Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

KLEZ CLOTHES

by Bert Stratton

A lot of bands wear all black.

Yiddishe Cup doesn’t do that.  Too East Coast.

In Toronto I saw the Flying Bulgars in what looked like clown suits.

Yiddishe Cup is somewhere between the Flying Bulgars and black.

We have five looks:

1. The tux with colorful hand-sewn lapels.  The downside to this is everybody knows we’re shnorring at the hors d’oeuvres table at weddings.  All-black tuxes would make us invisible.

2. Blue undertaker suit.  Keeps the focus off us and on the bridal couple or bat mitzvah girl.

3. Solid-colored shirt with colorful tie.  This is our middle-school art teacher look. Works well at laidback bar mitzvahs.

4. Hawaiian-style shirt.  A professional costume designer made these shirts.  They wash well and dry quickly.  A real show-biz shirt.  When we played 13 gigs in six days in Florida, the quick-dry feature came in handy.

Yes, Florida in January . . . I wish Yiddishe Cup would land another run like that. But the mega-condo booker in Florida won’t re-book us.

Was it our lyrics?

You judge. Yiddishe Cup’s “Tumbalalaika”:

What can grow, grow without rain?
“This,” says our singer, grabbing his crotch.

What can burn, burn for many years?
“Not love,” our singer says. “Hardly. Try hemorrhoids.”

A comedian, Stu, was our last booker in Florida.  I should have known he was bad news because his email address was Suntanstu@ and his Web site had photos of him with Engelbert Humperdinck.

Stu’s idea of a joke was not paying for our sound (speakers, mics) and backline (instrumental rental) after I bought airplane tickets to his showcase in Florida.

One final Yiddishe Cup look:

5. T-shirt with the Yiddishe Cup logo. We wear these when we play summer park gigs.

Our singer, Irwin Weinberger, wears the Yiddishe Cup T-shirt around town too. The rest of us don’t wear our shirts much off stage.  Do you see LeBron in the grocery store in a Cavs jersey?

At KlezKamp I saw a Klezmer Conservatory Band musician in a Montreal Jazz Festival T-shirt.  That was cool, synergistically speaking; KCB had played Montreal.

I wear T-shirts from the Concert of Colors (Detroit) and CityFolk (Dayton, Ohio).  Yiddishe Cup played those festivals.

I saw Klamberg, the Klezmatics’ singer, in a Klezmatics T-shirt at KlezKamp.  (Correction: Sklamberg.)

On second thought, maybe Irwin Weinberger is cool.
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1 of 2 posts for 1/13/10.  Please see the next post too.

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1 comment

1 Mark Schilling { 01.13.10 at 10:05 am }

Irwin is definitely cool! Wearing a Yiddishe Cup tee is a meta statement: We are beyond your petty definitions of “cornball” and “cool.” In fact, for us, the cornball is cool! Hah!” Or something like that.

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