Category — Klezmer

I don’t need no stinkin’ Facebook.

A suburban councilman—who had been in my high school physics class — introduced my band at a summer gazebo concert.   I hadn’t seen him in years.  He had talked a lot in Physics.  I told the audience that.

At a gig in Rockford, Ill., a kid who used to do odd things in my bathroom (junior high), showed up.  He was a banker.

In Dallas, the star of my junior high’s football team stopped by.  He didn’t know much about klezmer.  He was the oldest of eight children of a Polish milkman.   Sealtest.  I used to tutor my friend in math for the fun of it.  I concocted tests and flunked him. Years later he wound up getting into medical school.  Showed me.

When Yiddishe Cup played in New York, my other high school buddies — the ones who used to sing “We’re Outta Here (Midwest)” — showed up at the gig.  Back in eleventh grade these guys had worn buttons from a Greenwich Village shop: I’m a Plainclothes Hippie and Unbutton. Go East, young men.  They did — about a minute after graduation.

At a Cleveland luncheon, a waitress, who had been in my fourth-grade class, reminded me we had the same exact birthday, different hospitals.

I sometimes put these folks to work  at Yiddishe Cup gigs.  Particularly if  I’ve gotten them comp tickets to a concert.  They sell CDs for me.

One gig — down in Florida — I had a Palm Beach lawyer and a bee expert hustling CDs.  The bee professor had played in a jug band in high school.  Washboard or jug?  Something stupid.  The Palm Beach lawyer had played in the jug band too.

I wasn’t invited into that jug band.  I was relegated to playing dippy Al Hirt “Java” duets with the trumpet player across the street.

Now these jug band guys were selling CDs for me.  And they were good at it.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/5/09.  Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert 6 p.m. tonight, Wade Oval, University Circle, Cleveland, Ohio.

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The klezmer revival peaked 1996 to 2001. Back then Yiddishe Cup was moving CDs faster than tea bags at a cantors’ convention.  Itzhak Perlman was on TV.  He did a PBS show called “In the Fiddler’s House.”  That started it all, late 1995.  My band drove down to Columbus, Ohio, to catch the live show: Perlman, Statman, Brave Old World, the Klezmatics and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.  That hall was crowded.

That passed.

The good news is klez didn’t die.  It flat-lined into part of the culture.  Klez is now like challah and grape juice.  There.  I don’t have to explain “klezmer” to Yidn any more.  Just to Amish.

Every major town has a klez band. Yiddishe Cup is a “territory” band, to use jazz terminology.  Nobody messes with The Cup in the Midwest.  You go west to Chicago, Maxwell Street takes over.  (We haven’t played Chicago.  Maxwell Street has played Cleveland.  What’s with that?)

I thought Meshugeneh Mambo, the album, might make Yiddishe Cup the Next Big Thing.  Break out.

However,  our target audience for Meshugeneh Mambo, Jews, didn’t go for the funny songs as much as the straight-ahead instrumental klez.  After concerts, CD buyers gravitated toward our first album, the one with all the classic klezmer and Yiddish hits, like “Romania” and “Tumbalalaika.”

“Nudnik the Flying Shisl” (Pest the Flying Saucer) from Meshugeneh Mambo?  Forget it.

We do an album every few years. Our new one, Klezmer Guy, is mostly live.  My keyboard player wanted to stamp “live” on the cover.  So what if it’s live?  Picture this: A 75-year-old Jewish man says to his wife, “Gevalt (great glory), Hinda,  Yiddishe Cup’s live album just dropped. Let’s buy two.”

We recorded the album in a house — excuse me, studio — and laid down the live tracks at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the John S. Knight Convention Center at First Night Akron (Ohio).

We always expect to go platinum. That’s the thrill of the arts: all that striving and hope.  We’ll go tin at least.

At festivals Yiddishe Cup has opened for War, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Los Lobos,  the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Jon Hendricks.  Those guys will open for us next time.
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2 of 2 posts for 7/29/09

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At the cushy, soft-seat auditorium gigs, Yiddishe Cup gets “green room” meals and people ask for our autographs.  At country club weddings, we enter through kitchens and are often treated like crumb bums.

Country club managers have thankless jobs.  They are either dishing out vitriol to the help, or receiving it from the members.

If you’re paying the county club manager, you’re golden.  If you’re not paying the manager, you’re not.  Everybody knows his or her place in a country club.  Except the musicians.

The musicians, in the hierarchy of wedding gigs, think they’re machers — a notch above the kitchen help, florist, photographer, video guy, and even the club members.

Nobody else sees it that way.

My drummer—number two—said he was a “professional” whenever club managers and party planners pestered him.  He had a PhD in music. He could take that PhD  “down the hall, turn left, make a right” . . . and use the storage room there.
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2 of 2 posts for 7/22/09

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I’ve forgotten my clarinet. My third drummer — long gone — once showed up without sticks.  He cut up some curtain dowel rods to use.

Gigging is all about not forgetting stuff.  A band is like a platoon going into battle: mics, cables, axes, tune books, jackets, instrument stands, capos, neck straps, amps, monitors, lights.

When I forgot my clarinet, I played a lot of harmonica and clapped.  Thirty minutes into that gig, the rabbi asked me, “Where’s your flute?” (He meant “clarinet.”  Some old-time Orthodox rabbis don’t know their musical instruments.)  I said I was saving my flute.

My singer’s wife drove my axe to the gig — about 30 miles one way.  I paid her.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/15/09.  Please see post below too.

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Nobody thinks Yiddishe Cup plays American music.

We do.

We should change our name to America’s Cup because we play James Brown, Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Motown, swing and Latin.  If we didn’t play that stuff, we wouldn’t work. [Watch video clip.]

The working musician’s world is very schizo.  In one set we might play “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Cecilia,” “In the Mood,”, a neo-Hasidic pop medley, an Israeli medley and klezmer.

Klezmer, historically, is Eastern European Jewish instrumental wedding music.  But “klezmer” now means “Jewish music.”   So “klezmer band” means “Jewish band.”  “Klezmer” means you have a clarinet and/or violin as a lead instrument.  It means somebody in your group sings some Yiddish too.

Klezmer — the actual word — means musician in Yiddish.

Stop.  This is not an Elderhostel lecture.  For more on klezmer, check out Henry Sapoznik’s Klezmer! and Yale Strom’s The Book of Klezmer.

There are five or six books on klezmer, total.  We’re not talking about Shakespeare.  You can become a faux klezmer authority in about 40 hours.

Yiddishe Cup sometimes does a whole gig without playing one klez tune. We did a rocker’s fortieth birthday and didn’t play any Jewish music.  The drummer from The James Gang was there, so we played “Funk 49” for the drummer and the birthday boy.  Nothing but rock, except the birthday boy wanted a couple Armenian songs for his mother.  That’s why he had hired us.

What does Yiddishe Cup have to do with Armenian? Maybe the clarinet sound.

At weddings we’ve also played Norwegian fiddle tunes, the Japanese ditty “Red Dragonfly,” and Guarani Indian music from Paraguay.

Country too.  A bartender once gave me a request — in writing — for “My Dixie Wrecked.”

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, will frequently complain: “Why don’t we play something we know!”

Because that wouldn’t be fun.  Nobody notices if we screw up at a party, so why not mix it up?  Now at a concert — where people are seated, staring at you, and paying — we try to play tunes we know.

At one concert I screwed up the beginning of  “Second Avenue Square Dance” because a newspaper critic was there.  I was nervous. My fingers went all over the place.  Afterwards I joked to Steve Ostrow, our violinist: “‘Second Avenue’ was the highlight of the gig, huh?”

Steve said, “It was the highlight for me because you got out of it.”

That was the ultimate musician’s compliment.
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2 of 2 posts for 7/15/09.

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“Inductee class” is a phrase one hears around Cleveland.

Who’s going to be inducted into the next Rock Hall class, and who isn’t.

Mr. Stress is in the first inductee class of the Cleveland Blues Society’s Hall of Fame.  That’s a new place.  Doesn’t even have a building.  (Stress is a terrific harmonica player.)

The National Cleveland-style Polka Hall of Fame has a building.  It’s in the old Euclid, Ohio, city hall.  Frankie Yankovic was the man in Slovenian/Cleveland-style polka.

Yiddishe Cup has a polka pedigree – a small one. The DJ on the radio show “Polka Changed My Life Today” plays our “Tsena, Tsena” recording regularly.  “Tsena, Tsena” isn’t polka, but it is upbeat and major key.  Some polka aficionados clamor for “happy music,” and “Tsena, Tsena” fits the bill.

Generally, Jews aren’t big on “happy.”  For example, recently Yiddishe Cup performed “A Hard Day’s Night” in Yiddish (A Shvere Togedike Nakht) but sang the “I feel all right” line in English.  Why?  Because you can’t say “I feel all right” in Yiddish.  No such thing.  (Also, Gerry Tenney wrote the Yiddish lyrics that way.)

[Another acknowledgment: Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg pointed out the “I feel all right” paradox to me.]

My point here . . . When  is Cleveland going to get a Challah Fame?

I have the beginnings of one in my basement. I have a plywood cut-out/statue of Dave Tarras, the great klez clarinetist.  Must be 10-feet tall.  Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s vocalist, made it.  Irwin is also an art teacher.  Irwin’s Tarras cut-out folds in half at the waist.

Tarras (left), a giant of the clarinet, and Klezmer Guy

We used the Tarras statue as a stage prop at our Chautauqua Institution gig.  That was one complicated deal; I brought a rechargeable drill to screw Tarras’ halves together.  And I reinforced his back with metal channel strips.

The first class of inductees at The Challah will be some dead old guys, like Tarras and Brandwein, plus for post-ceremony partying needs, some living old guys: Danny Rubenstein and Ray Musiker.

For personal reasons, the museum’s second cut-out/statue will be Willie Epstein (1919-1999), the klezmer trumpeter from Florida and New York.  In 1997 Willie came  to Cleveland for the local premiere of the Epstein Brothers documentary A Tickle in the Heart, and my band played prior to the movie.  Willie was impressed with Yiddishe Cup’s trombonist, Steve Ostrow.  Willie cornered me in the hall and said, “You mind if I call your trombone player later.  I’d like to take him on our tour of South Africa.”

That was class: asking me — the bandleader — if Willie could raid my band.  Most music contractors would have just raided, no questions asked.

Willie never called.

Did the Epsteins ever make it to South Africa?   I don’t know.   Doubt it.  Nothing on the Internet about it.
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Read a Cleveland Scene review of Yiddishe Cup’s recent 20th anniversary concert.  By Anastasia Pantsios.

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I had a beer with Andy Statman, the acclaimed klezmer clarinetist, in Little Italy, Cleveland.  He looked more Italian than the locals.  Statman, an Orthodox Jew, wore a Borsalino hat.

I knew the restaurant owner, Robert.  He once took me to mobster Jack White’s house to see White’s wine cellar.  White was a little old man, and the last head of the Cleveland Mob.  Real name: James Licavoli.

Cleveland loved its mobsters. . . a couple cool names: Shondor Birns, Mushy Wexler. They’re history.

Statman said you can only play your hometown once a year.  He does one big show in New York per year.  (He plays a lot of little shows, like every Monday night at a New York shul.)

Yiddishe Cup’s big show is Cain Park, Sunday June 28.  Cain Park, that’s where all the great Cleveland tennis players used to hang out.  Some still do.  Next to the courts, there’s a WPA amphitheater that seats 2,400.

Yiddishe Cup will have a couple guests on the bill: Shawn Fink and Gerald Ross.

Even though Shawn is a baby (30-something), he knows a bisl (little) Yiddish.  Shawn’s father, Phil,  has done a Jewish radio show for more than 40 years.  Shawn sings a dead-on version of  “Joe and Paul,” a comedy tune about a Jewish radio station.

The second guest, Gerald Ross, is a well-known ukulele and Hawaiian lap steel guitar player from Ann Arbor, Mich.  He’ll, no doubt, wear a Hawaiian shirt.  In fact the whole band will wear Hawaiian shirts.  Why?  Because we’re going to a Yiddish luau. And according to the Cleveland Scene, “It doesn’t get more festive than Jews in Hawaiian shirts.”
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Hear Klezmer Guy interviewed on public radio today, 6/24, at noon.  Dee Perry’s  “Around Noon” on WCPN-FM 90.3.

Read in today’s Cleveland Scene about Yiddish Cup’s new CD, Klezmer Guy.  By Anastasia Pantsios.

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The only advice I ever gave Yiddishe Cup’s drummer, Don Friedman, was buy the roasted, milled flax seed with blueberries at Trader Joe’s.

I don’t tell him how to play drums.

Our keyboard player, Alan Douglass, tells our drummer how to play.  In fact Alan tells everybody how to play.  Good, somebody has to do it.

Except some guys don’t like being told how to play.

Me, I’m open to constructive criticism.

Danny Rubenstein, the legendary klezmer clarinetist, told me I play with “a lot of guts but little technique.”  I’m OK with that.  Beats the alternative.

I like wailing.  I like Kramtweiss and Brandwein — big wailers.  (Kramtweiss and Brandwein recorded in the 1920s.)  But the older I get, the more I prefer Tarras — Mr. Subtle, Mr. Refined.  Dave Tarras (1897-1989) was the Sinatra of klez.

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What’s the most important element at a wedding?

Maybe not the band.

After the party, guests often can’t recall if they saw a live band or a DJ.

How many pieces in the band? No idea.

Guests attend parties primarily to schmooze. They dance a bit, they drink a little, they eat a lot, and they talk — to friends, relatives.

Loud music . . . the bane of all parties. I was at a family bar mitzvah in Chicago where everybody went into the atrium to talk. The DJ was blasting it.

I have a case of earplugs, 50 of them. Got them in Orrville, Ohio, home of Smucker’s.

I didn’t like the earplugs I was getting at CVS; they’d pop out of my ears because the plugs were too big. The earplugs from Orrville, they’re jelly.

I use orange marmalade.

(The earplugs are actually tiny orange inserts.)

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I’ve sent out two versions of Yiddishe Cup on a single night.  Not often.  It’s hardly worth the logistical contortions: Yiddishe Cup does mitosis.  I name the groups the A Band and the B Band.

Probably should go with the red unit and blue unit, like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey does, so there are no bruised egos.  I’m fortunate, I  always wind up in the A band.

I tell my customers up front what the story is.  I say, “We’re  booked but if you really want us I might be able to pull it off.”   Then I try to steer them to another band, but if they keep insisting, I’ll do the B Band routine.

I didn’t try the A and  B band maneuver until I was 15 years into the biz and had a full stable of subs who knew the Yiddishe Cup Method.

Repeat:  Don’t play the A/B game without being very experienced and upfront.  If you’re a liar, you’ll encounter what the New York boys call a “screamer” gig.  That’s when the mom is screaming, “Where’s your bandleader?  I didn’t hire this band!”

When we do A/B gigs, “Stratton” is at both gigs.  The B Band is led by Alice Stratton, my wife, an expert dance leader.

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There are two kinds of musical chairs: the party game, and when tenants move from suite to suite within the same apartment building.

Typically, the tenant wants to step up from an efficiency (studio) to a one bedroom.  If you don’t let her, she’ll move out of the building entirely.  But if you do let her move across the hall, you have to decorate two apartments — the one she’s moving out of, and the one she’s moving into.

Do it.  Better than losing her.

And make sure the security deposit is brought up to the new rent level.  You never know, she could go ape-wire with new wall colors.  You can paint with neutral colors has many interpretations.  Tenants will not willingly use antique white.

I had one tenant who moved across the hall and left behind a pile of pizza boxes with maggots all over his pepperoni.  Luckily his new unit was close enough we had leverage to get him to clean up the old place.

Musical chairs — the bar mitzvah variety— is fun.  If you’re doing a job — any job, no matter how lowly, do it . . . blah, blah.  Yes, we’re glorified baby sitters, but we’re good glorified baby sitters.

For musical chairs we play everything from “Wipe Out” to “Moshe Emet” (Moses Told the Truth).  We try to rig the game so the bat mitzvah girl can win. Never stop the music when the kid is rounding a corner.

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Yiddishe Cup’s violinist, Steve Ostrow, is in the union.  That’s because he’s in the Akron Symphony as well.

Cleveland Local 4 was big about the time hotel dance bands were big.

My other favorite union member is Karl Zahtilla, who has subbed a few times with Yiddishe Cup. He hung around with Chet Baker in L.A.  Karl plays jazz clarinet better than anybody else in town.

He used to play all the shows at the Hanna Theatre, the Front Row, Playhouse Square, and a lot of private parties.  He knows the Jewish stuff.  He played Orthodox gigs for years.

Karl grew up when clarinet was still a dominant instrument in popular culture.  Nice timing.

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I’ve been in the rag trade for 17 years, selling Yiddishe Cup T-shirts.  Black tees with the band’s logo superimposed in white.

East Coasters buy the tees just for the look.  Yiddishe Cup, the band?  Feh.  The T-shirt?  Cool.

The tee is a limited edition.  Probably about 750 of them in the world.  I don’t advertise.

You have to be invited to wear one.

Sometimes I get a photo from, say, Mount St. Helens, Wash., of a man in a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt.  I played his wedding.  Or a photo of a Missoula, Mont., man wearing a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt on a cattle ranch.

I give the T-shirts to newlyweds and bar mitzvah moms.  Or the bat mitzvah kid, herself, if I think she’s woman enough to handle the impending peer harassment.

I saw a young man on Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, in a Yiddishe Cup T-shirt, with black jeans. Was this hip kid a Cuphead?  I asked him where he got the tee.  He said at a thrift store for $1.  He had never heard of the band.

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The Red Roof Inn is the band’s official hotel.

The worst one is in Southfield, Mich.  The smoke detector was ripped out and a guy was already in the room.  A greeter?  Joe Louis?

The wake-up call the next morning never happened.  The cops raided a nearby suite, so we really didn’t need the wake-up.

The band’s favorite restaurant is Bob Evans. The man himself, Bob Evans, died a couple years ago. I had my picture taken with him in Rio Grande, Ohio.  (Also, had my pic taken with actor/singer Theodore Bikel at KlezKanada. That didn’t kill Bikel.)  At Bob Evans, order the potato-crusted flounder, coleslaw and biscuits.

The Waffle House — that was a mechaya (pleasure) for a while-a.   I told Steve Ostrow, Yiddishe Cup’s vegetarian trombone player, the brown strips in his omelet were mushrooms. (They looked like mushrooms.)  Turned out to be steak.  We haven’t been back to Awful House. I miss the home fries with onions.

Here’s another band favorite: The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.  A woman—all decked out in Northwestern purple — said she would put us on the school’s Web site (Rabbinic Management Program page) if we did an original song while wearing purple shirts.  She saw us at a gig in Florida and is married to the dean emeritus of Kellogg, so maybe . . .

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A couple of my musicians freaked out when a critic called Yiddishe Cup’s first CD “schizophrenic.”  (Or was it the second, third, or fourth CD?)  The reviewer, who said a ton of nice stuff, said we were schizophrenic because we attempted so many different styles.

That’s all the band members could think about: we’re schizos.

You need the skin of a rhino to be a performer.

I mean, I’ve had two death threats in the real estate biz.  That bothered me. “I’ve got a gun” stuff.  One guy was pissed because I was a Jewboy born with a silver spoon in my mouth.  (He didn’t say “mouth.”)  The other guy was just pissed — pissed at everybody.  Tenants hate landlords.  We know that.  You need the skin of a rhino.

Everybody has an opinion. Particularly in the arts.   If you don’t have one, here are a couple:

The quickest way to knee-cap a jazz group: “They don’t swing.”

A blues band: “No soul.”

A klezmer band: “Dorks in vests.”

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Yiddishe Cup’s singer, Irwin Weinberger, wrote a sweetly nostalgic song about attending baseball games with his father, who was a Holocaust survivor.  Irwin even mentioned The Rock in the song: Rocky Colavito.  (Next up, a song about Harvey Kuenn for the Detroit market.)

Nowadays Irwin is laissez-faire on sports — unless the Indians get hot again.

Guys are supposed to talk about sports, and drink when they get together.  I know this isn’t always a fact.  One Yiddishe Cup musician calls sports a “cult.”  This musician is proud he doesn’t know a thing about pro sports.

The whole town went ape-wire over the Cleveland Cavaliers. He didn’t care.

Some of the other guys did.

The previous time Yiddishe Cup was sports batty was 1997, when the Indians were in the World Series, and Yiddishe Cup was playing Simchat Torah gigs.  (Goys: Simchat Torah is right after Succot.)  We hid in the temple’s cloak room and caught bits of the action on a small portable TV.

Yiddishe Cup is not sports adverse. Yiddishe Cup plays a variety of fight songs, including The Yiddishe Cup Fight Song, which is a major-key freylekhs (hora) interspersed with the verbal chants of  “Go Cup Go” and  “De-feat Maxwell Street.”  Maxwell Street, from Chicago, is our archrival.  They probably don’t know that.

Here are other fight songs you need to know in our part of the Midwest:

1. Ohio State.  Use “Hang On Sloopy” or “Fight The Team Across the Field.”  Sometimes we hold off on “Hang On Sloopy” until the Buckeyes score.  That’s the protocol.  Be aware of this if a guest is listening to the game at a gig.  If you play “Hang on Sloopy” before the Bucks score, it’s bad luck.

2. Michigan’s “The Victors” is a biggie. This tune is one of the most insipid tunes of all time.  Or greatest — depending.

Other requests: Michigan State, “On Wisconsin,” and the Pitt fight song, which is not the same as the Steelers’ song.

Forget about Notre Dame unless they get a Jewish quarterback again.

Be flexible.  For instance, Yiddishe Cup knows “Are You From Wooster?”:

If you’re from Oberlin or Denison or Wesleyan U.,

The Scots will take good care of you before they’re through.

Wooster has many international students and a lively Hillel.  Check out The COW (The College of Wooster) with your 16 year old.  Great school.  Yiddishe Cup has played there a half dozen times.

Another good, small Ohio school is Kenyon, which Yiddishe Cup has played a few times.   Kenyon has a Medieval dining hall out of Hogwarts.  The school’s swim team dines there wearing big purple capes and eats tons of priceless food.  Swipe that college ID card.  Free food to students, $50,000 to Dad and Mom.
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Tomorrow:
DOUBLE PORTION OF MANNA . . . Bandleaders’ pay.

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Some music school grads are prima donnas. The worst are violinists.  They’re very concerned about intonation.  When I played in a trio with a couple Cleveland Orchestra members, I kept a tuner on my music stand the whole time.  I tuned each note as I played.  I was scared.

What’s a little intonation problem if you’re playing klezmer music?  None.

These music school grads, they put in 10,000 hours in little practice rooms and want some respect for their prison time.

In Yiddishe Cup we occasionally get into squabbles on the bandstand about intonation, but nobody bugs me about being flat or sharp because I’m writing the checks.
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Shabbat shalom
Tomorrow:
HOLD THE SUNRISE . . . If you play “Sunrise,” you’re sunset.

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I always read the seating placards at parties. I’m there first, so I know everybody’s names – all my old customers.  “Jon and Carol [Weinstein], how are you?” . . . I played your son’s bar mitzvah a million years ago and remember your names.

Also, I  write down the bride and groom’s names before I  introduce them.  That way I’m less likely to screw up.  I’ve never messed up, but once a guy in my band did.  He called the bride Mindy instead of Michelle, or something like that.  To remedy the situation he called out the tune “Michelle.”  The bride — named Michelle — made him stop the music cold.  She hated that song.

Volatile songs: “Sunrise Sunset” and “YMCA.” Songs from Fiddler on the Roof make some Jews nervous.  (Russian Jews love Fiddler; American Jews — at least klezmer aficionados — often hate it.  They think it’s not the real thing.  Hey, it’s been around 45 years.  It’s old-time music.)
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Tomorrow:
JEW OR NOT A JEW? . . . Puerto Rican Lesbian cage-fighting barber.

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Jazz improvisation is fun to do and not fun to watch.  I’ve taken four-minute solos and wondered if anybody was still alive afterward.

The good thing about klezmer is there isn’t much room for long solo flights.

Most of the guys in the band can play in any key at any time.  Not me.  That’s why I’m the leader.  Then again, most musicians don’t know how to negotiate.  I do.  I think my whole adult life has been one big negotiation.

I have sat at the negotiating table with wildlife. Years ago I played avant-garde sax licks in the Rocky Mountains for birds.  “Avant-garde” because I didn’t know what I was doing.  You blast an alto from mountaintop to mountaintop, and you feel like Joshua with a shofar.

Consider your audience.  I jammed on the first few notes of “Hatikvah.”  It’s natural minor.

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Shabbat shalom
Tomorrow:
I AM NOT BOB FELLER . . . Signing autographs at a concert.

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And as the rabbi danced . . . not always.   (That’s a song lyric: “And as the rabbi danced . . .”)

And if the rabbi dances, the congregants will.   If he doesn’t dance, nobody dances.

At a private party — bar mitzvah or wedding — if the immediate family doesn’t dance, nobody dances.

We have our trade secrets — ways to motivate people to dance, though.  We play Fiddler on the Roof music; the guests stand up, sway side to side, link arms; and then we speed up the music.  And we have a shtickmeister, dance leader Daniel Ducoff , also known as Sir Dance-a-lot.   (He goes by many names. He also has a variety of business cards and eyeglass frames.)

Yiddishe Cup was possibly the first klezmer band to have a dedicated dance leader.  Daniel plays the duck whistle and that’s about it.  He dances.

Daniel leads a lot of  wild-and-crazy dance sets.

It’s not hard. We run into people who are in good moods.

Then again, in the band biz, the party always ends.  And I’m reduced to discussing fender dents with the band’s van rental guy.  Daily slice-of-life stuff.  Not all glamour.

The glamour . . . I tell locals we play out of town.  Oh really?  You mean you go to Columbus? Yes . . . and Texas and Florida and New York City.   Some day, kayn eyn-ore (no evil eye), we’ll play Australia.  And don’t forget we’ve played Canada.  The internationally acclaimed Yiddishe Cup.

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Tomorrow:

STINKY, STAINED FOAM . . . What tenants leave behind.

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