Lorin Sklamberg

Lorin Sklamberg, an accordionist and vocalist, joined the Klezmatics at their formation and has remained with the ensemble ever since. While living in California as a teenager he took part in Jewish and Israeli folk-dancing circles, yet his immersion in klezmer began only after he moved to New York City in the late 1980s and entered the group, which reproduced and notated selections from historic sound archives. Beginning in the early 1990s he has served as co-director, alongside Henry Sapoznik of Kapelye, of Living Traditions, Inc., the nonprofit Yiddish folk-arts organization that presents the annual KlezKamp and issues archival discs containing recovered broadcasts of Yiddish radio programs from the 1920s through the 1950s. Sklamberg has also appeared under pianist Zalman Mlotek and contributed to recordings such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Remember the Children, Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, and Moxy Fruvous’ Wood. Later in the decade he worked on Di Grine Katshke, or The Green Duck, an album of Yiddish children’s songs underwritten by the New York State Council on the Arts. He presented material from the project at Toronto’s Ashkenaz festival in 1997 and again in 1999.