Jewish Music, Born Again

Norman, Bob

JEWISH MUSIC BORN AGAIN BOB NORMAN "Everyone speak Jewish here?" asked Dave Tarras as he took to the stage to close out the first night of the Jewish Ethnic Music Festival. His eyes twinkled a...

...The festival's organizers, however, are cautiously optimistic...
...Accompanied by a pianist, he demonstrated the emotional power that lies at the heart of Ashkenazic cantorial singing...
...The folk music movement, affected by the general cultural climate, went through some redefinitions...
...With the spread of Zionism there developed a secular Hebrew repertoire, based initially in the composed, folk-like songs of chalutzim, though influenced increasingly by European and American pop music, but it did little to support those traditional forms most relevant to American Jews...
...But we weren't sure we had the contacts to create a whole festival of authentic performers, so it became instead a festival of both traditional musicians and interpreters...
...When Henry originally proposed the idea," says Richard Siegel, Director of Arts Services at the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, "we wanted to make it a real folk festival...
...A third set of workshops used film, videotape, slideshows and recordings to fill in the blanks where performers were not available...
...Moment/29 The Monday evening concert was graced by the presence of Ruth Rubin, whose lifelong study of Yiddish folksong is much valued by younger musicians...
...The revival of interest in Jewish music, and particularly in secular song, Yiddish folklore, klezmer music, Middle Eastern music—all areas that have been downplayed in the community for many years—is one bright star in a constellation of new developments that indicate a search for meaningful Jewish identity in contemporary America...
...That guy, of course, was Dave Tarras...
...But the Jewish folk music revival also reflects a broad interest in traditional culture that has taken root in the U.S...
...In forty workshops packed into a slender two days, we were invited to kick off our shoes, dust off our memories, share our knowledge, expand our horizons...
...Everywhere Kapelye plays, Henry recalled, someone comes up and says, "Hey, you sound just like this guy who played at our wedding...
...The arts in Jewish life have not been adequately supported by the Jewish community," says Richard Siegel...
...It underscored the most important point that can be made by any folk festival: that great music grows only in the fertile soil of a musical community...
...But for a Jewish boy who grew up with a fair amount of Jewish music (my father played the organ in synagogue, and there were many years of Hebrew school and Young Judaea summer camp) this was a revelation...
...By now I hope I've given you some clues...
...But I think we're in good shape in the eighties...
...A motley festival, but it reflected the reality of American Jewish culture, balkanized and hampered for years by many exclu-sivisms...
...Their driving combination of twin fiddles, clarinet, piano, accordion, and tuba soon had people clapping and dancing in the aisles...
...It's related to trends as diverse as the Chavurah movement, the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, the development of Yiddish-language courses in universities, the new Jewish theater movement, and the recent New Jewish Agenda Conference...
...perhaps most often it is applied to those of European extraction...
...It's encouraging that community leaders with vision have given us the mandate to work for change in this area, but the level of support up to this point has been disappointing...
...Unabashed, his father Zindel Sapoznik appeared, prayer book in hand...
...It also addressed the complex relationship between media and folk culture in the modern world...
...At folk concerts Chicano border bands, Irish pipers, Cajun accordionists, and Greek santuri players began to show up where British balladeers and country fiddlers had once kept lonely vigil...
...Taken together the two sets of workshops helped clarify both the cultural differences that exist among Jews and the cultural concerns we hold in common...
...The Sunday evening concert gave Kapelye a chance to show their stuff and let the audience sample that wild klezmer revival that began a few years ago in Berkeley with a group called, not surprisingly, the Klezmorim...
...Tamara Aminova, a strikingly beautiful woman, sang "songs of life and love" in that strong, clearly focused, highly ornamented style common to the folk cultures of Eastern Europe and the Middle East...
...A simple concert of reasonable length, it had nonetheless bridged thousands of years of tradition, thousands of miles of diaspora, music secular and religious, folk and popular, ancient and modern, Ashkenazic and Sephardic...
...By the same token, it can describe the national divisions within the Jewish community itself, and that's important to a people who've been dispersed throughout hundred of nations...
...Henry Sapoz-nik played clawhammer banjo with the country music band Delaware Water Gap until Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the first folklorists to teach Jewish music at New York University, gave him a shove in the direction of his roots...
...Workshops remove the artificial barriers set up by stage presentation and emphasize the social roots of music...
...The JEMF was a significant departure in the cultural history of the American Jewish community...
...Dina Dahbani-Miraglia, a folk-lorist of Yemenite background who once danced with the Alvin Nikolais modern dance company, then introduced Avram and Bracha Guzi and Avram Dahari, three non-professional Yemenite musicians from Brooklyn...
...It never was realistic to depend on the government...
...With songs like "Yoshke Fort Avek" drawing links between draft resistance in Tsarist Russia and Reaganesque America, they demonstrated that Yiddish music can certainly transcend nostalgia...
...In folk music circles the word "ethnic" sometimes refers to "authentic" traditional musicians, those who've learned their art growing up in communities where music is an integral part of everyday life...
...The onus falls on the Jewish community to protect its own culture...
...Sephardic and Ladino music, in the great minority in the U.S., but of inestimable importance to understanding root and branch of all Jewish culture, remained isolated...
...I wasn't just being complimentary...
...This is the National Foundation for Jewish Culture— three execs, three secretaries, that's it...
...Just how seriously the festival organizers took their task emerged most clearly in the festival workshops...
...The old klezmer music was relegated to weddings and bar mitzvahs, for many young folks, schmaltz-\and...
...It has to be a personal involvement...
...Gathered in the wings and aisles of New York University's Loeb Student Center auditorium that night were Yiddish-speaking Jews, Hebrew-speaking Jews, Ladino-speaking Jews, Arabic-speaking Jews, Russian-speaking Jews, English-speaking Jews...
...One set focused on specific regions or communities: Middle Eastern music, Ladino music, West Russian music, music from Bucharia, music from Palestine pre-1948, music from the Falashas of Ethiopia, Yiddish theater and klezmer music from Eastern Europe and the U.S., nigunim from the Chassidim...
...It was a significant event, but the trouble with all events is that they are events...
...Another set focused on special topics, with participants coming from at least two different communities: cantorial and cantillation styles, children's songs, songs of social movements, songs of love and marriage, Jewish art songs, fiddle styles, Passover songs...
...Bringing it all together was one of the festival's signal accomplishments...
...That's right," says Leslie Berman...
...Chassidic music emerged from its self-imposed ghetto only in stagey extravaganzas like the Chassidic Song Festival...
...The Jewish Ethnic Music Festival was only the immediate culmination of a lot of quiet work that has been going on for several years now throughout the country...
...Let's return to that first concert...
...from Turkey in 1920, and during and after the Second World War she became a much-loved radio and recording artist singing traditional songs and her own compositions in Turkish, Greek, Ladino and Sephardic Hebrew...
...Jewish traditional music has finally begun to come out of the closet, and here, for once, it was presented, unadorned, in all its variety...
...those garish East Side days when Tarras was the man to accompany Moyshe Oysher, Aaron Lebedoff, Molly Picon...
...Though the Yiddish theater was still in full swing in the thirties, ominous events already foreshadowed its decline...
...To many in the audience this was exotic, but Henry Sapoznik quickly brought them back home...
...And a fourth set was devoted to folklore study itself...
...and back much further to the Bessarabian shtetl of Ter-novka where the Tarrasiuk klezmer klan worked every wedding and might be summoned to play for princes or tsars...
...While one of her accompanists kept up a rhythmic drone and parallel melody on a stringed instrument called doira, briefly extending and embellishing the melody between verses, the other reinforced the rhythm with a handheld drum...
...ethnicity" commonly refers to the cultures of all national minorities...
...Questions of moment to the Jewish folk music movement were discussed...
...He was the editor of Sing Out!, the Folk Song Magazine, from 1970 to 1977...
...In the sixties and early seventies "ethnic diversity" became more respectable, the result no doubt of the civil rights struggles that had challenged the intense conformity of the fifties...
...The strength of Jewish culture in America seemed to wither...
...The "Ladino Songs and Melodies" workshop is a particularly good example...
...Dave Tarras's appearance was one of many things that made the Jewish Ethnic Music Festival, which took place last spring under the sponsorship of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, special...
...He led us back through Bob Norman is a musician and freelance writer...
...It was the most focused expression yet of a new movement in Jewish culture—a movement that has been shaped by forces outside the Jewish community as well...
...Jewish tradition, after all, is eclectic and cosmopolitan...
...Among them was Victoria Hazan, a formidable woman, something of a legend...
...As with many other immigrant communities, the continuity of Jewish tradition was broken, divided, alienated from the cultural life that gave it birth...
...Andy Statman, who played gorgeous clarinet in the JEMF's klezmer workshop, was known as one of the best bluegrass and jazz mandolinists in the northeast before he began to study with Dave Terras...
...Ethel Raim, co-director of New York City's Balkan Arts Center and my favorite contemporary Yiddish singer, was the music editor of Sing Out!, the national folk song magazine, for over ten years...
...Ladino is the language of the Jewish community that traces its roots to medieval Spain, and later to northern Greece and Turkey...
...Many of the agitators in the Jewish music revival got their start in this environment...
...His eyes twinkled a bit, an elderly Jewish gentleman, urbane in a gray suit, holding a clarinet...
...In the twenties, rightwing, anti-immigrant sentiment led to the establishment of strict quotas on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe...
...Tarras was introduced by Henry Sapoznik, a bearded young man who talks as fast as he fiddles and somehow manages to be erudite, politically caustic and just silly at the same time...
...It has to happen on a grassroots level, in people's homes, at house parties, Friday nights after dinner when you bring the kids in, sing the old songs, go over the stories...
...In the seventies, after years of determined efforts by a handful of committed academics, folklore programs became available in universities, and for the first time government funding was provided consistently for a small number of folk music projects...
...The American folk music movement is still small, but it's a hardy one that has survived for more than three decades...
...Then came the Holocaust, and the sources of Yiddish culture were decimated...
...Most of the workshops took place at the Hebrew Union College of the Jewish Institute of Religion, which, as one of the principal sponsors of the festival, donated its new facilities for the weekend.'There were five distinct groups of workshops running concurrently in five different locations...
...after that it retrenched and blossomed out in hundreds of small coffeehouses, folk song societies, record companies and folk festivals...
...There were many young Jews who spoke no Jewish tongue and who'd heard little Jewish music, and a brave band of non-Jewish musicians and folklorists who'd come because for them, too, this was a musical event of importance...
...In the mid-sixties it experienced a brief period of commercial exploitation...
...We may be able to make tapes of the festival available soon...
...Two evenings later, as the raucous strains of the Chassidic orchestra Neginah drew the JEMF to a close, I remember turning to Leslie Berman, co-coordinator of the festival, whose ebullient energy had kept it all going from dawn to dusk, and saying, "You know, that was the festival I've been waiting for all my life...
...They danced a little self-consciously, with those delicate short steps and lovely bending of the* body that characterize the Yemenite tradition...
...We haven't relied on the federal government for funding, and there's a significant change going on in the community, particularly among young people who are involved in an intense personal search for roots and consciousness...
...Just as bel canto style came to dominate cantorial singing, Yiddish folksong became "respectable" or "nostalgic...
...Henry was one of the JEMF's principal organizers, and he is the leader of Kapelye, one of a passel of new Yiddish music bands that have been formed by young American musicians, modeling themselves after the old-timers like Tarras...
...The workshop featured Joe Elias as moderator, singer, and resident nudge, along with a number of elderly folks from the Sephardic Home for the Aged...
...Hearing her sing with friends from the Sephardic Home, most of them rather shy, was very moving...
...They offered a taste of the myriad ways Jews approach common experiences throughout the world...
...You have to go deeper...
...I'll play for you my first number, a Rumanian doina...
...The Yiddish secular repertoire, once a thriving folklore rooted in the life experience of millions of working class immigrants, was transformed into art song, or dressed up with a nightclubby commercial sophistication...
...What exactly is a Jewish Ethnic Music Festival...
...His article on the klezmer revival appears in the most recent issue o/Sing Out...
...It will survive and grow only if it is nurtured by the Jewish community, particularly in an era marked by cutbacks in government support for the arts and a clear resurgence of xenophobia and ethnic intolerance...
...It has taken many forms, adapted constantly to new surroundings, borrowed a bit from everyone...
...My only regret is that we didn't have more things for people to take home—recipes, songsheets...
...As the workshops and concerts of the following days were to show, we'd only scratched the surface...
...The current cultural revival is a fragile sapling in the winds of change...
...But in the 1970s a determined effort was made to break down these barriers, to explore the folk roots of the music rather than its more arty and superficial expressions, to find a language capable of expressing not only the breadth of Jewish culture in the world, but also the specific experience of many generations of American Jews...
...Noting that chazones had been the center of Jewish music as long as the synagogue has been central to Jewish life, he invited the audience to "help me introduce the man who helped introduce me...
...She came to the U.S...
...The last set of workshops was about dance— Ashkenazic, Yemenite, Israeli—and in keeping with the others it included demonstrations and discussions as well as instruction and group dancing...
...In the U.S...
...She shared some of the many fine songs she's collected, singing acappella with dignity and expressiveness...
...All these definitions, in fact, help explain what made this festival unique...
...Monday evening also included the festival's most riveting performance, a set of religious songs by Vita Israel's Middle Eastern ensemble of oud (Arabic ancestor of the lute), violin and drum, executed with a virtuosity and intensity that can't easily be forgotten...
...Till that night I hadn't understood the richness of these traditions...
...In the early part of this century a vital theatrical and musical milieu existed in America's overwhelmingly Ashkenazic Jewish community...
...They sang in strong nasal voices, alone, alternating, or in unison, sometimes throwing their heads back a little, swaying from side to side in a kind of gentle ecstasy...
...They have real meaning only if they reverberate in the community, if they offer new ways of seeing that can affect people's lives...
...A trio from Bucharia in the southwest Soviet Union began the evening...
...Another was the answer to his question: a distinctly Babelian no...
...So why not Sephardic singers and klezmer bands...
...With his accordionist, bass player and drummer poised behind him, ready at his nod to catch up the familiar dance rhythm, Tarras began to explore the sinuous musical pathways in which Jewish Klez-morim, for centuries, have tried to express the soul of Jewish suffering and ecstasy...
...Tarras closed the evening with professional, if weary, elan...
...And so, the Jewish Ethnic Music Festival...
...At ten o'clock Sunday morning the casual festivalgoer was drawn irre-sistably into a nonstop journey down farflung byways of Jewish culture...
...They accompanied themselves with a miriam drum, an embossed brass plate tapped with a graceful brass striker, and something that looked like a cashew can...
...I've been to lots of folk festivals (for seven years it was part of my job), and this wasn't necessarily the best organized...
...This format had awkward, even ludicrous moments, but on the whole it was a lot of fun...
...Many Jews of recent generations have grown up with almost no experience of Jewish music and even less interest...
...Indeed the extraordinary quality of singing and musicianship demonstrated by the Mideastern musicians throughout the weekend was one of the festival's great strengths...
...you'll see what I mean...
...Henry Sapoznik concurs...
...The JEMF was a conscious and successful attempt to apply the practices and standards developed by the American folk music movement to American Jewish culture...
...In some ways this was just as well...
...For many young Jews the only exposure to Jewish music was in the synagogue, where music was entirely liturgical, sung only in Hebrew...
...The JEMF shaped up as an unseemly aggregation of non-professional traditional performers, popular entertainers, cantors, folk-lorists, art singers...

Vol. 6 • July 1981 • No. 7


 
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