There's always something eerie about listening to old recordings: first comes the crackle and hiss of long-defunct technology, then a long-dead voice floats from the speakers. At first the listener is transfixed - in these digitised days, the sound of static comes as quite a shock to the ears, and the vocal style on historical discs is, as often as not, as mannered as the gestures in old black-and-white films - but if the singer is any good, any reservations are quickly overcome. And on this two-CD compilation, Music of the Eastern European Jews, the singers are very, very good indeed.
The variety of the material, of course, is a kind of shock in itself. Here are songs from the Yiddish folk theatre, songs from the Carpathian mountains and the Black Sea, songs from Warsaw, songs from Second Avenue. The performers range from flirtatious girl groups to terrific tenors to honey-voiced crooners; folk melodies rub shoulders with love songs and nostalgic laments. But though some of the pieces are devoted to subjects of overwhelming sadness - or subjects which, in retrospect, resonate with overwhelming sadness - the effect is anything but downbeat. This is uplifting music, but not clappy-happy music; more than anything, it's music which tells stories drawn from lived experiences, so that what emerges from the speakers is a slice of life itself.
So the earliest song on the collection, Greetings from the Trenches, from 1918, is an American confection intended as moral support for all those who were worried about loved ones on the front line in Europe; one of the latest pieces is the 1948 Yontef, the Yiddish version of the Hebrew "Yom Tov" or "Good Day", which describes Jewish holy days. The Yiddish language is itself a joy: in one romantic love song we meet the "chupe", or wedding canopy; in a cheeky cabaret number we are introduced to the wealthy Mrs Binder, who cannot "chupe shteln" (have children) because " 's felt a bissl fefer" (some pepper is missing").
The folk origins of the music are, almost everywhere, unmistakable - instruments occasionally waft in straight from a Romanian folk dance, or voices from the Russian steppes. As the helpful sleeve notes explain, much of the material is housed at the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute in New York; a great deal more came from collections and archives scattered around the world. The aim of the anthology was to present as broad a spectrum as possible - it has succeeded, not as a dusty exercise in musicology, but as a life-affirming song of celebration.
Music of the Eastern European Jews is on the Pan Extra label