The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band are a Canadianfolk music band, who play a brand of klezmer music, traditional Eastern European Jewish dance music. The band's music adds elements of rock, jazz and salsa.
Formed by composer and trumpeter David Buchbinder in 1987, the band has become a popular draw at Canadian folk festivals, folk and jazz clubs and Jewish community festivals.
The band currently consists of Buchbinder, Daniel Barnes, Andrew Downing, Marilyn Lerner, Bob Stevenson and Dave Wall.
But David was kind enough to inform me that here flyingbulgar refers not to a carbohydrate but to a type of dance.
Klezmer, for the uninitiated, comes largely from the ecstatic songs and dances of the Hasidim, ultra-religious Jews well known for their mystical leanings.
Klezmer, then, is a music of the dispossessed and oppressed; that is why the joy of it is so powerful.
Klezmer is easily identifiable by its characteristic expressive melodies, reminiscent of the human voice, complete with laughing and weeping.
The freylekh (freilach) or bulgar (bulgarisch) is a (3+3+2 = 8)/8 circle dance, usually in the Ahava Rabboh melodic mode.
Other klezmerbands look back to different eras or regions, and attempt to recreate specific styles of klezmer--for example, the band Muzsikas has released albums in the 19th-century Rumanian klezmer style, with only violins, tsimbls and other stringed instruments, giving even the happier passages a more haunting feel.
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