I enjoy this type of music. It reflects lots of cultures- Eastern Europe and Isreali/Jewish origins. The songs are emotional and fun too! I will continue to buy more Klez music real soon.

This album is a joy! The Klez Dispensers are excellent musicians who know how to have fun with their medium. They capture the spirit of the old-time klezmer bands and restore your faith in the future of klezmer as an art form. Highly recommended for listeners of every age, gender, or religious persuasion. Viele nachess (much happiness)!

With their exuberance, musicianship and ability to have any audience get up and dance, The Klez Dispensers have become the house band for klezmer's newest wave. New Jersey Freylekhs draws inspiration from the experimental jazz/Jewish interchanges of the late '50s where bop added to klezmer's established relationship with swing. It is obvious throughout that the Dispensers are filled with “players”; clarinetist/saxophonist Alex Kontorovich, trumpeter Ben Holmes and saxophonist Audrey Betsy Wright use the genre to highlight their technical ability while maintaining the requisite melodic respect. Amy Zakar's heartfelt violin alternates between Jewish and swing to impart warmth that touches the soul. While the band's take on traditional tunes, like their arrangement of “Dave's Freylekhs,” where Kontorovich's clarinet brings back clarinetist Dave Tarras; and “Abi Gezunt,” which has Amy's swing violin conjuring up Stephane Grappelli, do delight, it is the newly composed music and arrangements that most impress such as the Ben Holmes compositions “Doina,” “Karnofsky Tanz” and the title cut. “Doina” draws its effectiveness from Holmes' restraint as he holds each note while delicately rolling it around until it subtly changes as he spits it out. His “Karnofsky Tanz” serves as the perfect uptempo release with each instrumentalist taking a turn on the dance floor. The title cut begins with a traditional sound, as the piano of Adrian Banner pumps along the rhythm with drummer Gregg Mervine leading violin, clarinet, trumpet and sax to find interesting changes. Banner likewise proves to be a strong composer and arranger as he blends the classical piano/violin duet of “Freymilekh” into an introductory doina, followed by some hot avant klez freylekhing. Banner's version of “Der Heyser Bulgar” takes things further out as Kontorovich switches to bari sax, and with Ed Browne's electric bass, turns what begins as a stately violin/trumpet duet into a modern downtown NYC klez blow out.

In the mid- to late 1990s, a strange thing began to happen on college campuses across the land. Alongside marching bands, symphony orchestras, jazz combos and rock groups, klezmer ensembles began to sprout like mushrooms. By the end of the century, klezmer had a formal or informal presence on campuses including Yale, Brown, Columbia, the University of Virginia and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1998, a few students from the Princeton University Jazz Ensemble got together to play klezmer. The Klez Dispensers began as the officially-sanctioned, university klezmer band, but after the musicians graduated, they became an independent group, replaced at Princeton by the Klezmocrats. On their second CD, "New Jersey Freylekhs," the Klez Dispensers mine a unique, nearly forgotten style of klezmer. Picking up where the music left off in the 1950s, before it was all but steamrollered by mainstream American popular music in the postwar rush to assimilation, the group re-imagines what would have happened to the classic-sounding freylekhs and bulgars if the music had continued evolving along the lines of the post-Swing Era experiments of clarinet great Dave Tarras and his son-in-law, saxophonist Sam Musiker. On his landmark but grossly neglected 1955 album, "Tanz!," Musiker, who had played with Gene Krupa's swing band, tried to update his father-in-law's sound to reflect some of the harmonic and stylistic innovations of post-swing, small-ensemble bebop. On earlier klezmer recordings, horns and clarinets tended to double each other's melodies in the same way that Old World violins would echo each other one octave apart or simply play rhythmic, pedal-point notes. Musiker introduced the concept of playing sophisticated ascending and descending harmony lines around the lead melody-player in klezmer. Nowadays, when you listen to "Tanz!," it sounds strikingly modern, in part because many of the early klezmer revivalists of the 1970s and 1980s went back further in time and recapitulated the more primitive ways of playing and arranging klezmer. Even the more experimentally-oriented of the current crop of klezmorim, including those who add rock, jazz and other influences to the mix, tend to build their work upon more straightforward melody-playing. On "New Jersey Freylekhs," the Klez Dispensers have chosen to revive Musiker's approach while adding a few twists of their own. The group puts violin and mandolin back into the ensemble in the person of Amy Zakar, spicing up the horn-heavy jazz sound with some Old World tam, or flavor. Many of the group's arrangements are solidly rooted in Adrian Banner's piano, another element borrowed from jazz. But purists needn't fret. In clarinetist Alex Kontorovich, the stately playing of Dave Tarras lives on. Like Tarras, Kontorovich holds much in reserve, carefully parceling out the trademark achy, bent notes — the krekhts and kneytshn that klezmer inherited from cantorial music — using them as delicately placed punctuation. Trumpeter Ben Holmes sounds equally schooled in the playing of Benny Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman and the Klezmatics' Frank London. The rest of the musicians have obviously done their homework, too. The Klez Dispensers don't play with blinders on. The album's final track, a version of "Der Heyser Bulgar," originally popularized by clarinetist Naftule Brandwein in the 1920s, suggests that these 20-something musicians have avant-garde leanings of their own. The selection opens with the instruments entering one at a time, playing a fractured version of the melody, before the bass lays down an odd Balkan meter over state-of-the-art drumming of the sort more likely to be heard at the Knitting Factory than at a Jewish wedding — or any wedding, for that matter. On "New Jersey Freylekhs," the Klez Dispensers dispense the voice of both klezmer past and future, providing the connective tissue between the two.