Category — Coming of Age

1.   JEWISH FORK-LORE

Musician Mickey Katz called chocolate phosphates “Jew beers.”   He drank them at Solomon’s on E. 105^th Street.

I drank mine at Solomon’s at the Cedar Center shopping strip, where Solomon’s moved to.

For some Semitic semantic reason, goys occasionally called Cedar Center the Gaza Strip. Now it kind of is.  The north side of Cedar Center is concrete chunks and gravel heaps. A real estate developer knocked down the 1950s-era plaza and plans to redevelop.  Who knows when.

Solomon’s was my family’s deli of choice. My father, Toby, was a “deli Jew.”  In the Jewish world, that’s usually a putdown, meaning the person knows more about corned beef than Rashi.  Toby’s favorite food was a “good piece of rye bread.”

Toby, a phosphate fan, probably didn’t drink more than a dozen real beers his whole life.  He should have.  In his retirement, when he drank booze he smiled a lot more.  A bit shiker at one party, Toby teed off on a watermelon fruit bowl with a golf club. That stuck with me.  [Shiker is drunk.]

Toby grew up in a deli. His mother had a candy store/ deli at E. 118 Street and Kinsman Road. She sold it to her half-brother when he came over from the Old Country.  Something fishy about that deal — something involving the half-brother’s wife.   My grandmother went from candy store/deli owner to simply candy store owner.  Not a lateral move.

At the Gaza Strip, there was also Corky & Lenny’s. (Still around — four miles east.)   A couple small Jews hung out in the rear booth at Corky’s.  One was Harvey, who did collections for a major landlord.  (Major, to me, means more than 1,000 units.)  I knew Harvey from junior high.

He sued my mother.  My mother, for health reasons, moved from her Beachwood apartment after 27 years into an assisted living facility.  She had a couple months left on her lease.  Harvey, who represented the major landlord, went after her.  Harvey’s boss, by the way, loved my band.   So what.  My mother was collectable.

Freelance journalist David Sax just wrotea book about the decline of delis.  Here’s something for the second edition, David: Delis went downhill when they added TVs.  Now you have to watch the Browns while you eat.

I was deli-famous.  At Jack’s Delion Green Road, I had a thank-you note up in the entrance.   My letter was about the terrific tray for my firstborn’s bris.  Fatherhood was about buying huge quantities of smoked fish.  What a blast.  (I ordered the exact same tray for my daughter’s naming.)

I complimented Jack’s Deli on its fish, which my Aunt Bernice, The Maven, also liked.   I mentioned “The Maven’s seal of approval” in my letter.  Bernice work for a food broker and knew food.

My letter was up for a couple years.
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(Acknowledgment to Henry Sapoznik for “fork-lore” in this story’s title.)

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2.  ’DINES

The trend at mass-feed kiddushes (post-service temple chows) is toward Israeli foods: hummus, baba ganoush, Israeli salad.

When you privatize — and don’t invite the whole congregation — you typically add some fish.

All Jews like a good piece of fish: lox, smoked fish, herring, the occasional sardine.

My youngest son recently called  from Trader Joe’s in Ann Arbor, Mich., and said, “Don’t get excited, Dad, but do I want the sardines in oil or water?”

“Oil.”

I did get excited.  My college kid was finally getting into ’dines.

My mother had given me about eight cans of ’dines when I went off to college.  I ate them on Sunday evenings, when the dorm cafeteria was closed.  (This was back when sardine cans opened with a key, and the ’dines were Portuguese — not Moroccan like now.)  Surprisingly – to me at least – the guys in the dorm wouldn’t share my ’dines. Pizza time.

I liked all kinds of ’dines.  Even the monster-size sardines in tomato sauce were OK.  Bones, no bones . . .  no matter.  Cajun sauce, soya oil, olive oil, mustard sauce . . .  all good. Four ’dines in a can, two in a can . . . either way.

Anchovies?  Also, an excellent choice. Make sure you buy your anchovies in a bottle; they last longer than in cans.

Herring in wine sauce.   Beware.  Last month Heinen’s supermarket substituted Vita brand for Golden Herring.  That was lamentable.  Vita is too sugary.

At luncheons, the other Yiddishe Cup musicians don’t seem to appreciate the fish (i.e., the “dairy spread” in kosher parlance) as much as I do.  Yes, they like the lox.  Lox is apple pie.  But the other items (smoked fish excluded) get little play from the band.  You should see the mountains of herring left over.

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Everybody needs a mentor. Trouble is I’ve only found semi-mentors.

For music, I’ve basically taught myself.  My clarinet teacher showed me the notes and fingerings but he couldn’t improvise.  And he never recommended music to listen to.   He thought clarinet was like typing.

That was OK with me. I liked typing.  I practiced a lot.  My mother had me sign a contract not to practice more than an hour a day.  And I could not throw my clarinet when I hit a wrong note, particularly at my sister.

Here’s the secret to superior musicianship: Lock yourself in a room for years and hope you were born with a good ear.

That’s why pop musicians sometimes disdain singers.  They just sing.  They don’t play anything.  Many of them never locked themselves in rooms to practice.

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Vis-a-vis my band, we’ve had some mentors:

(1.) Greg Selker, who reacquainted Cleveland with klezmer in the early 1980s.  Greg learned about klezmer from Hankus Netsky at the New England Conservatory in Boston.  Greg gave me lessons in 1987.

(2.) Jack Saul (1923-2009), a Jewish record collector.  You couldn’t find a seat in his house unless he moved a ton of records for you.

Every time Jack played a record he’d clean it with Windex.  No scratches.  Smooth-h-h.

He didn’t throw anything out — since day one.  He even had a John McGraw baseball card.

A couple years ago I sold my baseball cards — for a few grand — and he said, “Why’d you do that?”  I wasn’t looking at them and my kids didn’t want them.  My kids didn’t know who Harmon Killebrew was. “Why’d you do that?” Jack repeated, semi-stunned.

The Cleveland Jewish music scene was synonymous with Jack Saul. The Kleveland Klezmorim musicians went to Jack’s house in the early 1980s to record 78s.  Those 78s were pristine.  When Boston public radio did a radio show in 2000 about clarinetist/parodist Mickey Katz, they came to Jack for clean recordings.

Jack never let a record out of his house.  You had to sit there for an hour or two, and have him dub the records onto tape.

The first time I went there, in 1988, I recorded cuts from Music For Happy Occasions, Paul Pincus; Jay Chernow and his Hi-Hat Ensemble; Dukes of Freilachland, Max Epstein; Jewish Wedding Dances, Sam Musiker; Twisting the Freilachs; and Casamiento Judio, Sam Lieberman — a freaking klezmer musician from Latin America!

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Several months after Jack died, Nathan Tinanoff, the founder of the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University, went into Jack’s basement and came out with 4,000 Jewish LPs in one day.  And he didn’t even get to the 78s.  By comparison, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., had 3,000 records, which the center eventually  turned over to Florida Atlantic University.

Jack Saul liked Yiddishe Cup a lot.  (He also liked Steven Greenman, Lori Cahan-Simon, Cantor Kathyrn Wolfe Sebo — all Cleveland Jewish musicians.)  At one community meeting, he said, “We’ve got talent in this town.  We don’t have to always run to New York for entertainers.”

That meant a lot to us locals.  Go Tribe.

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Backstage, August 1969, at a major music festival: The harmonica player carried a leather pouch the size of a travel first-aid kit.  She called the set-up a Kentucky saxophone.  It contained shot glasses and whiskey.

Three days of peace and 12-bar blues.

The Ann Arbor Seltzer Festival.

I’m losing it . . .  the Ann Arbor Blues Festival.

“Got My Mojo Working.”  How many times can you listen to that?  A lot. The festival was three days of just blues.  Big Mama Thornton was the booze-packing harp player.

We — the student organizers of the festival — allowed black customers in for free.  Not many took us up on the offer.  This was the festival of Black Music for White People.  Four of the five organizers were Jewish. The event was produced by the University of Michigan’s student activities center and Canterbury House, the  local Hillel for Episcopalians.

We were up against the Atlantic City Pop Festival that weekend:  Janis Joplin, Santana,  Jefferson Airplane.

We didn’t care about pop music. We were blues freaks.  Old, black and blues — those were our watchwords.   Embodied by Muddy Waters, James Cotton,  Son House, Big Mama Thornton.

There had been gate-crashing at the Newport Jazz Festival earlier in the summer, and a mini riot at a festival in California.  The University of Michigan president suggested we hold our event in the football stadium.  What, on Tartan Turf?

We wound up in a grassy field by North Campus.  About 15,000 people showed up.

Pianist Otis Spann, the master, played boogie woogie.  I never did talk to him, even though I was backstage a lot.  What was I going to say?   The man was old, and I was too shy to talk to anybody over 21.

I first heard the “changes” on Otis Spann’s piano playing.   The “chord changes” — the I/ IV/V chord progression of the blues.  I was a single-note player (clarinet/sax) who knew very little about chords (multiple notes played at the same time) until Spann’s music spelled it out for me.

“Spann’s Boogie,” the tune, was simple.  It was like skeletonized jazz.  I couldn’t miss the left-hand boogie woogie arpeggios (runs) and chords.

I aspired to be like Spann and the other old guys: authentic musicians who answered yes to “Do you gots the feeling?”

Let me hear you, do you gots the feeling?

That exhortation auto-repeated at the festival about every 15 minutes with the college bell tower.

Spann had the feeling.  He was 39.

He died the next year.

My response to that — worked out over the next several decades — was to learn the Jewish blues (klezmer) and slug seltzer.  Took me way past 40.   Klezmer and seltzer: both are fizzy and both cut right through the glop.   Seltzer, oh boy.

As Alan Sherman said:
“Bring me one scotch and soda.
Then you’ll take back the scotch, boy.
And leave the 2 cents plain.”

At a bar mitzvah bar, if you ask for “two cents plain” or seltzer,  you’ll get nowhere.  Ask for club soda.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/12/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup  plays the West Virginia Jewish Reunion 7 p.m. Sat., Aug. 16, Charleston, W. Va.

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There’s no money in the arts. My old clarinet teacher told me that.  He used to eat salami sandwiches while I took lessons.  That stunk.  Mr. Golub.

He bought a building across from his music store; named the building after his daughter, The Joyce Manor; and sold it years later.  He said he regretted he didn’t move with his brother to D.C. and make an even bigger killing there in a real boom town.

Golub’s Music Center.  He had a neon saxophone on the sign.  That, alone, drew the customers.  Inside, there were bongos and guitars.

Mr. Golub couldn’t play by ear. That mystified him.

Mystifies me — playing by ear. But I can do it —  somewhat.

I’m the klezmer guy.  I go to shivas (funeral wakes) and tell the mourners that, and, yeah, they recognize me. They say, “Oh, you’re the klezmer guy.”

Everybody needs to be some kind of  “guy” (or “gal”).  Cable guy.  Computer guy.  Pool guy.  I became the klezmer guy because I put together the longest-lasting Jewish band between Chicago and D.C.  Yiddishe Cup.

No mega money in this but it keeps me from going nuts.

My day job is real estate.  I’m a landlord.  I own and manage apartment buildings.  People call me up about low-water pressure, mice, clanging radiators.  I generally don’t fix the stuff; I usually hire repairmen.  My father used to say, “I didn’t send you to college to paint walls.”  Well, I painted a few walls anyway and pointed some bricks,  but that’s not my calling.

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