Dor L'Dor

The rotating cast of Knoxville’s Dor L’Dor has been delivering its unpredictable take on traditional klezmer music for nearly 10 years now. As the title of the group’s new disc has it, Dor L’Dor is Not Your Father’s Klezmer Band. There’s plenty of traditional klezmer on the album—about half the song titles are in Hebrew or Yiddish—but it’s interspersed with bursts of jazz (sections of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” show up in “Bai Mir Bistu Sheyn,” and there’s a drum solo in “Trombonki Tantz (mit a poyk)”), folk (“Ha’aretz” rearranges Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”), and even marching band tunes (“Am Yisrael Chai” includes a klezmer version of the University of Michigan fight song, “Hail to the Victors”).
The band now includes founding members Ken Brown and Susan Shorr Brown, their children Michael, Daniel, and Rachel Brown, Ken’s brother, Steve Brown, who’s played drums with Hector Qirko for years, as well as Jeff Hecht, Jon Walton, and Jamie Warren. (Matthew Everett)