Mike Anklewicz, a clarinettist in two klezmer bands and who has roots in jazz and classical music, is a fearless musical explorer. 

Anklewicz has recorded with the Czech-based punk jazz band Eggnoise, playing clarinet on the band’s amazingly eclectic CD, Yolk. He described Yolk as “Steely Dan meets ’80s prog rock,” citing such diverse influences as Frank Zappa and Paul Simon. “The electronic stuff is easier to listen to than Nine Inch Nails,” Anklewicz noted. 

Anklewicz was at a Montreal conference on improvisation where he met one of Eggnoise’s leaders, Ondrez Galuska. “We were roommates at the conference and we traded music,” Anklewicz said. He ended up visiting Galuska in Prague, where they recorded tracks for Yolk. 

Anklewicz leads the Canadian klezmer fusion band KlezFactor, which  was formed in 2004. The group performs traditional and original compositions, fusing klezmer with jazz, rock and classical musical techniques. Klezmachine, the band’s most recent CD, topped university radio charts in Ontario and also got radio play in other parts of Canada, the United States, Argentina, France, Portugal, Spain and Russia. 

Anklewicz lived in Berlin for a year, where he played with a Berlin-based version of KlezFactor. Reminiscing about the music scene there, he said, like Toronto, there’s not a lot of money to be made performing because paid gigs are hard to find. He added that musicians often get together to play for enjoyment rather than money and “if they perform, it’s outside Berlin at festivals.” 

Anklewicz began playing klezmer in the late 1990s, while he was studying music at Queen’s University. By the year 2000, he was attending KlezKamp, the annual Yiddish folk arts program that was held in the Catskills. 

Anklewicz said that growing up he was exposed to a wide array of music, from classical to the 1960s folk music of Peter, Paul and Mary and The Travellers. 

“Klezmer was a big part of the landscape,” he said, adding that his parents took him to chassidic festivals to hear klezmer. 

Anklewicz’s interest in klezmer extends to the academic side of the music. In addition to a bachelor’s degree from Queen’s, he holds a master of music degree from the New England Conservatory in Boston and received a PhD in ethnomusicology from York University in 2013. His dissertation, Musical Hybridities and the Klezmer Revival looks at klezmer from its historical aspects, when it was blended with early jazz, to the current scene. 

“Klezmer today comes from what people have access to,” Anklewicz said, citing Socalled, who combines hip hop and klezmer, and pianist Marilyn Lerner, whose influences include Debussy, avant-garde composer John Cage and free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor.

 Anklewicz will be giving a four-part lecture about klezmer at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, where he teaches saxophone,  beginning on April 15.

 “I’ll try to give people a taste of the history of the music and how it developed,” he said. “The lecture is going to give me the opportunity to go into a lot of detail and play a lot of music.”

He will travel once more this summer to take part in a musicology conference in Astana, Kazakhstan. At this writing, he’s scheduled to perform in Prague with the Toronto-based world-music artist Lenka Lichtenberg and in Amsterdam with a traditional klezmer trio. He’s also playing with KlezFactor in Berlin and Dresden. 

Locally, you can catch Anklewicz’s trio playing traditional klezmer at the Free Times Cafe on May 3 for the “Bella, Did Ya Eat?” brunch. He’s at Solel Congregation in Mississauga on May 23 for a performance and lecture.

  For more information about Anklewicz, visit www.mikeanklewicz.com. 

For KlezFactor visit: www.klezfactor.com.