Joel Rubin

Joel Rubin was born in Los Angeles in 1955. His paternal grandfather, who was from Kyiv, was a guitarist and his maternal grandfather, who was from New York City, was a passionate fan of classical music and opera. Both men instilled a love of music in him. Rubin's father was a psychoanalyst and his mother was a visual artist and painter. From 1973 to 1975, Rubin studied classical clarinet with Richard Stoltzman at the California Institute of the Arts. Rubin was exposed to a wider range of Eastern European music from Bill Douglas during that time. In 1975 he relocated to New York City where he studied with Kalmen Opperman, who he continued to study with for several decades. In 1978 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Music at the State University of New York at Purchase. At around that time, he was experimenting with jazz music and other more contemporary genres. He was often performing with Lisa Rose, a pianist who was interested in Jewish music, and when an acquaintance lent him an LP by Dave Tarras, he began to take a greater interest in klezmer music.

Rubin's career as a performer of klezmer music began in 1980 in the Hester Street Klezmer band from Portland, Oregon, as well as a duo with Lisa Rose called The Old Country. He said in a 2021 interview that few people in Portland at that time had any awareness of the genre. At that time, old recordings were fairly difficult to find anywhere in the United States, so musicians would trade cassettes of 78-rpm records from the 1920s or visit archives such as YIVO in New York. KlezKamp was founded in 1985, and he started teaching there annually. In San Francisco from 1986 to 1989 he played with the Joel Rubin Klezmer Band, which included Michael Alpert and Stuart Brotman. In 1988, he started a new duo with accordionist Alan Bern, which Brotman and Alpert soon joined as well; the group eventually became Brave Old World. Rubin moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1989; for the next three years, Brave Old World toured regularly in Europe, although in 1992 Rubin left the group. In 1994, he founded his next project, which still performs to this day, the Joel Rubin Ensemble, which includes Kálmán Balogh on cimbalom, David Chernyavsky on violin, and Claudio Jacomucci on accordion. (The violinist in the ensemble was also Steven Greenman for a time and is and currently Mark Kovnatskiy). He also began to perform as a duo with Joshua Horowitz, who was living in Austria at the time. In 1994, he recorded a CD with Horowitz (Bessarabian Symphony). Both that 1994 album and his subsequent Joel Rubin Ensemble CD Beregovski's Khasene (1997) drew heavily on melodies collected by Soviet ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky, which at that time were still not being performed much by klezmer revival musicians. Since 2013, Rubin has been collaborating more frequently with the group Veretski Pass, releasing two albums with them, Poyln, A Gilgul (2015) and The Magid Chronicles (2019), which was based on the work of Sofia Magid. Over the years, Rubin has appeared on stage with a number of other traditional performers such as the Epstein Brothers, Moshe "Moussa" Berlin, Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, Leon Schwartz, Sid Beckerman, Pete Sokolow, Danny Rubinstein, Ben Bazyler, and Leopold Kozlowski, Vladimir Terletsky and Bronya Sakina. He has also appeared with klezmer revival groups such as the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, The Klezmatics, and the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band. He has also directed some university klezmer ensembles, including the University of Virginia Klezmer Ensemble (of which he has been the director since 2006), the Syracuse University Klezmer Ensemble (in 2006), and the Cornell University Klezmer Ensemble (2003–2006).

• Shteygers (Ways). New Klezmer Music 1991–1994, Trikont, 1995 • Yikhes (Lineage): Early Klezmer Recordings 1911–1939 (1996, Trikont) • Doyres (Generations): Traditional Klezmer Recordings 1979–1994 (1995, Trikont) • Jüdische Lebenswelten/Patterns of Jewish Life: Highlights from the Concert Series 'Traditional and Popular Jewish Music' Berlin 1992, (1993, Schott WERGO) • The Epstein Brothers Orchestra. Kings of Freylekh Land: A Century of Yiddish-American Music (1995, Schott WERGO) • Hungry Hearts: Classic Yiddish Clarinet Solos of the 1920s (1998, Schott WERGO) • Oytsres (Treasures): Klezmer Music 1908–1996 (1999, Schott WERGO) • Cantor Isaac Algazi: Sweet Singer of Israel. Ottoman Jewish Music from the Early 20th Century, in cooperation with Prof. Edwin Seroussi and the Renanot Institute for Jewish Music, Schott WERGO, 2002 • Di eybike mame (The Eternal Mother): Women in Yiddish Theater and Popular Song 1906–1929 (2003, Schott WERGO) • Shalom Comrade!: Yiddish Music in the Soviet Union 1928–1961 (2005, Schott WERGO) • Aneinu (Answer Us): Hasidic-Orthodox Music from the Festival of the Torah in Jerusalem (Moussa Berlin Ensemble) (2008, Schott WERGO) • Chekhov's Band: Eastern European Klezmer Music from the EMI Archives 1908–1913 (2015, Renair Records)