Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Levine and His Flying Machine Every year at the beginning of summer, New York City's Fifth Avenue is closed off from 82nd Street to 105th for the Museum Mile...
...For that evening, ten museums in the area are open free—from El Museo del Barrio to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
...This year, the band that attracted the largest crowds, which also stayed the longest, played in front of a mansion on 86th Street and Fifth Avenue that used to be owned by the Vanderbilts...
...Still, Chamberlin and Levine were feted as heroes in Europe...
...Look...
...The plane ran out of gas and missed Berlin...
...In 1979, after years of researching the music of the klezmo-rim—the itinerant Yiddish musicians of Eastern Europe and their descendants in the United States—Sapoznik formed his own troupe of klezmorim and called it Kapelye...
...As chronicled in the notes to Kapelye and in Marc Slo-bin's fascinating 1982 book, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (University of Illinois Press), Levine was a Jewish millionaire who, in 1927, decided to back a pilot who would be the first American to make a nonstop trans-Atlantic flight...
...Yivo is the only museum I feel I own a part of...
...She pointed to the children dancing to the klezmorim, and grinned...
...He hired a pilot, Clarence Chamberlin, and decided that he himself would go along as co-pilot and navigator...
...To make the air more vibrantly festive, each museum presents its own musical ensemble: jazz bands, string groups, a marimba player (at Goethe house), and a coolly elegant wind ensemble (at the Metropolitan, of course...
...In 1955, the mansion came into the possession of the Yidisher Visn-shaftlekher Institute (the Institute for Jewish Research...
...It is better known, here and abroad, by its Yiddish acronym, Yivo...
...When they asked for a raise, he screamed at them angrily: 'You Bolsheviks...
...As Kenneth Maltz's clarinet cried and swirled and laughed alongside Michael Alpert's sizzling fiddle while various band members, including Sapoznik, sang in Yiddish and then in English, children strutted and danced in front of the klezmorim...
...As in their new album, Levine and His Flying Machine (Shanachie 21006), Kapelye played what could be called ecumenical, Yiddish-accented dance music woven of various ethnic European strands...
...Yivo began in Vilna, Poland, in 1925 in a three-story building that was later held by the Nazis...
...But in the United States, President Coolidge received Chamberlin, but not Levine...
...The song is "Levine with Your Hying Machine...
...During the year, there are also diversely illuminating presentations at the Institute...
...After all, the museum is about me and all my relatives, going way back before I know their names...
...Levine, Levine, you're the greatest Hebrew ace...
...It was a contest, and the winner would get $25,000 and immortality...
...On that June evening in front of Yivo, as the kids danced and their parents remembered their own childhood, Kapelye's fiddler, Michael Alpert, an ethnomusicol-ogist who is a graduate of UCLA, finished his vocal paean to the Hebrew ace, and then with his proudest and broadest Yiddish accent, he shouted, "Take it—avayl" Alpert laughed, as did we all, without a thought of what the Vanderbilts would have said...
...Alas, Levine's navigation skills were inadequate...
...The thirty-year-old Levine kept hiring and firing pilots and mechanics while a chap named Lindbergh, whose plane wasn't ready until months after Levine's, finally did the trick...
...A song the crowd in front of Yivo particularly enjoyed was about a semi-heroic Jewish figure you may not have heard of: Charles A. Levine...
...Recently, for instance, pursuing one of my musical obsessions— the passionate art of the hazzan—l went to Yivo to hear a lecture by Wesleyan Professor Mark Slobin, "From Rosenblatt to Rock: The Story of the American Cantor...
...Levine decided to sponsor a trans-Atlantic flight anyway...
...By flying to Berlin, he and his pilot would break Lindbergh's distance record and Levine himself would become the first Jew to fly the Atlantic...
...He was a contented worker, Soon he became a boss and shaved off his beard And his workers toiled like slaves...
...In addition, there were theater pieces, and songs about matchmakers, and even a touch of political analysis: My friend Yankl Shimen came here from Russia To America, the Golden Land...
...Levine, Levine, just an ordinary name, But you've brought it everlasting fame...
...He believed in Marxism, and he saved every nickel...
...In charge of these archives is Henry Sapoznik, whose parents survived the Holocaust and came to this country, where Sapoznik trained as a choirboy to accompany his father, a professional hazzan...
...But much of the Yivo archives were hidden and thereby saved...
...and in New York, these archives, stretching back over centuries and encompassing multifarious dimensions of Jewish life, keep growing...
...Now, however, it is occupied by a group that the Vanderbilts and their turn-of-the-century neighbors would never have imagined living in their midst...
...An elderly Jewish vaudevillian, Charles Cohen, was furious at the insult to Levine, and thereby to all Jews, and he helped bring 1 into being the isong, "Levine with Your Flying Machine": Levine, Levine, you're the hero of your race...
...INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Levine and His Flying Machine Every year at the beginning of summer, New York City's Fifth Avenue is closed off from 82nd Street to 105th for the Museum Mile Festival...
...Among Yivo's departments is the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of Yivo Sound Recordings—cantors, Yiddish theater music, klezmer bands, political songs, comedy, and sheet music too (like "Men-dele the Martyr...
...On the balmy June evening of this year's Museum Mile Festival, the members of Kapelye were greatly pleasing themselves and crowds that were sometimes ten-deep in front of the Yivo Institute...
...I'll send you back to Russia.' (If you want information about the album, Shanachie Records is at Dalebrook Park, Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ 07423...
...Older folks seemed unable to stop smiling, and I heard one woman say, "They thought they could kill us all, they always think they can kill us all, but listen...
Vol. 49 • August 1985 • No. 8
