Though there have been countless innovators, klezmer has remained essentially unchanged as a genre through the centuries. It is still mostly a pre-modern music, songs traded from musician to musician or via sheet music as opposed to learned off of recordings. Melodies and solos generally stay within a proscribed form within predetermined scales. As an approach, hip-hop adheres to an any-means-necessary methodology, pulling in whatever might best serve it. The idea of sampling fits klezmer music to a tee. For many, the initial appeal of the genre is in its sinuous changes, its exotic old-world melodies, and its evocative timbres -- in short, its appeal is textural. It is a not an immediately dense or tonally challenging music. Lifted out of context, its swirling clarinets and rhythmic upbeats sound plum cool.

Socalled, then, scans through klezmer - and all of Jewish culture, for that matter - and lifts it gloriously out of context. Meanwhile, Solomon, and an all-star band featuring latter-day klezmer all-stars like clarinetist David Krakauer, recontextualize the samples by delivering traditional forms. In all cases, it's hard to tell whose part is feeding off whose. The resulting music isn't nearly as all-encompassing as hip-hop, but that's fine. The hip-hop acts as a focusing tool. Into the mix go not only the usual drumbeats and samples of old klezmer recordings, but Borscht Belt stand-up comics, sober sounding Rabbis, and gravely reciting academics.

By virtue of content alone, HipHopKhasne is a klezmer album. Whether or not it is successful in communicating the sweep of Jewish experience, which it certainly attempts to do, it definitely conveys something whole. It is a disparate record, but just about everything fits snugly under the conceptual umbrella. There's campy humor, such as a mock Rabbinical blessing over the wedding ("Badd-Khones"), but even that can be grouped with the Catskills humor that pops in from time to time.

But the real icing on the cake is that it's good. The traditional music is impeccable and recorded with an astonishingly rich sonic depth, such as the "Dobriden." Socalled has found some great samples. And while a few stalk the realm of the predictable, such as "Freylekhs Far De Kale," they usually do with panache. "Freylekhs Fun Der Khupe" and others use brightly vintage recordings the way Mark de Gli Antoni employed Raymond Scott samples on old Soul Coughing records. When there's rapping, it's right clever, suggesting a slightly more self-consciously Jewish Beastie Boys. No matter what elements are mixed, and what tricks are deployed, the album remains fruitfully adventurous. And resisting all metaphors of blessed union, that's truly a great thing.