monochromatic klezmer style quickly, but leader-saxophonist Lev Liberman’s band is far too canny to let that happen. For example, a mini-opera that progresses from Minsk street corners to “Minnie the Moocher” is a fine microcosm of what the Klezmorim can offer.

The Klezmorim are fun, they can play (percussionist Ken Bergmann, trumpeter Chris Leaf and trombonist Kevin Linscott round out the group), and they’re performing locally in a small theater well suited to their talents.