Have You Heard The KCB

Rozovsky, Peter

HAVE YOU HEARD THE KCB? What do you get when you combine rhythm, nostalgia, serious musicians and pure fun? The Klezmer Conservatory Band. The Yiddish music and lyrics are straight from the Lower...

...but Netsky's pick-up klezmer group received the most enthusiastic applause...
...Romania...
...1 pictured my brother answering calls 'Can your band play at my son's bar mitzvah...
...It is admixture of traditional Jewish modes, a ragtime beat and swooping and crying jazz horn lines...
...There is almost no kind of music that Byron has not worked into this old dance tune...
...For her, klezmer has meant a reawakening of her Jewishness...
...Jt goes to the heart of a people...
...He (Hankus) said it was Jewish music, but not what I knew...
...Don't look for me where the myrtles are green,/You will not find me there, my beloved./Where lives whither at the machines,/There is my resting place," sings Bressler to a plaintive piano and accordion accompaniment...
...At this show, Netsky gets a laugh with his introduction to a Yiddish drinking song: "This is one hell of a fight song looking for a college...
...they're playing the right notes at the right time...
...The Yiddish music and lyrics are straight from the Lower East Side of New York in the 1920s, but the musicians and the setting are different...
...RozhinkesMilMandlen" ("Raisins and Almonds...
...Its title is richly evocative of the vigorous intermingling of cultures in early 20th-century America: "Yiddish Blues...
...Of course, most members admit that the ovations, the touring to other cities and the success of Yiddishe Renaissance help...
...It is overdone and hackneyed...
...They just thought it was a solid song...
...But then Berg listened, and his reaction changed: "I went to a rehearsal and that did it...
...You just can't stop moving...
...Then he stops, and goes into a teasing medley that includes Ravel's "Bolero" and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue...
...The relentless rhythm section underpins some wailing clarinet by Byron, and the trills on the final chorus would leave any kazatzski dancer gasping for his vodka...
...The program included Yiddish and Israeli songs and Ravel's setting of the Kaddish...
...1 don't want to listen to it any more...
...Says Netsky, "They didn't have to go through the process of hearing Eyde Gorme do it...
...Baritone saxophonist Merryl Goldberg, 24, teaches music at a private Jewish school...
...1 remember stepping to the mike doing the introduction to the first song thinking...
...The new bands borrowed from ragtime, and they took songs from the Yiddish theater...
...Says Guttman, "The people we're playing for want this music...
...Children in Jewish schools learned Zionist songs that spoke of the glory of Israel, past and future...
...It was in that Philadelphia attic in his grandfather's house that KCB-founder Hankus Netsky discovered a photograph of his grandfather's old klezmer band...
...Dance musics are wildly rhythmic," he says...
...In the '60s...
...My personal angle on this whole thing changed, and so last year when I came up here to be manager, after explaining to many people that Hankus had done this research into his roots, I suddenly realized that they were my roots too...
...Byron has played jazz, Latin and classical music...
...A lot of people know the word 'klezmer' from a background where it had a negative connotation," he says...
...And, among those who did arrive, klezmer was the mark of a greenhorn...
...And instead of playing at a traditional Jewish wedding, the 14 members of Boston's Klezmer Conservatory Band are playing to a packed and cheering house at one of the area's top jazz clubs, Ryles in Cambridge...
...But the decline had begun even earlier...
...But they shared several traits: technical mastery of their instruments and a love of crying, soulful, expressive music...
...Netsky says that the band members' varied backgrounds allow them to inject a certain freshness into the song...
...Cometist Frank London, 24...
...When I heard that, man, I turned off," he says...
...For them, klezmer music would have to stand on its own merits...
...The difference between us and the Klezmorim is that they don't play in and out...
...The Manic Depressives...
...And for bassist Jim Guttman, the music itself is the attraction...
...And the Klezmer Conservatory Band is not averse to hamming it up...
...One record that Lt...
...Netsky calls his brother Steve, the band's manager and sometimes-banjo player, "a staunch Hebrew school dropout...
...a lot of things were spiritual...
...Not all band members had the connection to Jewish music that Goldberg had...
...All this cross-fertilization produced some remarkable results...
...He had always loved the cantonal singing he'd heard as a child in Philadelphia, but here was a chance for him to bring Jewjsh music out of the synagogue...
...Perhaps their widest exposure came on National Public Radio's "Prairie Home Companion" music show...
...The expertise and sophistication with which they work has enabled them to see beneath rigid classification of music, and they display a wide and contemporary range of cultural referents in discussing their attraction to klezmer...
...Tonight, as always, laughs and groans from the stage and the floor greet each turn of Byron's musical imagination, and there is loud applause when a clarinet cry signals a return to the original chorus...
...I brought the record home at Christmas...
...When it became possible to link the two, they did that...
...On the band's record this is an almost unbelievably kinetic tune...
...They like the music, but they're not screwing around with it...
...Would synagogues, with their limited resources, be able to afford a 14-piece band...
...in Boston, people did...
...Says Netsky, "We play wherever people will take a chance on us, and...
...The throng that jams the club this night may not be full of klezmer revivalists, but the freshness soon wins them over...
...Amidst the colossal optimism and effort required to establish the nation, things Yiddish were rejected as reminders of the previous era's suffering...
...I knew that was what I was looking for," he says...
...I am almost in tears because of 'Raisins and Almonds.' Thank you ever so much for making me proud of my Jewishness...
...They called their record Yiddishe Renaissance and they dedicated it to "Our 'Mamas un tates' and to lovers of Yiddishkeit everywhere...
...The word-of-mouth advertising the band received from satisfied customers proved effective...
...Joseph Frankl made in the 1920s is a good example...
...By mid-century, klezmer music had all but disappeared...
...Most of the musicians were New England Conservatory students, not all were Jewish and many knew nothing of klezmer before they met Netsky...
...As the reputation of the KCB grew, however, the group was asked to play concerts...
...So what keeps them at this...
...The image of the klezmer (Yiddish for "musician") still looms in Jewish folklore: a ragged violinist, maybe a player of the old wooden flute as well, their melodies alternately solemn and wildly celebratory, snaking out over friends and relatives gathered at a shtetl wedding...
...The vibrancy of Abe Schwartz's 1927 "Russian Sher" was reduced to spoof in its 1965 counterpart, a novelty record called Yiddish Songs My Mama Never Taught Me, with bright orange jacket depicting a frazzled mother, her Doris Day look-alike daughter, a loaf of "Jewish rye," and not a word of Yiddish...
...Radio and records have also contributed to the band's success...
...The roots of Boston's klezmer revival lie, appropriately, in an attic littered with broken musical instruments...
...they're not daring to make it contemporary...
...After that movie that had klezmer in it, it really had meaning for me, that we were carrying on something that was killed in World War II...
...Of course, the familiar dollop of Yiddish schmaltz is there too, but the young musicians have such an obvious affection for the cornier lyrics that the schmaltz becomes an excuse for communal celebration of laughter, of fun and of Jewishness...
...For violinist Mimi Rabson, the youngest band member at 22, klezmer lives...
...The Klezmorim don't have any distance on the music...
...We packed Jordan Hall...
...Jewish musicians listened to popular American music and they incorporated the new instrumentation and musical features into their own playing...
...For trombonist David Harris, the question is, "How can I get the most out of it for me and still maintain the integrity of the music...
...It gives her the freedom to improvise that was denied her in classical music...
...It has the same attraction for me as rhythm and blues, salsa and funk...
...Listen to this,' and he put on a Naftule Brandwein record...
...Byron will roll his eyes in mock ecstasy as he plays and Bressler will delight the crowd with her translations of the charming and humorous Yiddish lyrics...
...Later, ironically, even the establishment of the State of Israel may have contributed to klezmer's downfall...
...and saying...
...It was no longer a question of doing a favor...
...Ryles jazz club is located halfway between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge's other great university...
...What do you want the kid to have a bar mitzvah for?'" and he adds, "My other brother (not with the KCB) said that if the kind of Yiddish music we do had been the spirit of Jewish education back then, he'd have stuck with it...
...a saxophonist and pianist in the KCB, and a composer and oboist in other musical settings...
...Television theme songs...
...That's not particularly spiritual to them...
...Years later, when he was studying at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, he became curious about the photograph...
...What had begun as an impromptu venture was now being beamed across the United States, and vocalist Judy Bressler was nervous...
...It included, among others, a high school friend and a bass player whose credits included a stint with a Boston New Wave band...
...We came on anrfblew the roof off," says London...
...One interesting non-Jewish reaction came from cornetist Ingrid Monson's family...
...I had this big picture in the room of my grandfather's band," he recalls...
...I think it has the power to reach beyond the Jewish community...
...As she tells it...
...They're not being kicked around any more...
...The KCB had an almost guaranteed following among older Jews...
...We got letters from all over the country...
...Their Yiddishe Renaissance album has been selling welt for more than a year and it receives air play on radio stations across the country...
...And because they do, I get to eatlox...
...It is a wildly exaggerated account, a big, fat voluptuous romp of a song that portrays life in Romania as a glorious orgy of food and wine and sex...
...A restless horn-and-rhythm section figure leads into a chorus dominated by clarinet and violin...
...But because the musicians grew up at a distance from Jewish culture, they were not subject to the depredations that Yiddish chic wrought upon songs like "Romania, Romania...
...feels equally at home with klezmer and the Haitian music that he loves...
...This distance may help to account for the band's success as a living musical experience rather than a mere museum piece...
...This is going to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of listeners.' I remember almost blacking out, almost blowing it...
...A lot of bands who are more into Jewish culture than we are wouldn't touch 'Romania, Romania.' It's hackneyed...
...It's the "Proud Mary' of Jewish music...
...Clarinetist Don Byron finds common ground between klezmer's Romanian doinas and John Cohrane's moving prayer/celebration "Alabama...
...she recalls...
...But the group loosened up and impressed the Boston folk aristocracy that had crowded Jordan Hall for the broadcast...
...In person the song is even faster...
...Of course, the vast majority of the victims of the Holocaust were from the land of klezmer's origin...
...Her other interests include Israeli and Yemenite Jewish music...
...The shtetl...
...But today there is a resurgence of interest in klezmer, spearheaded in part by Boston's Klezmer Conservatory Band (KCB), an ensemble that has played to sell-out crowds, toured in the Northeast and Canada, and recorded an album that has sold almost 8,000 copies...
...Indeed, many band members tell of concerts at senior citizens' centers where residents cry and elderly women who have hardly walked in months suddenly break into a lively sher...
...Violinist Greta Buck joins Byron and Monson as non-Jewish KCB members, and few of the rest come from a religious background...
...Now, Goldberg says she might like to go to Israel and teach klezmer music to Jews rediscovering the cultural roots (and routes) that brought them to the Holy Land...
...But more important, his music and the other klezmer music that Netsky heard then and on succeeding visits with his uncle convinced the young musician that klezmer could live again...
...A chorus ends, and it is Byron's turn to play "Stump the Band...
...The evening yields a spectrum of music ranging from "Chane Bryne" and "Romania, Romania" through wild freylachs and bulgars to "My Resting Place," Morris Rosenfeld's Yiddish lament of an immigrant sweatshop worker...
...Netsky says that for young people, klezmer may have its spiritual roots in the 1960s, a time when music and the search for spirituality merged...
...They're folkies...
...But here, years of sentimentality are blown away: the oldest of the players is 34, six of the musicians are women and the music is alive with relentless rhythms, wailing clarinet and crying violins...
...They didn't have to hear Perry Como do it...
...To the elder Bernstein, "musician" meant "klezmer," with all the associated images of itinerant and ragged minstrels...
...Netsky turned to his uncle, Sam Katz, the cornetist in that old photograph of the Kol Katz Orchestra...
...Take the 1940s Yiddish theater hit "Romania...
...When Jews came to the United States from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th, a new klezmer music developed...
...It has also been for years a KCB showstopper, a finale that has never failed to elicit screams of recognition and delight from audiences...
...For the members of the KCB, the link has been forged in their music...
...To a non-religious Jew, Jewish music was cultural deadwood—bar mitzvah music played by velvet-jacketed oldsters, or "Hava Nagilah" courtesy of the organist at your local major league ball park...
...This is all part of the renaissance of klezmer, that YidPeter Rozovsky is a Boston area freelance writer...
...dish soul music so long consigned to grandparently recollections...
...Part of the reason the band is so successful is that they didn't know it was supposed to be corny...
...Dance musics contain a lot of the same elements...
...I used to play it just to play it," she says, "but then I saw that movie Image Before My Eyes...
...Through the 1920s musicians such as Harry Kandel, Joseph Cherniavsky and the great Abe Schwartz led big, brass-dominated bands that recorded klezmer for appreciative audiences in New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and other Jewish centers...
...But in looking to the future, the band remains aware of the cultural heritage its music represents...
...says the 24-year-old Bronx native, "with a freylach tacked onto the end of it...
...It's the music they use for their feasts, for their parties, for their getting down...
...There are wisecracks from the stage, scintillating playing and a stage presence that makes the audience have as good a time as the musicians...
...he says...
...Netsky is a versatile musician...
...Netsky kept the picture through his years as a high school jazz musician and synagogue choir singer...
...it is difficult to find a seat any time the band plays...
...All the traditional Yiddish tunes are there: the mournful Romanian doinas, the joyous freylachs and the horas and bulgars that Jews from Eastern Europe danced to at their weddings and other celebrations...
...This kind of diversity, he says, is the key to the band's success...
...In 1924, immigration laws were tightened, restricting the growth of the music's natural audience...
...Echoing Netsky's comments on "Romania, Romania," Byron says that distance from tradition distinguishes the KCB from the country's two other recording klezmer bands, Berkeley's Klezmorim and New York's Kapelye...
...It is not surprising that Leonard Bernstein's father was, at first, dead set against a musical career for his son...
...My favorite reaction in my family is my grandmother's...
...Then he said...
...At this concert, he begins with a Jewish-sounding tune and the rest of the group gradually joins in...
...They knew 'Prairie Home Companion.' We played one song to warm up and people were looking at us like 'Where do you come from?' By the end of the second number, people were going nuts...
...Our poor protagonist rushes out for an immediate divorce, but as he leaves the judge's chambers, he hears the learned adjudicator singing the words he knows so well: "Oy, my Chane Bryne/Thank God you are mine...
...Yiddish-American culture was relegated to nostalgia and parody...
...She's 82 years old...
...He told me anecdotes about the characters they played with...
...Netsky kicks into the song with a yell, and the band is off, the musicians wearing expressions of complete concentration as they aVe swept along by the speed and movement of the music...
...For his own part, Steve Netsky says that Hankus's research was something of an inspiration...
...My initial reaction was that it's great dance music, real party music...
...Sam took him up to a playroom filled with old records...
...They heard Aaron Lebedoff do it and they loved it...
...The 14 members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band are serious and talented musicians who could be playing any number of other musics...
...Netsky played klezmer tapes for students, and he decided to include several big band klezmer tunes in a concert of Jewish music that he helped to organize at the conservatory's Brown Hall in the spring of 1980...
...I had a vague idea of the stuff they played...
...Hardly a career for a nice American boy...
...Brandwein was a colorful fellow, a clarinetist who sometimes performed with a neon sign that read "The Naftule Brandwein Orchestra" strapped to his chest, and who reportedly played with his back to the audience to hide the fingerings he used...
...The response of drummer Charlie Berg, 28 years old and a friend of Netsky from their high school days, says much about the attitude toward Jewish music at the time...
...Klezmer ensembles became larger and brass instruments took on a greater role, after the Dixieland jazz bands of the time...
...The klezmer sound was infectious among spectators as well, and the band began to receive outside bookings—at first, appropriately, for weddings...
...This makes the evening's contrasts even more delicious: young, trained musicians playing old Yiddish folk songs, the crowd sipping daiquiris and whooping it up to songs their grandparents listened to 50 years ago, young people loving old tunes...
...The way 1 knew she really liked it was, she asked me to play it four or five times until I said...
...By 1978, when he was 23, his talents had earned him an invitation to teach at the New England Conservatory...
...Then comes the part that everybody loves...
...The Rite of Spring, even "The Star-Spangled Banner" have found homes in "The Heyser Bulgar...
...But they needed something extra to appeal to audiences that did not grow up with Yiddish theater and had not been rocked to sleep by the folk lullaby...
...You might say that the heart of the shtetl beats in the body of Harvard...
...And, as one of the band's many fan letters suggests, others have come to similar realizations: "The music is beautiful and haunting...
...Klezmer is really deep...
...Area synagogues expressed interest, but they had reason to hesitate...
...As always, a high point of the evening, enjoyed as much by the musicians as by the crowd, is "The Heyser Bulgar," literally "the hot bulgar...
...from Memphis and Milwaukee, from Jews and non-Jews alike, bearing such messages as "Thank you for this uplifting entertainment" and "The music stuck in my brain...
...His idols are Stravinsky and jazz saxophonist Joe Henderson...
...Alabama' is a doina...
...The drummer's long hair is tied back in a pony tail, a cornet player wears baggy pants and clogs and the band's front man is a black clarinet player from the Bronx...
...And the letters came from everywhere...
...More'over, he would be presenting it to skilled musicians who might not have the family connection to the music that he had...
...Would people pay to hear music that had rarely, if ever, been performed in a concert setting...
...I'd always had it, for years...
...So, I think that to watch the future of klezmer music is to watch us...
...The group he found was diverse...
...Thus encouraged, Netsky set about the task of forming a permanent klezmer band...
...There is the hilarious "Chane Bryne" about a young unfortunate who composes a love song to his bride, Chane, and later discovers a dapper young diamond salesman serenading her with it...
...Music became their religion...
...I thought it must be traditional, but I didn't know how to find out what it was...
...The band scored such success at its weddings and bar mitzyahs and its concerts for Jewish organizations that it soon was booked into settings that the Kol Katz Orchestra surely never dreamed of: the jazz and folk clubs of Boston and Cambridge...

Vol. 8 • April 1983 • No. 4


 
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