A MIKE NAMED MOISH

Klezmer violinists often don’t get along with klezmer clarinetists. The animosity goes back to the late Chagall era.

In the early 1900s, recording engineers favored the piercing clarinet over the murky violin.  Studios had big acoustic horns the musicians played into.  The clarinet’s sound picked up better than the violin’s.  The clarinet’s ascendancy was quick, and the violin became passé and alter heym (old country).

Violinists are sensitive about this.

Violinists don’t like playing second fiddle.   They ask for “more violin” in the monitor mix and the house mix.  (The “monitor mix” is what the band hears on stage.  The “house mix” is what the audience hears.)

Truce time . . .

Let’s just forget about mikes. You don’t see them at New Orleans parades.  You don’t see them at bluegrass jam sessions.  Ban mikes.  Let lungs rule.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, likes to get to concerts early to talk about mikes with the sound mixologists.  Alan is Yiddishe Cup’s spokesman to the sound guys; if I would let the other band members chime in, we would spend the entire sound check saying, “more clarinet,” “more violin” and “more vocal.”  Every musician has a focus — himself.

I tell the sound techs, “Can you turn my moish up?”  (I like moish better than mike.  As for mic, that is totally absurd.  Fiction alert.)

Before Yiddishe Cup goes on stage, the sound guys — for no apparent reason — spin all the dreidels on the mixing board, and we sound like soup.

Throw away the mikes, musicians.  If you can’t hear yourself, so what? You shouldn’t have taken up violin.

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