INDIGENOUS MUSIC
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC, Nat Hentoff YIDDISH SWINGERS Two summers ago, on a Sunday af-ternoon, I went to a Dave Tarras concert on the lower East Side. You don't know the name? What Benny Goodman was to...
...Par-ticularly intriguing is the Start of the open-ing track, with just Max and the voice of Martin Luther King (the "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington...
...There was jubilation (the Buchanan Brothers' "Atomic Power...
...And that wasn't in New Orleans...
...Such telling fragments of social history...
...That was in a Jewish section of Boston...
...Years ago, before all of this, I was telling Charles Mingus about Jewish "soul music," and to prove it, I played him recordings by a number of melismatically fervent cantors...
...It's beyond profes-sionalism...
...Roach fuses them all into an insistently cohesive, indeed overwhelming, unit through a wide r?nge of moods and speaking textures...
...pelling authority—big, f?ll sounds...
...Each of them has his own comness to assimilate drew them to what the "native" Americans liked—Benny Goodman, for instance...
...But the music, can it speak to the present, can it still make you want to dance and cry and pound the table and reach for more schnapps...
...Try to find any of these recordings—except maybe far back on a shelf where your grandmother keeps the brown snapshots and the beaded handbags of her girlhood...
...re-markably bold and cohesive coneeptions...
...Tarras is in his eighties, and the younger fellows in his trio were in their seventies...
...I expected a scant audience, also of rather advanced years, but the main hall was f?ll, as was the balcony, and while there were indeed venerable folk there, there was also a surprising number of Jews in their twenties and even younger...
...What Benny Goodman was to the jazz clarinet, Tarras was and is to the clarinet in Yiddish music (not that Benny sounds exactly goy-ish...
...I shouldn't have been surprised...
...You feel jazz authority by the way someone beats off the tempo, by the way a musician listens to another musician, and, of course, by the way a musician takes over when it's his or her turn...
...the rise of a new generation of American Jews whose eagerChoice Cuts It is a tribute to the greater care the Japanese take with jazz recordings that a new se-ries of reissues of the American Verve label is manufactured in Japan...
...He may have to take a detour...
...What have we got...
...I never did get around to adding some sides by klezmorim to show him that Jews could also wail in the jazz sense...
...The music—actual commercial recordings from 1944 to 1962—reveals how the news and ramifications of the Bomb were being ab-sorbed in the popul?r culture...
...Finally, there is a re-cording on an'American label, Columbia, that fully realizes the potential of his current combo—trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, tenor Saxophonist Odean Pope, and bassist Calvin Hill...
...I have never heard her on records or in live Performances—even at times she was down past the bottom—when her sound, her phrasing, her sinuous beat, her very soul, if an atheist can use that term, did not stop time for me...
...is Max Roach...
...Listeners there have had these historic sets available for years, but the albums have been hard to come by here since Norman Granz sold the label (which he founded) to Polygram...
...gentle protest (the Sons of the Pioneers' "Old Man Atom...
...Actually, they're all rare sides...
...Musically, anyway...
...They have formed new bands of klezmorim, and some have studied with such of the survi ving masters as Dave Tarras...
...and a song of religious transcendence (Lowell Blanchard's "Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb...
...Listen...
...The music—can it still make you dance and cry and pound the table...
...Also, the immigration laws changed and fewer folks from the old country came, including fewer klezmorim...
...Tarras is a klezmer, a lineal and spiritual descendant of the klezmorim of the old country—the wandering, improvising musi-cians who played in the villages and in the cities, absorbing all kinds of musical forms but keeping strong, swinging Yiddish roots...
...Sapoznik has compiled this set from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028...
...And it happens, one way or another, on every track in these albums...
...I confess to a total inability to be critical of Lady Day...
...Folkways is at 43 West ?lst Street, New York, NY10023...
...and total command of jazz time...
...There are lucid notes on the history of the music, the musicians, the audiences...
...Among the first batch are two Billie Hol-iday sets—a 1946 concert in Los Angeles, Billie Holiday at Jazz at the Philharmonie, and a later Session, Lady Sings the Blues...
...for example, as the presence of a Statue of Liberty motif found only on Jewish ethnic records on the Okeh label...
...It is the difference, let us say, between I.F...
...Always, Billie had authority...
...All but one of the recordings were made in New York by transplanted klezmorim, but there isone rare side of flute and tsimbl (the hammered dulcimer) made in Poland in 1910...
...Rounder Records (186 Willow Avenue, Somerville, Massachusetts) has created yet another fascinating, often frightening interplay between music and extra-musical history...
...Even if you have never heard klezmorim before, the crack-ling, pungent sounds and swirling rhythms, the exultant solo flights of fiddlers soaring way over the roof, the krekhts (the cry, the laugh) of the clarinet—all this and more will light your fire...
...The latter's message is that the thing to worry about is not the atomic bomb but the day "my Lord will come...
...Max's punetua-tions, commentary, and palpable personal memories of blackness in America under-score the continuing presentness of that speech...
...The label is, of course, Moe Asch's Folkways...
...As a very small boy, when the weddings would begin at the catering hall a block away, I'd come running at the call of the klezmorim and stay until the last guest was gone...
...No one in this nation has done more to preserve all manner of indige-nous music from all over the world than Moe...
...Mingus recognized his spiritual lantsleit...
...Anyway, in recent years, a number of young Jewish musicians who had first been drawn to indigenously American forms— bluegrass, jazz—have broadened their skills to include the traditions of their forebears in the old country...
...sensuous connections ("Atom Bomb Baby" by The Five Stars...
...Henry Sapoznik, for example, is a mem-ber of both the Delaware Water Gap String Band (with its Anglo-American roots) and Kapelye, a Yiddish combo...
...Atomic Cafe (Radioactive Rock 'n Roll, Blues, Country & Gospel) is the sound track of a film that deals with the variously bizarre "culture of the atomic age...
...Stone and James Reston...
...The existence of Israel has had something to do with this too, of course, but for Jews on the Left, the black example was particularly challenging...
...He is also a scholar of the living Yiddish musical past, and has put together a marvelously evoca-tive and illuminating album of Klezmer Mu-sicl1910-1942...
...And there is an account of the reasons for the gradual disappearance of the klezmorim in the land: the rise of radio where the music was free...
...One result of the black cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s has been the examination by a good many Jews in their twenties and thirties of their own roots...
...It comes from having a calling, which is quite something eise...
...and as huge as the Folkways cata-logue is, no album is ever discontinued...
...Get them assimi-lated fast...
...Thev've got the blues...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
