Sherry Mayrent earned a PhD in English from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England, and spent 12 years as a research associate at Harvard Medical School before attending her first KlezKamp in 1987. She transitioned to KlezKamp staff in 1995, and in 2001 she became the Associate Director of the program. During that period, she became clarinetist and musical director of the Wholesale Klezmer Band for 16 years.

Since 2006 Sherry has assembled what has become one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Yiddish and Hebrew 78rpm recordings, which she is having digitized and entrusting to the stewardship of the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. At over 9,000 recordings and growing, it represents over 6,000 unique performances and spans the full gamut of genres commercially recorded from 1895-1955. The discs have all been fully catalogued with over half already meticulously transferred and digitally preserved by the Grammy-award winning sound engineer Christopher King.

Sherry is the founder of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at U Wisconsin, Madison, an outgrowth of her decades of involvement in the preservation and dissemination of Yiddish culture. She is a record producer and prolific composer of klezmer tunes in the traditional style. Her passion for traditional Yiddish culture is equaled only by her love of all things Hawaiian, and she serves on the board of the Mohala Hou Foundation. She divides her year between her home in Watertown, Massachusetts and her home on the Big Island of Hawaii.

https://klezmeracademy.com/

Michael Aylward graduated in German from the University of Sussex and spent the next eight years working as a peddler, market-trader, lorry driver and hospital porter before succumbing to the false charms of the insurance industry in which he spent fifteen years as an inter-departmental manager before becoming an insurance translator. In 1994, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve his sanity, he started work on a Discography of European Recordings of Jewish Music. He estimates that he has now documented about 15,000 recordings made between 1899 and 1956 and that this probably represents the bulk of the total output. He is now examining the options for making his findings readily accessible to the public. In recent years he and Julian Futter have produced three critically acclaimed CDs of historical recordings of Jewish music: Wandering Stars ‑ Songs From Gimpel’s Lemberg Yiddish Theatre 1906‑1910, Chekhov’s Band ‑ Eastern European Klezmer Music from the EMI Archives1908‑1913 and Warsaw’s Jewish Mermaid: Syrena Recordings from the Orvomaa Archive 1909‑1933. His non-insurance translations include: Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation [Herbert Marcuse in conversation with Karl Popper] and Beyond Recall ‑ A record of Jewish musical life in Nazi Berlin, 1933 ‑ 1938.

Jeffrey Wollock, Ph.D., is an international authority on the history of the voice, speech, hearing, gesture and language sciences, is also well known as an exponent of the traditional klezmer violin style and a klezmer historian. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Wollock began violin at 7 and viola at 12; he also studied Yiddish at a school run by poet Chonon Kiel. He began collecting old Jewish 78s before his bar mitzvah, thanks to their frequent occurrence at local bazaars and curbsides and his father’s encouragement. After studying viola with Paul Doktor and earning a B.A. at Brooklyn College and an M.A. at Memorial University of Newfoundland (both in English literature), he attended the Yale School of Music, played in many orchestras and chamber groups in the United States and England, and in the late 1970s resumed viola studies with Emanuel Vardi. While freelancing he met Andy Statman, who encouraged him to learn the traditional Jewish violin style from close study of early recordings. In 1981 he received a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University and the following year he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for further study in Oxford, where he remained until mid-1986 and was very active in the musical scene. In the early 1990s Wollock got involved in the Yiddish language revival led by Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter and the klezmer revival through KlezKamp and Buffalo on the Roof. In 1993-94 he organized a series of dance workshops with live bands for the Learning Alliance, NYC, with Michael Alpert as instructor, and over the next decade worked and performed with Alpert and master clarinetist German Goldenshteyn, who had recently arrived from Ukraine. Wollock worked as a field researcher for CTMD’s Soviet Jewish Cultural Inititative (Nashi Traditsii) and performed in Di Molever Kompanye with Goldenshteyn and Hersh Rikelman. For the last 25 years Wollock has researched the history of klezmer music, making presentations and publishing a series of widely-cited studies on klezmer history and discography in both English and Yiddish. He taught courses in English and History at Long Island University and the College of New Rochelle, and his Introduction to Klezmer Music (2004 & 2006), in Performance Studies at Texas A&M University was perhaps the first full-credit university course entirely devoted to this subject.