Great musicians influence other great musicians, in a harmonic chain that links present with past.
Who influenced Judith Aller?
Fritz Kreisler, perhaps: the brilliant violinist whose repertoire contained his convincing pastiches in the styles of ancient masters. Jascha Heifetz, certainly, the modern master who taught Judith during her Los Angeles adolescence, and who brought as much appreciative emotion to an ethnic psalm such as “Deep River” as to a melancholy Tchaikovsky “souvenir.”
And then there was the extraordinary Austro-Hungarian player Oscar Zehngut (also known as Josef Solinsky), born in Galicia: one of the first violinists to record klezmer music. A period photographic portrait shows a man with a bald and noble head, alert ears, an intimate gaze, and perhaps the faint hint of a resigned smile. It’s a visage worthy of becoming the carved scroll at the head of a magical violin. His haunting musical sound and style, though, were preserved only on a few shellac discs from the dawn of the twentieth century.
Yet those discs were enough, many decades later, to help spark a klezmer-music revival, and then the creation of “Out of the Ashes”: Judith Aller’s mesmerizing musical triptych summoning the spirit of a vanished world which now seems somehow brought back to life. The suite was recorded by Judith with a fine cymbalom player – Zehngut used cymbalom on one of his records – “in a tiny room with only one microphone,” she says, "because I wanted [it] to sound ancient. I intended to honor [Oscar Zehngut] as well as Gypsy and Jewish musicians who created this form of expression for the violin." As Judith and her colleague leaned into that single mike in a small Hollywood space on an evening in 1992, much of the city of Los Angeles was burning, during a prolonged period of civil disturbance fueled by racial strife.
The first in a group of three pieces is by the Jewish composer Lazar Saminsky (1882-1959), as arranged and interpreted by Judith Aller. It is mournful, thoughtful, exultant, caressing, and exuberant by turns as sudden as life itself.
“The second piece has no name,” says Judith. “I cannot remember if I improvised it or who wrote it. I stand by it.” It is slow, insistent, rhythmic – evocative of dancers moving in a stately circle. One might imagine the mazurka, even the minuet, might have begun in the light of a Romany campfire. You can almost smell the smoke above the glowing twigs.
“The last piece,” Judith continues, “is a combination of a Yiddish song and the Russian drinking song ‘Kalinka.’” The first strain was written by Judith “when I was 12 or 13 years old; and [I] played it on the stage of Bancroft Junior High, where I was cast as a Gypsy violinist in a short vaudeville-like production.” In 1962, the German-born Jewish composer Franz Waxman, a friend of the Aller family, included “Kalinka” in his Academy Award-nominated score for the movie “Taras Bulba,” based on Gogol’s 19th-century novella about 17th-century Ukrainian Cossacks. Judith recalls: "As a child, I was there when the score was recorded. The excitement of the orchestra performance was almost unbelievable. Throughout the session on the Samuel Goldwyn soundstage, the film played on a giant screen in back of the players while Waxman conducted music that shook the room from the floor to the rafters.”
From Gypsy encampment to crackly 78rpm disc to Hollywood soundstage – and now into “Out of the Ashes”: sixteen minutes of inspired performing and exquisite instrumental interplay. Sensitivity, subtlety, virtuosity, and soul. Music capable of enchanting, inspiring, and comforting you for the rest of your life.
Tom Nolan
Out of the Ashes, Tack 1: 7:29
Out of the Ashes, Track 2: 4:34
Out of the Ashes, Track 3: 3:45
Recorded April 29th, 1992, Sunset Boulevard Studio, Hollywood, CA
Audio Mastering by Jake Larsen.
Cover Art courtesy Joe Garnett, used by permission.
International copyright by Judith Aller, 2026
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