Trampled Manuscripts

Christina Crowder, a leading researcher and performer of klezmer music, will perform a concert with the Little Chef Klezmer Band, spotlighting newly-available klezmer repertoire. Crowder’s visit is part of the “Trampled Manuscripts'' international residency touring program, showcasing a collection of about 1,400 songs from present-day Ukraine and Belarus, originating from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and made available to researchers and performers within the past three years. The “Trampled Manuscripts” touring program brings together local musicians and Jewish communities to engage in historical repertoire, deepening understanding of Ashkenazic expressive culture and encouraging audience members to adapt tradition into contemporary practice.

Christina has been performing and researching Jewish music for thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993 as a founding member of Di Naye Kapelye, and continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has been awarded three NEH Grants for Institute projects (2021-2025). 

The Little Chef Klezmer Band is Phoenix’s premiere professional Yiddish music ensemble. Since its founding in 2022, the band has performed in public and private events throughout greater Phoenix. The ensemble’s instrumentation of clarinet, saxophone, accordion, percussion, and tuba/sousaphone is inspired by Eastern European brass bands, while its energetic and virtuosic performance style pays tribute to early American klezmer bands whose recordings were popular among American Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century.