Jews and black music: How deep is the connection?
Jews and black music: How deep is the connection? Jewish jazzmen. Jewish songwriters. Jewish jazz journalists. Jewish owners of independent jazz, R&B and soul labels. Their success begs the...
...So in fact eastern European Jews hearing jazz and hearing blues would not feel so completely alien, as would somebody who had grown up in a more northern European musical tradition...
...They're both matriarchal societies...
...They were sharper...
...It's pre-verbal and sub-verbal...
...David Chevan, a musicologist and leader of the Jewish- and jazzinfluenced band Afro-Semitic Experience, claims that cantors "are the real connection between Jewish music and African music in terms of the improvisational spirit...
...That's culturally chauvinist...
...in both you have the men just pretending to be in power...
...When you have music with heartwrenching aspects, you have to assume that's who they are...
...Life is hard, period, whether you're Jewish, gypsy or black...
...I think it was a common attitude among the people we associated with that black people were hip...
...You can hear these sounds in traditional Balkan music and traditional Middle Eastern music and traditional North African music and into blues, because the lines between [Arab] north Africa and [black) central Africa historically have not been that clearly drawn...
...He adds that Jewish and black cultures share "a wonderful compatibility...
...Songwriter Mike Stoller said he and partner Jerry Leiber "thought of ourselves as black...
...My objection is when Jews historically have said they have some mystical, sacred, allegorical relationship to African Americans because we have suffered, too...
...We don't hear Armenians making this claim to African American music...
...I don't want to say Jews have a certain right to this music," he says, "but there is a historical moment when African Americans and Jews lived side by side in the cities...
...It's that emotional, honest emotional core that we hear, regardless of whether the music is gospel, jazz or rhythm and blues...
...It was that kind of emotional response that Jewish Americans had to African American music...
...These Jews lived around, participated in African American culture on a real street level...
...Everything about them was somewhat heightened," he told journalist Mark Lisheron...
...Their success begs the question: Is there a special connection between blacks and Jews—or at least their music...
...They cherish sense of humor and sense of family...
...Music is the mother tongue...
...Ben Sidran, a pianist, owner of GoJazz Records and author of three books on jazz, points out that black and Jewish music, with their similar motifs, are communicating similar feelings...
...Bruce Iglauer, owner of Alligator Records, takes a more musical approach to the question...
...Lots of peoples have suffered...
...Still, Melnick agrees that Jews come by the blues honestly...
...Chazanut [the cantorial style] really involves spontaneity and taking off on enormous flights on melodic, for lack of a better word, fancy...
...They had a defensible right to the music as street culture...
...Blacks were warmer...
...Historically, certain musical scales and sounds stretched "around the horn of the Mediterranean," he said...
...Not so fast, contends Jeffrey Melnick, author of A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song and an associate professor of American studies at Babson College in Boston...
...All music is an expression of the interior condition of the people who make it...
Vol. 29 • August 2004 • No. 4
