Lloyd Wolf, Michael Winograd, Coney Usland, Brooklyn, NY, 2019.
In A Joyful Noise! photographer Lloyd Wolf presents his documentation of the international Jewish klezmer music scene from the early 1990s through 2024. From old-school performers to the latest young cutting-edge bands, these photographs provide a visual journey exploring this vibrant musical tradition.
What is klezmer? The word derives from a Hebrew phrase keley zemer, meaning tools of the music—or instruments, but by the early 1700’s it was being used to refer to the musicians. Their music, based on Middle Eastern scales, thrived in Eastern Europe, and was performed on happy occasions, using stringed instruments, hammer dulcimers, clarinets, drums, and, later, on other easily portable instruments.
Klezmer music was brought to the US with the Jewish immigration, but was dying out after World War II, perhaps because it reminded people too much of what was lost in the Holocaust. A revival began in the 1970s as people again wanted to hear and perform the kind of music that had sustained them in good times and bad.
For over thirty years, Lloyd Wolf has photographed the musicians of this uniquely Jewish art form, from old-school performers like Sid Beckerman, Julie Epstein, and Elaine Hoffman Watts to the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, Andy Statman, Henry Sapoznik, and Itzhak Perlman, to younger stars Michael Winograd, So-Called, Sasha Lurje, Kleztronica, Zöe Aqua, and many others. These photographs are collected in A Joyful Noise, published by the Klezmer Institute in 2025.
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Lloyd Wolf is an award-winning photographer whose work has been exhibited in over 150 national and international exhibitions. He has worked on assignment for The Washington Post Magazine, National Geographic Explorer, AFL-CIO, People, Vogue, NIH, and many other publications and organizations. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant in 1980 to document Arlington, VA. Current projects include leading the Columbia Pike Documentary Project, and “Washington’s Other Monuments,” on homemade street shrines to violence victims (featured in the Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, and NPR), and ongoing coverage of social justice issues and street protests.
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