THE SHEETS
Sid Beckerman was a living legend of klez clarinet. I followed him around KlezKamp — the music conference — a lot. And you know what, he talked to me.
Big deal?
It was. Sid was paid staff. I was “payer,” as in student/customer/ fawner. Paid staff was hard to corner. They had a lot of demands on their time.
Sid was different than many staffers. Sid had no ego, according to Washington clarinetist Rodney Brooks, another student. “Sid was never a star,” Rodney explained.
Sid was “discovered” by klez revivalists, and made his first record at 70. (He died in 2007 at 88.)
Sid had a handwritten tune book called “the sheets,” as in sheets of paper. Sid’s unarmed guard of “the sheets” was pianist Pete Sokolow, who had transcribed the tunes for Sid.
The most popular tune in the collection was “SB7,” which stood for “Sid Beckerman tune #7.” [Yiddishe Cup plays it on Klezmer Guy. We call it “40A” — the page it’s on in our book. Dave Tarras recorded it as “Di Zilberne Chasene” (The Silver Wedding). Don’t know what page Tarras had it on.]
At KlezKamp I had a strategy for obtaining the sheets from Pete Sokolow. First, I gave Pete an obscure 1938 magazine article about “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (By Me You Look Grand), hoping to get in Pete’s good graces.
Sokolow, stuffing the magazine article in his pocket, said, “The sheets? What sheets? I’m so busy now. I’m working up an arrangement for fifteen people. What did Sid say?”
I hadn’t thought of asking Sid.
So I went to Sid and offered him $20 for the sheets. Sid said, “For what? What transcriptions?”
Interestingly, all the clarinetists from D.C. knew the SB tunes. So I badgered Rodney from D.C. some more. I hocked him. He had learned most of his freylekhs (horas) from the sheets, he told me.
He admitted he had the sheets. “You can xerox them,” he said. “But don’t say you got them from me. Somebody might take umbrage.”
A year later, the sheets came out commercially as the Klezmer Plus! Folio. Everybody could buy them. Sokolow and Sid had just been protecting their investments.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/7/09. Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup is at Fairmount Temple, Fri. Oct. 9, and Park Synagogue, Sat. Oct. 10, for Simchat Torah. Cleveland.
3 comments
Does the Dept. of Homeland Security know that you and other well-known liberal-leaning people went to a camp in a foreign country with certain “instruments,” where you learned how to do more “numbers” with them that had cryptic identity codes.
Watch yourself in the airport and at the next border crossing. Your days are numbered (so the liturgy tells us at this time of year). Zay gezunt!
Actually, I received the SB xeroxed tunes from you back in the day, in the early 90’s. Klezmer Plus only has a few of those tunes. The old xeroxes have many, many more. I think around 50 or more tunes, which are mostly bulgars.
One colleague of mine thought that “SB” stood for “Stu Brotman,” and I had to correct him.
Sid was a wonderful man who lived a block or two away from my grandma Sylvia Greenman in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, NY.
On my many trips to New York, I would stay with my grandma and take the subway to Manhattan to work with Zev Feldman and Michael Alpert, among others. A couple times, walking along Bay Parkway going to the subway, I ran into Sid. He was such a nice man, and he remembered me each time, even though he kept calling me “Brian” or some other name.
He was a big influence on Margot Leverett and many others.
And good point…the man had no ego, and lived somewhat in the shadow of his more successful father, who made klezmer recordings (Shloimke Beckerman).
Pete Sokolow still talks about Sid and how much he misses him.
Thanks for remembering a nice good honest sweet man, who everyone loved and respected.
To Steven Greenman:
Direct from the Klezmer Guy research department: The SB “sheets” is 26 tunes, and the Klezmer Plus! Folio is 13 tunes/medleys.
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