A great melody never dies, it just gets borrowed.
Such is the philosophy of the Klezmer Company Orchestra, which played to about 400 people at the Tucson Jewish Community Center last week to raise money for the Jewish-Latino Teen Coalition's upcoming trip to Washington, D.C.
The nine-piece Klezmer Company Orchestra is an ensemble-in-residence at the Florida Atlantic University Libraries in Boca Raton, and has access to its extensive print music collection. The group creates new orchestrations by remixing old melodies with contemporary music, said Aaron Kula, the band director.
"We are the only major professional ensemble-in-residence of its kind in the country at an academic research library," Kula said before taking the stage. "That's like the biggest key in what's going on here, because we are establishing a new model for what happens inside a library's music archives."
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Operating much like the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian Institute, the FAU Libraries archives consist of music that is American, European, classical, jazz and Latin American.
"Although many institutions have tremendous archives, we have archives that actually get used," Kula said. "I take the raw material and I transform it through the art of composition, jazz, improvisation and arranging and orchestrating for a larger scope of musicians."
The orchestra's Tucson stop was part of a nine-day tour, its first outside of Florida. It was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and the Tucson Jewish Community Center, 3800 E. River Road.
Go to www.klezmercompany.com or www.fau.edu/library for more information.
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Contact photographer David Sanders at 573-4155 or dsanders@azstarnet.com
