Real Music & Real Estate . . .

My father told me that when he graduated college in 1938, he wanted a job — any job.

I, on the other hand, wanted “meaningful work” when I graduated in 1973.  “Meaningful work” was a popular term then.  I first heard it from Lawrence Kasdan, the Big Chill director.

I tried being a bricklayer.  A “brickie.”  I got a joiner, mortar and mason’s trowel.  I knew another Jewish bricklayer, who talked up the profession.

My father said incredulously, “You want to work with your hands?”

Just a thought, Dad. I learned a bit about roofs, radiators and hot water tanks.

Whenever my father had tools in his hand — which was rare — he was often loud and profane.

It’s not innate — Jews swearing with tools.  I know a couple Jewish car mechanics and Jewish fix-it guys.  It’s all about how you were raised.  My dad gave me arithmetic workbooks in elementary school.  For fun, I plotted graphs.  In high school I got fast on the abacus.

If you want a number, see me.  Here’s one: the rent on apt. 1 at 1409 Marlowe Avenue was $80 in 1965.  Now it’s $525.  The rent has approximately kept pace with inflation. Eighty dollars in 1965 is $540 now.
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2 of 2 posts for 1/13/10

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Yiddishe Cup’s biggest fan is Lea Grossman.

She got us a gig at The Ark, the premier acoustic music club in the Midwest.  She kugel-ed The Ark’s program director.  She delivered a noodle kugel to his office in Ann Arbor, Mich.  He liked it and he hired us.  (Hopefully our music had something to do with the booking too.)

I had been avoiding Ann Arbor.  I had attended college there during the hippie era and hadn’t learned much.  There had been a quasi-ban on book learning.  The foreign language requirement had been oppressive, according to protestors, and the Psych teaching assistants led T-Groups and gave everyone A’s.  Until I signed up. Then it went to pass/fail.

When my kids started looking at colleges, I told them Michigan was a swamp.  Too big, too impersonal.

I even rooted for Ohio State over Michigan.  I harbored some serious animosity toward the Blue. I told Michigan to stop sending me alumni mail.  But for $75 I hedged and sent a donation every year.  You never knew.

Thanks to Yiddishe Cup super-fan Lea Grossman, I wound up back at Michigan big-time.  Lea is 60-something but gets around like a coed, and she promoted our band to everybody and helped put signs on every phone pole.  The woman can dance, party and cook.  She knows every Jewish dance, and has sung “Tumbalalaika” on stage with Yiddishe Cup at The Ark.

Lea lived near North Campus in a university-affiliated retirement community.  It was like a dorm for seniors — real seniors.  North Campus — the last time I had been there — had been a music school, a smattering of grad student housing, and one undergraduate dorm.  It had been the end of the earth.  You had to take a bus to get there.  (Still do.)  The dorm was called Bursley, as in “brrr, it’s cold.”

For Yiddishe Cup’s first Ark appearance, I picked January.  Not too many rational Clevelanders scheduled weddings in January, so we had an opening.

Ann Arbor’s weather was just like Cleveland’s.  Bad.  And we got a huge crowd at the club.  That was weird.  The difference between Cleveland and Ann Arbor was Michigan had a puffy coat brigade. The worse the weather, the more the puffy coaters came out.  It was almost an Upper Midwest can-do chic — like something from the Progressive Era — a bunch of irregular Jews in irregular puffy coats.

On our first Ark gig, my youngest son stayed in the North Campus dorm, Bursley.  He was in eleventh grade.  (He also played drums on the gig.)

He liked the school and wound up at Michigan.

So I returned to the swamp– to see my son, and play gigs.  (My other kids went to small liberal arts colleges.)

I couldn’t get the Michigan Daily to write up Yiddishe Cup.  Ever.  I tried. The reporters wouldn’t return calls.  Maybe they weren’t too crazy about talking to a middle-aged klezmer guy.

When I had been a Daily reporter, I had enjoyed the John Lennon and Miles Davis assignments but not the local-angle profiles, like when I wrote up the Discount Records clerk who played sax.  (That sax player, Steve Mackay, was good, and cut some records with the Stooges later.)

Lea didn’t know who to kugel at the Daily; the Daily reporters were always rotating in and out.  They missed a good dish. 

Lea moved to New Jersey a year ago.

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“To Kugel,” this post,  first appeared in the Washtenaw (Ann Arbor, Mich.) Jewish News, Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010.
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Check out the new video clip “Driving Mr. Klezmer,” live from The Challah Fame Cafe. The Klezmer Guy blog exits the loch (your computer).  Klezmer Guy walks and talks.  Rated scary.
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Yiddishe Cup plays The Ark, Ann Arbor, Mich., 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 23.   Guests include Hawaiian guitarist Gerald Ross, comedian Seymour Posner, and members of the soul/klez band Groove Spoon.

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Musicians probably get more ego satisfaction in one evening than most people do in a year.

When I don’t have a weekend gig, I drift around the house like a guy in rehab.  Where are my cigs?  My booze?  Where’s my heroin?  Do you want to see a movie? No, I want to make a movie.  A concert? Man, I’d rather be playing.

Music is different than the more solitary arts, like writing and painting.  When I’m on stage, the audience thinks I’ve got the answer.

Music is laying on of hands.  You ever try laying on of hands one-on-one, like with writing and painting?  It’s hard.  The best way to do laying on of hands is in large crowds, like the evangelical preachers do.

Street festivals, family parties, concerts . . . all mass feel-good sessions.  Humans like hubbub. Noise is life. Deaf people like music.

In writing and painting, you’re in the library.  Shush.

There is no minor league for writers and painters unless you count academia. 

There is a Triple A league for musicians.  Beyonce can’t be in every concert hall, night club and private party at once.  I’ve subbed for Beyonce.

Who spiked my heroin?
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2 of 2 posts for 12/30/09

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I sometimes get rent envelopes with flakes of floor varnish inside.  Tenants also occasionally send dead bugs.  Sometimes they send poems.  The most common enclosure is a Post-It stating “the bank has screwed up my bank account again,” and that’s why there’s only half a month’s rent.

One tenant sent me a padded mailer stamped FRAGILE.

I held that package at arm’s length, pulled the ripcord, and thought about the Unabomber.

Tick tock.  There was a watch inside.  It was a chromatic watch; the face had C-C#-D-D# instead of numbers.

The tenant wrote he really appreciated his apartment and said his dad owned the Chromatic Watch Company.  I could also get a watch with Circle of 4ths or Circle of 5ths if I wanted.

I dropped off two Yiddishe Cup CDs at the tenant’s door as a thank-you.

I used to give all the tenants gifts. It was a hassle and expensive.  I gave everybody a box of Malley’s chocolates at Christmas.  We would make sure the tenant was home; we didn’t just put the candy by the door; somebody might steal it.

I gave up on it.  The candy man routine was costing me about $1,000/year.  Very few people were thanking me.

Also, I used to take the building managers to Miller’s Dining Room for dinner.  Then Miller’s burned down.

We tried an Italian place after that. It wasn’t the same.  Miller’s was the gentile response to Corky & Lenny’s deli.  The seasoned waitresses at Miller’s circulated with huge platters of sticky buns, corn sticks and muffins.  No pickles. My building managers — who were all older than me then — really like the small-town Ohio vibe.  The favorite main dish was chicken a la king.

I would thank the managers on behalf of my family, including my dad, who was usually in Florida that time of year.

Maybe I should do those dinners again.

I probably won’t.  Now I’m older than most of the managers.  The younger custodians like the cold cash.

Miller’s was fun.  The young people would have liked the sticky buns.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/23/09.  Please see the post below too.

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 Most artists prefer to practice and wait for the phone to ring.

When I started out in klez, a Cleveland Irish musician, Dermot Somerville, told me: “You need to remind people you’re alive at least every six months.”

I do — X 26. As you know.

Yiddishe Cup is one of the most popular klezmer bands, because:

(1.) We’re good.

(2.) We promote ourselves.

I learned item #2 , and the chutzpah to say item #1, from my dad, who was not a WASP-modest George “Poppy” Bush kind of guy. My father said if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody will.  When my father was at the hospital dying of leukemia, he told the doctor, “I own this place.”  My dad owned a Cleveland Clinic municipal bond.

I used to be shy.  So was my father.  He took a Dale Carnegie course on public speaking.   In my twenties, I was still shy; I heard a West Side hardware store owner say “jew down,” and it took me 20 minutes to sputter, “Bob, you know I’m Jewish.”  (My family spent about $500 a month in that store. I figured Bob would be open to my viewpoint.)

Bob didn’t know “jew down” had anything to do with real Jews.  He apologized.  He was a decent guy.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/23/09

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I liked KlezKamp, the klezmer convention, because it wasn’t just Mahjong Jews.  (Mahjong Jews don’t camp and, for that matter, can’t imagine camping.)

KlezKamp, in its first years, was in a ratty old Catskills hotel.  Going there was like camping indoors. Many bathrooms had plungers.  Heat was erratic.  The halls smelled of disinfectant.

Most of the male campers looked like they had just crawled out of sleeping bags.  They looked like Abbie Hoffman or Eugene Levy.  No other choices.  These guys were professors, shrinks, music students and Jewish hippie farmers from New England.

Four-hundred twenty-five people, total — half of whom were musicians.  Twenty clarinet players in one room.  We had to audition.  Sid Beckerman, musician and clarinet arbiter, had rachmones (pity) on us.  Everybody sounded “nice” to Sid.  I wound up in mid-level.

I took clarinet classes, and also heard a professor named Brown, from Brown, talk about Brown’s, the resort.  I heard Leon Schwartz, a legendary violinist, reminisce about gypsies.  He said the gypsies in his Bukovina village had had it worse than the Jews.  “The Jews had the stores,” he said.

I went to KlezKamp for more than a decade.

At first I couldn’t get my wife, Alice, to go.  We had young kids.

One year I took the two oldest kids and went without her.  I spent a lot of time in the game room and swimming pool that year.  That chlorine vat/pool was slightly bigger than a half dollar.  You had to coat yourself with skin conditioner or get a rash.  Thankfully, several lesbian musicians helped me with the babysitting.

The kids and I went to New York City afterward.  My daughter,
then 5, made me carry her everywhere.  We weren’t going too far.  We went to Popeye’s on Times Square for dinner.

When we returned home to Cleveland, my wife said at the doorway, “The kids look anemic!”

But we had beans and rice and lemonade at Popeye’s, Alice.  (The kids hadn’t been too crazy about the borscht and herring at KlezKamp.)

Alice never trusted me with food vis-a -vis the kids.

So the following year she came with us.  All five of us.  Alice was a folk dancer and exercise nut; however, Jews at klezmer conventions think exercise is something in an etude book.  Alice found an indoor tennis court which was so dusty the balls turned black after one set.  It was like playing in a parking garage.  We went skiing on Christmas.  I thought the slopes would be empty.  No, a lot of Asians and Jews from New York City were there.

We sneaked over to The Pines resort for ice skating.  That place was a staging area for the Mahjong Jew takeover of the world.  We had a good time.  There were interesting trivia games in the lobby.   I’ve got nothing against middle-class Jews.  I am one 51 weeks out of the year.

My family kept going back to KlezKamp.  Every Christmas.  Ikh khulem fun a vaysn nitl.  (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.)  And every year Alice would complain: “I can’t believe we’re going to KlezKamp again!”

Finally, after 12 years, the brainwashing was complete; the kids knew more Yiddish than just oy vey (woe is me) and farklempt (choked up); and Alice could have, by then, taught the dance classes.  And I had met all the old klez guys: Max Epstein, Felix Fibich, Danny Rubenstein, Velvel “Billy” Pasternak . . .

Attention must be paid.  Mas . . . Paul Pincus, Leon Schwartz, Ray Musiker, Ben Bazyler, Sid Beckerman, German “That’s Herman in Russian” Goldenshteyn, Howie Leess, Elaine Hoffman Watts.

The majority are now dead.

I had paid my dues — family-rate.

And I was through auditioning.

KlezKamp’s 25th encampment is next week.  Did you know Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader, Daniel Ducoff, was at the first KlezKamp, 1985?  Less than 100 people were there.  They planned to take over the (klezmer) world, and they did.

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Great Yiddishe Cup non-gigs:

The Shrine to American Music, Vermillion, North Dakota
New York Mills (Minn.) Regional Cultural Center
Southern Cross International Music Festival, Brisbane, Australia
Austin (Tex.) JCC, Israel Independence Day celebration
Klezmer Festival, Fuerth, Germany
Jewish Music Festival, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

All of them were close calls.

Maybe we came in second.

Second stinks.  For example, when 30 clarinetists audition for the Kansas City Symphony, 29 clarinetists get to add “finalist” to their resumes.

Australia . . . That would have looked good in our obits.

Nobody — anywhere — does what Yiddishe Cup does: play wacky klezmer comedy.

We get around.  We’ve  been to Texas three times, Florida four times, Missouri nine times.

We’ve played abroad twice. The first time was New York City. That’s a foreign country.  The Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts.  The Jews in New York understood our Catskills parodies better than we did.

The second time abroad . . . Windsor, Canada.   (Quiz:  What foreign country would you reach first if you drove due south from Detroit?  The answer: Canada.  Windsor is south of Detroit.)

For our Australian non-gig, I dealt with a contemporary composer/professor, Ralph.  His children knew most of Yiddishe Cup’s funny lyrics.

I wondered if Yiddishe Cup’s synthesizer would work with the electrical system in Australia.  And should I purchase the airplane tickets, or have Ralph do it?  He might route us through Greenland.  The bigger question:  Would Ralph’s university have the money to bring us over?

Ralph didn’t have the money.

Chanukah in Jackson Hole, WY. That was the subject line of an email I recently got. I almost spammed it.

In the email’s text, a Wyoming rabbi asked Yiddishe Cup about doing a three-day Chanukah bash at three ski hotels.  I immediately called the rabbi, gave him a fair price, and he didn’t hang up.  In fact, he was enthusiastic.

I told the Yiddishe Cup musicians the Wyoming gig was 49 percent likely.

Our singer said, “Forty-nine percent?  That means you think it’s not going to happen.”

“Correct.”

Forty-nine percent is the street corner where optimism meets realism.

We didn’t get the gig. The rabbi hired another band, he wrote me.  I wonder who.

I just Googled the Wyoming event . . .

. . . The Ruby Harris band.  I’ve vaguely heard of Ruby Harris.  I think Ruby is a singer from San Francisco.

I understand. A California band is cheaper to fly to Wyoming than a Cleveland band.

News flash: Ruby is a guy — a violinist from the Midwest!  I went to his Web site.  Chicago.  That’s around the block from Cleveland!  Why him and not us?  He plays klez and blues.  So do we!  “Yiddishe Blues” is a tune on our latest album.

Check out the black diamond ski trails, Ruby.

Break a leg.

. . . Deep breath. Rewrite:

Happy Chanukah.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/9/09.  Please see the post below too.

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We sprayed a tenant’s suite for cockroaches, and it didn’t work.  The tenant wrote a letter demanding we do it again, and if we didn’t, she would put her rent in escrow.  She worked at a law office.

We sprayed again.  Then we sprayed the whole building.  About a thousand dollars’ worth of spray.

She still had bugs.  So she called the city building department, which sent out its newest, most gung-ho inspector, who decided we needed to point the chimney and plane the boiler-room door in the basement, and fix up everything in between.

Then she complained again.

So we brought in our cockroach “bomber” guy, who zapped her apartment, including a direct hit on her coffee maker. A dozen cockroaches scampered out.  She had gotten a used coffee maker from her boyfriend.

That roach-infested coffee maker set me back $2,000.

I planned not to renew her lease, but she told me she was not renewing her lease before I could tell her I was not renewing her lease.

That bugged me.  Her boyfriend annoyed me too.  As did her 20-pound bond, legal stationery.  She wasn’t even a lawyer.

On move-out day, she and her boyfriend put the mattress and air conditioner on the treelawn.  I had to move the items to the dumpster.  Mattress moving is seriocomic wrestling; A/C pick up is clean and jerk.  And I didn’t deduct anything from her deposit.

She was OK.  Her only major negative: that she had dropped a dime (X 20,000) on me.

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Treelawn, two paragraphs above, is Cleveland talk for the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk.  Odder:  Akronites — Akron, Ohio, residents — call the treelawn the devil strip.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/9/09

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Goys and many highly assimilated Jews think Yiddishe Cup plays primarily for Orthodox Jews.  Not true.  We play mostly for non-Orthodox Jews.

But we do play the occasional Orthodox Jewish gig.

Some of these gigs go NYC-style, fast-talking, cell-phones-beeping-everywhere frenetic.  You’re in Israel but without the jet lag.

We play mostly OrthoRock tunes at Orthodox affairs.  OrthoRock isn’t klezmer.  It’s rock with liturgical lyrics.  A classic OrthoRock tune is “Moshiach” (Messiah).  Another is “Chazak” (Strength).  These two tunes — plus a hundred others, some of which are popular only for a month or so– are the standard OJ (Orthodox Jewish) repertoire.  Yiddishe Cup doesn’t learn the new tunes frequently enough.  (We don’t get many OJ gigs either.)

The Orthodox families who hire Yiddishe Cup are typically left-wing Orthodox.  Left-wing, here, means on the liberal end of ritual observance.  The client might request, for instance, American rock and roll toward the end of the party.

Yiddishe Cup’s most right-wing gig was for the get (divorce decree) rabbi.  We played a Purim tish (table gathering) at his house.  All black hats and beards.  The rabbi’s drosh (speech on a liturgical text) was in Yiddish.

My Conservative rabbi, when he heard about the get gig, couldn’t believe I’d been in the get rabbi’s house.  He had never been in there.

Yiddishe Cup knows the rabbis the rabbis don’t.

Cleveland is large enough that Jewish denominations typically don’t party and pray together.  If you want a mishmash of Jews in the same room, go to a smaller town, like Akron, Ohio.   In Akron, the Orthodox and non-Orthodox will mix it up.  It’s a matter of survival.  Small numbers.  You’ll see every kind of Jew but Jews for Jesus at an Akron Jewish gathering.

Musicians, take note: Don’t play “Hava Nagila” at an Orthodox simcha (celebration). Too goyish.   Nevertheless, at one Orthodox wedding, the mom’s sister repeatedly requested “Hava Nagila.”  I said no.  Then some yeshiva buchers (students) from New York asked me for the song.  I said, “Are you trying to embarrass the band?”

“No, we heard you’re a klezmer band and we’d like to hear it.”

The mom didn’t want it.  Again, the mom’s sister said play it.  Again, the buchers said play it.  The mom finally relented.  We played it.

The buchers danced with ruach (spirit) to the tune.  “Hava Nagila” is originally a Hasidic nign (wordless melody) from Hungary.  It’s a great tune.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/2/09.  Please see the next post too.

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Downtown Detroit has a lot of detour signs.  Just when you think you’re heading back to Ohio, you’re not.  You’re on your way to Detroit Metro airport and points west.

Don’t play for peanuts in Detroit.  You’ll feel like a fool if you’re lost and underpaid at two in the morning.

In Yiddishe Cup’s van, each musician has an assigned role. Our drummer is in charge of windshield fluid levels.  He’s big on that.  Our dance leader supplies the bottled water. Our keyboard player loads the van; he knows the secret order of the gear.  We like to watch.

Van life smells.  It reeks of six guys in a metal container, topped with a cherry-scented spray, courtesy of the van rental company.

One Yiddishe Cup musician plays his iPod so loudly there is aural seepage.  Not everybody is into Bob Dylan’s basement tapes.  The icing: scents from Krispy Kremes and Cinnabuns.  Our driver eats that stuff like he’s on death row.

The bandleader’s job is to monitor the musicians’ word output.  Everyone has a certain quota of words for the day, and after he has used that, he should shut up and read, according to the van guard.

Luckily, nobody in Yiddishe Cup is a motor mouth.  Really, nobody wants to hear about your stock portfolio, your computer, your illness, your day-job boss, for too long.  Only exceed your word quota for safety reasons, like if the driver might fall asleep from drowsiness.

That, unfortunately, is a possibility. You know how boring it is to drive I-71 to Columbus, or the Ohio Turnpike to Detroit?

Little known fact: you can get lox and bagel at milepost 100 on the Ohio Turnpike.

Don’t.

Yiddishe Cup’s worst milepost ever: 213, on I-71 near Medina, Ohio.  We had a flat tire and waited for a tow truck at 3 a.m.  Our drummer kept repeating, “Here comes a truck with lights on top.”

I said, “Most trucks have lights.”

The tow truck was a heavy-duty model — especially equipped for jacking up vans — and it arrived very late.

I had a lot of time to replay our night’s gig, a Columbus bat mitzvah.  After the hora, the mom had said, “It wasn’t a freylekhs!”  [Hora.] And I had said, “It wasn’t Latin music!”  Apparently, she had wanted to be lifted in a chair, and I had cut the music before.  I wasn’t clairvoyant.

Bat mitzvah moms don’t always goes up on chairs.  Maybe half the time.
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1 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

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Terry wanted to sell Notre Dame paraphernalia from an empty store I had across from St. James Church.  He had just come back from South Bend, Ind., with a carload of merchandise.  [Terry isn’t his real name.]

He sang in two church choirs, knew the bishop, and knew the town’s development director, Kelly.  He knew the mayor too, FitzGerald.   And probably knew the former building director, Fitzgerald.

Terry wanted the rent lowered.

I couldn’t figure out if he had any money.

He kept talking choirs.  He sang in two — St. Ignatius and St. Malachi.  That wasn’t money.

I told him my building manager sang in a choir too — a Ukrainian one. “Call the manager to see the inside of the store,” I said. “He lives in an apartment right above the store.”

“You own the apartments above too?” Terry said.  “I’m looking for a place.”

That was a bad.  Maybe Terry’s car trunk had all his worldly possessions, plus the Notre Dame gear.

I told him I had a vacancy upstairs. “Too bad about Notre Dame’s final twenty-two seconds against Michigan,” I said.

He didn’t want to talk football.  I couldn’t blame him . . . Michigan and Notre Dame.

Terry didn’t rent — the store or the apartment.

I’ve only had a couple commercial tenants who also lived in the building.  I had a photographer who lived in the basement of his shop.  That was free living quarters. The photographer installed a dishwasher, stall shower and kitchen.   He was down there for decades, and the city never looked.  That photographer should have had a bumpsticker: “Thank God I’m a Morlock.”  (In the 1980s, ethnic bumperstickers were a fad in Cleveland. “Thank God I’m Slovenian” was the most popular, I think.  “Thank God I’m Jewish” was special order.)

I had a barber who lived over her store.  She paid extra.  Her store had a window sign: “Fighter Chick Parking Only.”  She was a lesbian Puerto Rican cage fighter who got along with everybody.  (She’s still there, but doesn’t live in the apartment.)

I had a Chinese tenant who lived beneath his meditation and “healing arts” studio.  He lasted 10 years.  (He didn’t live under the store all those years.  Only after his divorce.)   If you develop a following, you can make it in a business like healing.  Yoga is another field like that.  Charisma-driven.  I have a yoga store that seems to be doing well.  The owner is very outgoing.

I had a tenant who re-sold children’s toys.  She left me a basement of orphaned Fisher-Price kids.  A whole basement: the kids, plus broken schoolhouses, gas stations and school buses.  Also, Little Tykes picnic tables and Big Wheels.  I wish she had left a Fisher-Price dump truck.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

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When I was growing up, saying “Jewish music” was like  “Jewish cars.”   Didn’t mean a thing.

On second thought, “Jewish cars” did mean something.  It meant, for example, the Boat — an Olds 98 owned by my friend Mark’s father.  The Boat had electric windows and was oceanic.  (Mark was richer than the rest of us, I think.  He lived by Cedar and Green roads, and his doorbell lit up.)

Years later, a West Side gentile called those humongous Detroit rides “Jew boats.”   So maybe there were Jewish cars.

Re: Jewish music . . .

I learned about that at the house of another high school friend, Shelly Gordon.  His parents knew Israeli and Yiddish music, cold.   Shelly was rarely home.  I was an adult when I got interested in Jewish music, and Shelly had already moved to Israel.  (His parents were such impassioned Zionists most of the family wound up in Israel.)

Shelly’s parents were Labor Zionists (Poale Zion).  They seemed to know every classic Israeli tune and how to dance and/or sing it.  And the  Gordon family  attended a Yiddish camp in Michigan.  (Farband/Jewish National Workers Alliance.)

The parents didn’t know sports, which was odd because Shelly turned into a star athlete.  He played tennis for Ohio State and became a tennis pro in Israel.  Shelly did that for more than 30 years.  (Still at it.)  He never took a private tennis lesson.

Shelly didn’t care about Jewish music; he cared about the Browns, Buckeyes and Indians.  In Israel he logs on — to this day — at about 3 a.m. to catch Cleveland sports scores on the Internet.  He has a yarmulke that reads “Cleveland Cavaliers.”

When I went to Jerusalem in 2006, I played The Wall.  Shelly.  At the Israel Tennis Center, Shelly was like Moshiach (Messiah); he had the highest seniority and everybody deferred to him.  He had even beaten Andy Ram, a Wimbledon doubles champion.  “Andy was 12 at the time,” Shelly pointed out.

Shelly’s dad, Sanford (the man who knew all the Hebrew tunes),  never played tennis.  In fact Mr. Gordon was so oblivious to sports he didn’t even sign Shelly up for Little League.  Mr. Gordon was not an immigrant or DP (Displaced Person); he was a NASA scientist and full-time Zionist.  Baseball meant nothing to Israelis, thus, it meant nothing to Mr. Gordon.

Shelly went to a Zionist camp in Michigan.  (Habonim Camp/The Builders.)

On the flipside: My parents played tennis; didn’t collect Jewish song books;  didn’t send me to any kind of  camp; and my dad managed a Little League team.  So I wound up playing klezmer music.

When Mrs. Gordon died last month, her body was flown from Israel to Cleveland, to Mt. Olive Cemetery.  A twist on shipping an American Jewish corpse to Mt. Olive, Jerusalem.  Mrs. Gordon wanted to be buried next to her late husband.

At Mrs. Gordon’s funeral, I had time to kill because the mourners, following Orthodox tradition, shoveled mounds and mounds of dirt into the grave.  Took a half hour.   I noticed Mr. Gordon’s tombstone said on the back side: “A kind and gentle man loved by all.”  In his case, true.

Mr. Gordon was eydl (polite/refined).  Also, a rocket scientist and excellent balloon twister.  His wife, Beatrice, had gone to college and social work school after raising children.  She wasn’t idle.

When my kids were little, I took them to the Gordons often.  (The Gordon grandchildren were in Israel.  That worked out well for my family.)  I called Mr. and Mrs. Gordon “Beasan” behind their backs.  It was a contraction of Beatrice and Sanford, as in: “Let’s go to Beasan’s for pizza and some magic tricks.”

What a pair.
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1 of 2 posts for 11/11/09.  Please see the post below too.

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Nobody in my neighborhood knew about private tennis lessons.  Music lessons, yes. Tennis, no.

Exception: my father, Toby.  When I was in high school, Toby got me about 10 tennis lessons at a gentile country club, and suddenly I was one of the best players on my high school team.  Yes, we still got clobbered by Shaker Heights and University School, but in our division, the Lake Erie League, we were above average.

That goyish club now will accept anybody, and not just for drop-in tennis lessons.  Show them the money.

One of my mega-rich buddies says two Cleveland country clubs still don’t want Jews.  Yiddishe Cup plays those clubs.  Well, once.  We got treated fine there.  The upper crust treats help and dogs best.

We get hassled the most at a Jewish club: “Use the kitchen door,” says Kim the Kurva (Whore), the manager.  Kim (not her real name) doesn’t want musicians near her front door, messing up the view or her valet parking.

Kim’s view might disappear soon.  That Jewish club is considering closing and merging with a nearby gentile club.

“Hine Ma Tov” (How Good It is) at the Mistletoe Dance.  Yiddishe Cup on the bandstand.  We’re ready.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/11/09.

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1. NOT THERE

Wolf Krakowski, a singer from Massachusetts, used to skewer Jewish musicians on the Internet for performing in Germany.  One of Wolf’s most memorable lines was “Nobody looks good in brown lipstick.”  (Meaning, don’t kiss German tush.)

One American klezmer — who played in Germany a couple times — thought Wolf was stiff-necked. The musician wrote back to Wolf: “I’m a vegetarian and don’t wear leather.  I am not evil. I don’t eat
meat . . .”

No sale.  Wolf wrote, “Heaven forfend that any unpleasantness intrude upon your pursuit of the deutschmarks.”

Wolf dropped off the Jewish-Music Web forum shortly after that.  Nobody took his place.  Impossible.

Few, if any, American klezmers are as hard-line on Germany as Wolf.  (Wolf was born in a Displaced Persons camp and has valid reasons for his position.)

The postwar generation in Germany is an appreciative, knowledgeable audience, according to many American klezmers. Just about every German town has a klezmer band.  Nearly every American band wants to play there.

Yiddishe Cup would go to Germany.

Nobody has asked.

Got sort of asked.  A festival in Fuerth, Germany, wrote me several emails about how they were looking forward to Yiddishe Cup’s appearance at the Fuerth Klezmer Festival. Then the committee switched leaders, or something, and I didn’t hear from the organizers for a long time.  I emailed.  Nothing.  I phoned.  I got a man on the line and said, “Do . . .  you . . . speak . . . English?”

He said, “I’ll give it a try.”  Easy-breezy, with a British-tinged German accent.  His only stilted  line was his last one: “We will not be needing you.”  I heard that as “Ve vill not be needing you, Mr. Yiddishe Cup.”  Sounded like Kissinger or Colonel Klink.   Kissinger.  Kissinger was born in Fuerth.

Germany could use some Mickey Katz parodies.

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2. KISS ME, I’M BALKAN

I want to introduce Yiddishe Cup in a foreign language.  “Nuestro keyboardist es Alan Douglass …”  That would be in Buenos Aires, say.

Der Rhythmus der Tradition.  Der Beat der jungen Generation.  Aus der Reihe KulturSpiegel.

That German is real.  Yiddishe Cup is on a just-released Sony Germany compilation CD, Balkan Basics World Tour II.

[The rhythm of tradition.  The beat of the young generation.  From the Culture Mirror series.]

Yiddishe Cup doesn’t generally play Balkan music.  No problem, the other bands on the CD do.  Taraf de Haidouks, Boban Markovic, Balkan Beat Box.

Yiddishe Cup’s contribution is Mehkuteneste Mayne (My Dear In-law) — straight-ahead klez.  We’re right after Tsu Der Kretshme (To the Tavern) by Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars.

London, a founder of the Klezmatics, is one of the top players in world music — and one of the coolest.   He wears a Jim Brown yarmulke; shades; a billowy, flowery shirt; and yet somehow doesn’t look like a 51-year-old Jewish guy at a Woodstock party.

I’ve seen London a few times at KlezKamp. He’s ingenious, making new music with pros and amateurs alike.  He organizes multi-generational bands: teenagers pound drums, senior citizens skvitch (screech) on violins, and assorted pros hold it all together.  London directs this KlezKamp ensemble with his hairy, Cro-Klezmer Man mien.  That’s side one of London.

Side two is Frank London as New York Jewish intellectual.  In a Pittsburgh newspaper, he used semiotic and qua to discuss an upcoming Klezmatics concert.

That wasn’t just postmodern.  That was Post-Gazette.

London calling . . .

Yiddishe Cup, and others, is on Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH.

Yesterday Yiddishe Cup was an Ohio klezmer band.  Today Yiddishe Cup is an Ohio klezmer band, but add irresistibly au courant.  Other tunes on the Balkan Basics project are “Sex Bomb,” “Rod Serling’s Trip to Bulgaria” and “Are You Gypsified?”  (By Globeal.Kryner, Mastika, and Taraf de Haiduks, respectively.)

Yiddishe Cup wants this Balkan hubbub to last longer than 10 seconds.  The Challah Fame in Cleveland is hastily organizing a one-day symposium, “Jewish Cultural Ventriloquism,” featuring these four lecturers:

Frank London, trumpet
“The Visceral, Semiotic Link Between Klezmer Music and Yiddish”

Bert Stratton, clarinet
“Supple, Labile Ethnicity: Kiss Me, I’m Balkan (ne Klezmer, ne Jewish)”

Walter Zev Feldman, tsimbl
“Repurposing the Bagel Shmeer: Klezmer as JIF (Jewish Instrumental Folk Music)”

Steven Greenman, violin
“How About Those Steelers?”
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Hear clips from the CD Balkan Basics World Tour II, direct from the Treffpunkt Musikshop.

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The phone number at AAA Window Shade Co. was 221-3700.  The proprietor, Joe Villoni, started there at 13, and was 87 when he pulled the last shade down.  Seventy-four years: same job, same location.

He quit in 2003 because nobody was buying window shades anymore.  Everybody was into $5 mini-blinds at Home Depot.  My father,Toby, and I had kept Joe’s rent low because Joe never asked for anything.

The store’s wood floor had a grooved path circumnavigating the huge window shade—making machine. That apparatus, and possibly the whole store, belonged in the Henry Ford Museum.

I always liked Joe — and the other old-guy tenants.  I was just a baby, a pisher (pisser/youngster), to these guys.  Another old tenant, Jim English, gave me a metal Phillies cigar box full of screws.  I appreciated the cigar box more than the screws. I was in my twenties and collected anything older than myself.

An old custodian, Jeanne Saunders, left me several novel manuscripts when she died. She had one lung, a great disposition, and a tough life; she should have written her life story and gone easier on the long, lanky cowboys and gladiators.

Another old custodian, Mary Kubichar, produced a concert for Yiddishe Cup.  It was at the Beck Center for the Performing Arts on the West Side.  That was the first — and last — West Side Yiddishe Cup concert.  (West Side means “not a lot of Jews.”)

Mary was from western P.A.  (You need to say each letter: P. A.)  She never married.  After retiring from Higbee’s department store, she became a super volunteer at her church and the Beck arts center.  So when she told the arts center to hire Yiddishe Cup, they owed her.  The concert turned into an appreciation party for Mary. (She died the next year.) Even the publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed up.  It was a very big deal.  We played a couple Slovak pieces for Mary.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/28/09.  Please see post below too.

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I knew a building inspector who could smell rats.  That’s what he claimed.   He didn’t have to see the droppings.

I knew a custodian who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My dubious talent is figuring if a tenant has skipped out or not.

First, the tenant hasn’t paid his rent. That’s a given.  I knock loudly on the tenant’s door.  No answer.

I yell “maintenance” a couple times, and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and I step into the apartment.

A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff.  TVs too.  Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out.

Some small items stay behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills.  Usually enough to fill three or four garbage bags.

The stove: cooked.

The refrigerator: always missing a couple crucial shelves.  Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.

No socks, no tenant.  The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are jumbled on the closet floor. Decent stuff too.  Skippers are usually too anti-social to take items to Goodwill.

I found a tux left behind.  The guy was 6-4.  I had the pant legs shortened.  (He wasn’t a skipper.  He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. So would most people, I bet.  It’s like staring at a car crash.  Most of my building managers like trashed apts.  (Some managers make extra money on the cleanups.)  One manager would gleefully phone me with on-the-scene reporting: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

The rat hole tour isn’t for everybody. One young manager passed on a good show.  “I’m creeped out,” she said, standing in the apartment corridor, while I went into the suite.

What’s to be creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts?

Afterward, I sometimes phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone.  I say, “You out yet?” No lectures about housekeeping.

Nobody likes to be criticized on his cleaning skills. And he might come back for his DJ magazines — and me.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/28/09

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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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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.

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I had a store tenant who sold gravestones and pistachios.  His main window sign read Porter Monuments and a smaller sign was Pistachios.

Not a good sign.  He went under.

I had a tenant, the India Food Emporium . . . Indian spices, Indian bread, Indian music.  Then came the Marlboros and malt liquor.  Went under.

You want a samosa with that 40?

I got a call from a prospective tenant for a headlight removal business.  Not a bad concept; headlights are tricky to remove.  The caller repeated, “Head lice.”  I was still OK with it.

Yiddishe Cup/Kiddush Cup/Klezmer Cup/Some Kind of Cup.  Nobody knows our band’s name.  All klezmer bands really have the same name: A Klezmer Band.

Sometimes clients hire us after they’ve attended a fun out-of-town wedding with a klezmer band.  I ask, “What band?”  They say, “A klezmer band.”

There is only one klez band with a name: the Klezmatics.

Yiddishe Cup probably stole a gig from the Klezmatics.  An East Coast college promoter booked us because she thought she had heard us on the radio.  What radio show was she talking about?  She couldn’t remember.  We’ve been on Cleveland and Cincinnati public radio.  My guess is she heard the Klezmatics on NPR, googled klezmer, and somehow came up with Yiddishe Cup.  So she hired us: A Klezmer Band.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/7/09

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My real estate job is pretty easy physically. I just boss custodians and repairmen around  and do paperwork: pay taxes, pay cockroach killers, and argue about security deposit refunds.  The only physical part is climbing the stairs and going on roofs.  None of my buildings has elevators.

Playing the clarinet . . . that can injure you.  You know where?  The right thumb.  The right thumb holds a disproportionate weight when you’re standing.

I had a pain in my right thumb that lasted 18 months.  The pain took a long leisurely trip through my body. Went from my thumb to my shoulders to my neck.

Physical therapists love musicians, particularly violinists, flutists, pianists and clarinetists.

I drove to Cincinnati to see a specialist for clarinet pain.  Then I did Alexander Technique, and every other technique short of amputation.

Some clarinet players use a neck strap. I do.  At KlezKamp, the music conference, I met a clarinetist who wore a neck strap.  He said, “The pain eventually goes away.”  That was my mantra for more than a year.

The clarinet is the agony stick.  Musicians call it that.  Not simply because the clarinet can be painful to play, but because it’s difficult.  The fingerings are harder than the sax, and a clarinet has the “break,” the awkward leap from A to B in the middle register.  The clarinet squeaks.  And the clarinet’s register key raises the note a twelfth, not an octave.  This is extremely odd physics.  The clarinet’s sound doesn’t typically come out the bell, like on a sax.

You mic a sax by clipping a mic on the bell, but on a clarinet you surround the clarinet with mics like on Wagon Train.  I had a mic rig for my clarinet that was so complex and heavy — and cost more than my axe — I  gave up on it.  Plus, it was hurting my thumb.

I asked a sax player in a big band if he played clarinet.  He said, “I have a clarinet.”
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1 of 2 posts for 9/30/09.  Please see the post below too.
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A version of this post will appear in the upcoming (Dec. 2009) issue of The Clarinet, the magazine of the International Clarinet Association, www.clarinet.org.
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Apparently some people don’t know there is a comments section to this blog.  Click on the “comments” link  below the “Tell A Friend” link. If there are few, or no, comments, go to the end of the “Sanctuary” post — two down from here. There are a lot of comments there.

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