"Little Blackbird documents the early work of a virtuoso who up until now was an unsung hero of the klezmer revival... one of klezmer’s greatest living violinists"

- Seth Rogovoy, Berkshire Jewish Voice, July 2002

Violinist Sandra Layman’s new CD, Little Blackbird (Rosin Dust), documents a series of live performances of klezmer and related genres by Layman and her musical colleagues in Seattle from 1982 to 1985. As such, it serves as an important historical document: at once preserving an oral account of the fertile Pacific Northwest klezmer revival, of which Layman was a key proponent, and encoding the revival’s close relationship to co-territorial musics, including Greek, Turkish, Romanian and Hungarian music.

Many early revivalists, like Layman, were already students of non-Jewish eastern European and Balkan folk musics, and they brought the influences of those backgrounds to their initial forays into klezmer (thus historically recapitulating the give-and-take that Yiddish klezmorim shared with non-Jewish musicians in their area). So on “Little Blackbird,” we typically hear Layman - one of dozens of revivalists who studied at the New England Conservatory -- fiddling a Gypsy dance followed by a suite of Hasidic nigunim, joined by various musicians on piano, guitar, bouzouki, clarinet, and cimbalom.

But more than all of that, “Little Blackbird” documents the early work of a virtuoso who up until now was an unsung hero of the klezmer revival. The only question remaining is, if this is what Layman sounded like 20 years ago, what does she sound like today? The time is long overdue for one of klezmer’s greatest living violinists to make a new recording.

- Seth Rogovoy

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