Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC NatHentoff The Exultant Return of the Klezmorim The young boy, a Jewish boy, in Eastern Poland could not get the wild and sweet sounds of the fiddle out of his head. He had...
...In May 1981, Carawan conducted a workshop in Madison, Wisconsin, on the use of song in communities and in social movements, and many of the songs he recorded there have recently been released in an album that ought to be around the house for those grey times when you start to wonder if we shall overcome after all...
...The story, all true, is one of those collected by Henry Sapoznik, an enthusiastic scholar of klezmer music and himself a musician in one of the growing number of klezmerbands created by young American Jews who have also been seized by the ecstatic compulsion to improvise these bold, brooding, sentimental, caustic, manic, swirling, explosive melodies...
...There's not enough soul, elation, mystery, celebration—all those things that you can't just read off a page...
...But often there's something missing...
...With all the traveling a klezmer had to do to stay alive, he might never come back because of the terrible roads, the terrible bandits, the terrible lure of all those goyishe things out there...
...Do not miss one of their more recent sets, Metropolis (Flying Fish Records FF 258,1304 W. Schubert, Chicago, IL 60614...
...Trumpeter McGhee is one of the patriarchs of bop...
...She had it even then, "that electric thing," and it gets stronger every year...
...From Jimmie Rodgers ("Blue Yodel") to Elvis Presley ("Heartbreak Hotel"), the program, while hitting a few clinkers, has a number of certified indispensable country sides: the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flower," "Orange Blossom Special" with Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, and the performance that invariably used to make the little fellers listening in at home thirsty—the Sons of the Pioneers' "Cool Water...
...And that's what creates and sustains the electricity here—true collective improvisation, including characteristically crisp and lucid piano by Barry Harris, another youthful patriarch...
...It doesn't matter whether you know how to dance or not...
...Some of their music will make you cry (guaranteed) and some, like the Yiddish Blues of the 1920s, will have you dancing...
...The other horn, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who served a longtime apprenticeship with Thelonious Monk, has never sounded more distinctively present on a recording while also being an integral part of the group...
...The band that is largely responsible for launching the exultant return of this struttingly indigenous Jewish music is The Klezmorim, formed in 1975 by six young musicians in Berkeley, California...
...The Czar is sleepingF/That's how the Czar sleeps at night...
...And who knew what else...
...It's hard to believe that ardently young revolution started some forty years ago...
...But the boy knew better...
...But his parents, like most other Jews then, would much rather their son become a tailor or a shoemaker than a klezmer, a musician...
...Maggie, as he's called, was never just a finger-busting chord-conjugator...
...Co-director of Highlander's Cultural Program is Guy Carawan, a songwriter who is, however, especially persuasive and energizing as a singer...
...He had to have one...
...1QUIET...
...And worse...
...His is essentially a lyrical temperament, and he has always been a resourceful colorist...
...Others took bounding shape during the tumultuous years of sweeping Jewish immigration to America (1880-1922) as the thousands of klezmorim who came here from the Old Country, absorbed—as klezmorim always have— what they liked of the sounds and rhythms of different cultures...
...They take a roomful of feathers/And slip the Czar into it,/And a troop of soldiers with rifles/stand there all night shouting: 'QUIET...
...This album is also on Flying Fish (FF 249), and for more information about Kapelye, you can contact Henry Sapoznik, 2018 Voorhies Ave., #B24, Brooklyn, NY 11235...
...A magnificent dividend in the set is a 1964 recording by the Moving Star Hall Singers of Johns Island, South Carolina...
...So there would be no fiddle for the eager Jewish boy...
...The only steady thing in such work was risk...
...It's Songs of Struggle and Celebration (Flying Fish 27272...
...What keeps Guy going is the vitality of his dreams, and that may explain, in quite another context, the continually astonishing vitality of Ruth Laredo...
...But you have to be careful not to blow all the mystery away...
...There are any number of pianists with "monster chops," as some jazz musicians might say...
...A particularly admirable illustration is the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, which for fifty years has been a haven and an idea-arsenal for civil rights activists, labor organizers, and all kinds of other folks who actually believe in democracy...
...Samuel Barber was there, and he autographed her score, "Brava—Bravissima...
...Yet another wondrous group—all these combos are wondrous to those of us who thought the klezmorim had become as rare a species as New Orleans "songsters" of Sidney Bechet's generation—is the Klezmer Conservatory Band (Yiddishe Renaissance, Kleztone 3192, 204 Aspinwall Ave., Brookline, MA 02146...
...But somebody always found the secrets, as young Andy Statman has in this piece...
...That is, they can master any score...
...Among the vivid tales and trills in Kapelye: Future and Past is a song I remember from before I thought I could remember anything—"How Does the Czar Drink Tea...
...Years ago, on the day Ruth Laredo was graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, the work she chose to play was one of her favorites, the Sonata for Piano in this set...
...M Choice Cuts One of the mysteries of jazz recording is why certain dates—very few of them—turn out to be practically perfect...
...You can't keep a tradition going, after all, without penetrating its mysteries...
...Laredo, however, has both the chops and the ardor...
...Another pungently exhilarating group is Kapelye (Yiddish for "band...
...The formidable Brandwein had worked out such quick fingerings for dense passages that he sometimes played with his back to the audience to hide his inventions from rival musicians...
...There are Galician dances, wedding melodies, shers, a gypsy hora, and a song that was a specialty of the fabled virtuoso klezmer clarinetist, Naftalie Brandwein...
...On this album, even the silence makes you want to dance...
...And after that happens, you might have the same group of musicians in the same studio a month later, and the playing, while competent, just won't have what jazzman Benney Bailey calls "that electric thing...
...Furthermore, Laredo is just as absorbingly dramatic in the differently demanding music of Samuel Barber (Sonata for Piano, Souvenirs, Nocturne [Homage to John Field...
...He also put together the indispensable Klezmer Music: 1910-1942, Folkways Records FSSS 34021, that I reviewed in the September 1981 issue of this ecumenical journal...
...So, way back, did certain jazz horn players...
...He found a gypsy boy with a fiddle, and he traded his shoes to that gypsy for the fiddle...
...Some of the forms of the music go back to the Nineteenth Century, and farther yet, in Eastern Europe...
...The aforementioned scholar-player, Henry Sapoznik, is the fiddler and one of the singers...
...It ends by asking how does the Czar sleep at night...
...All kinds of progenitors are represented in RCA Victor's two-volume 60 Years of Country Music (CPL2-4351...
...The band itself can be reached c/o Richard Foster, Klezmorim, Inc., 6132 Margarido Drive, Oakland, CA 94618...
...Jazz, for instance...
...Also part of the repertory of the young improvisers regenerating the tradition now are songs from the Yiddish theater and labor songs and—well, the Jewish mix...
...Sweet and sour, but plenty of flavor...
...Carawan himself can be reached for concerts and workshops at RFD 3, Box 370, New Market, TN 37820...
...Or the band can be contacted directly at 97 Parsons St., Brighton, MA 01235...
...Finally, for the time being, a gently brilliant all-instrumental set, Jewish Klezmer Music (Shanachie 21002, Dalebrook Park, Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ 07423) with cimbalist Zev Feldman, Marty Confurious on bowed bass, and Andy Statman doubling on clarinet and mandolin...
...Places, along with people, are sources of musical tradition and regeneration...
...I have been listening, for instance, to interpreters of Maurice Ravel's music since I was a lad in Boston, where such interpreters abounded, but never have I heard so deeply exciting a Ravel recital as Ravel/LaredolMiroirs, La Valse, Sonatine (CBS Masterworks 36734...
...Whatever constitutes that exactly right mix of the jazz elements, it all certainly connected in Howard McGhee's Jazz Brothers (Storyville SLP 4077, distributed by the Moss Music Group...
...For it was well known that musicians being musicians, Jewish and Gentile swingers traded tunes and techniques...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
