Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Arvids Jansons.  I got a desk when he left.

Argero Vassileros.   Nickname: Argie.

Michael Bielemuk.  The Professor.  He had three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Maria Malfundido.  (Not her real name but close enough.)  A kleptomaniac.  She stole light bulbs from the hall so we glued the bulbs into the sockets.

Zenon Chaikovsky.  Building manager and Ukrainian musician.

Saram Carmichael.  A black transvestite who solicited customers from her second floor window.  The johns waited at the bus stop outside her window.  What is a Saram?

Stan Hershfield.  One of the few Jews on the West Side.  He was raised in an orphanage and loved the word bubkes (beans), as in: “Stratton, I have bubkes so don’t hondle me about the rent.”  [Hondle is haggle.]  When Hershfield painted the wood floor in his kitchen, he beamed, “Only the best, Stratton, Benjamin Moore!”

Malfalda Bedrossian.  She was never late with her rent.  Put that on her tombstone.

Chris Andrews.  He made up for his regular name by sleeping in a coffin.

Merjeme Haxhiraj.  An Albanian who talked me down $10 on her rent every year.

John “Chip” Stephens.  A Chet Baker-like figure — in looks, music and name.  He played jazz piano all day and was so good he landed a tenure track job at a university in Missouri.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/30/09

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I rent to musicians.  I used to give them a break. Like one musician didn’t leave his forwarding address for his security deposit, and I mailed it to him anyhow.  He specialized in electronic music.  I put “please forward” on the envelope.  I never got a thank you.  He should have sent an email thank-you at least.  He messed it up for the next guitar picker.

I had an older blues guy who screwed me out of a couple months’ rent.  A guy in his fifties ought to know that “12-month lease” means 12 months, not six months.

Youngsters — say, 22-to-30 year olds — can’t envision what 12 months means.  They think that’s forever.  I felt that way when I was in my twenties.  These young tenants try to weasel out of their leases.  They say they need to move home to help Grandpa, who broke his hip.  They need to help him drink beer and watch the Three Stooges!  These kids are moving out for one main reason: to shack up with their girl/boyfriend to save on rent.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/16/09

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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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Klezmer bands are often run like dictatorships because klezmer music originated in Eastern Europe — a part of the world notorious for autocrats.  Or so hypothesized Walt Mahovlich, the leader of the renowned gypsy-style band Harmonia.  Walt is an expert on Eastern Europe. His full name is Waltipedia.  Maybe.

Walt used to be in Yiddishe Cup. Technically he still is.  He is on a leave of absence, which he requested 13 years ago.  Walt likes to keep his options open.

If you run a band as a democracy, you’ll be in total disarray on the bandstand, Walt said.  I had a musician who liked to call tunes for me.  Drove me nuts.  Luckily he moved out of town 19 years ago.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, occasionally requests songs.  More often, he requests not to play a certain song.  For instance, he does not like playing “balls out” (hard-driving) music during guests’ meals.  Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes not.  These folks — at bar mitzvah luncheons — are comatose from a three-hour shabbat service followed by a 30-minute kiddush (post-service schmooze).  Sometimes they need a bracing shot of high-proof klez.

Some musicians have trouble with bandleaders’ czar-like behavior. My guys — not so much.  Yiddishe Cup’s musicians are the best in Cleveland; they get paid the most; and they generally cooperate.  If I have a problem with a guy, I’ll talk to him alone, not in front of the others.

Craig Woodson, a veteran drummer, taught me not to air private grievances in public.  Craig, too, believed in the benevolent monarch thing.  He had worked with a king — Elvis.  (Check Craig out in the movie Clambake.)

Craig was Yiddishe Cup’s second drummer. He was good — and in California too often on his own gigs.  Yiddishe Cup went through a ton of drummers.  Our current drummer, Don Friedman — who has been with us 13 years — knows how to keep time and add tasteful fills.  So does our alternate drummer, a yingl (boy) named Diddle.

Diddle, 21, started “playing out” (gigging) when he was 13.  I hate that — that start-out-as-young as-Mozart-or-you’re-toast mentality.  Diddle’s father hangs around our gigs, kind of like Venus and Serena’s dad.

Cleveland’s jazz king Ernie Krivda played in his dad’s polka band at 13.  Clarinetist Ken Peplowski played in a polka band at 13.  Joe Lovano started the sax at 5.  “At 16 the young Joe Lovano got his driver’s license and no longer needed his father, Big T, to drive
him . . .” blah, blah.

My father was a “Big T” too.  Toby.  Why didn’t he have a band?  Or at least a decent record player.
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1 of 2 posts for 9/2/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert 7:15 p.m. Sun., Sept. 6, Orange Village (Ohio) gazebo.

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My father said job one was getting the rent checks in the bank.

He didn’t even trust the night drop.  Had to wait in line.

The worst was when a money order got lost.  It might take up to three months to get a replacement.

One time the bank lost 16 rent checks.  I used the night drop, and the envelope wedged between the metal chute and the bank’s brick wall.  Just got buried in there like a time capsule.  I thought I was going nuts . . . Did I forget to make the deposit?  Was the deposit in my car somewhere?  At home I spent many hours looking through file cabinets and garbage cans for that deposit.

The bank found the deposit three months later, and I said to my tenants, “See, I’m not senile.  It was the bank’s fault.”  It’s rarely the bank’s fault, so I had to brag.

I wrote the bank manager about my  predicament — my embarrassment telling 16 people I had lost their checks.  I asked the bank to waive its service fees for a year.  I wrote: “My late father, who started the business, began talking to me! . . . ‘You did what?  You lost the money?'”

The bank didn’t waive the fees.  They did, however, give me $110 to cover tenants’ tracer fees.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/2/09

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My dad, Toby, was a big fan of California. He and every other Ohioan in the 1960s.

His cosmetics company, which he started in the basement, was Ovation of California.  It was a franchise.  The franchisor, based in California, was simply “Ovation.”  Toby added the “of California.”  Toby sold moisturizers, shampoos, eyebrow pencils, lipsticks and bases.

Bases were war paint for women.  My mother, who wore the stuff on sales pitches, looked like a Claymation figure.  My parents gave presentations at Cleveland hotels, trying to recruit women to do home sales parties.  Better yet, become sub-franchisees.  My parents had a carousel-tray slide show with an LP sound track that synched to the slides.  Beep.

Ovation went bust. Avon Products was the powerhouse back then.

Californian dreamin’ . . . it’s part of  the Midwestern mentality.  My family took the station wagon trip to California in the sixties.  Our “station wagon” was a 1961 Pontiac Catalina sedan with no A/C.  Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red (My Love)” was on the radio.

We wound up in San Francisco — the home of Daniel Ducoff, Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader.  I didn’t even know that!

Daniel’s father was a rabbi in Frisco. While I was growing up in standard-issue Ohio, Li’l Danny was being raised in the Haight, or more exactly, three miles from it.  To this day, Daniel wears a T-shirt that says “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?”  Daniel is Cali Man.  He has many different sun glasses.

Daniel — when he’s out in California for a high school reunion or something — will phone me: “They’d love Yiddishe Cup’s bizarre humor here!  Why aren’t we playing here?”

Daniel played several tracks from Yiddishe Cup’s Meshugeneh Mambo CD for Grateful Dead guys.  Not exactly Grateful Dead musicians.  It was for Mickey Hart’s ex-wife and the Dead’s ex-manager.  They danced to “K’nock Around the Clock.”  Nothing came of it.

Daniel does not have the Midwesterner’s sense of limited possibilities.

Get real, Daniel.  Get us a gig in Kentucky.  Get us a gig in Columbus, Ohio.
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1 of 2 posts for 8/26/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert:  7:45 p.m. Sun., Sept. 6 at Orange Village (Ohio) gazebo.
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Watch a new YouTube video of Yiddishe Cup singing the Barry Sisters’  “Zug es mir nokhamol.”  Good harmonies.

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Some bands play every third Saturday at Joe’s for decades.

Yiddishe Cup has ongoing gigs like that too.  But they’re annual, not monthly.

We play the City of University Heights (Ohio) summer concert series every year. We played in August 2003 when the entire East and Midwest had a blackout.  I thought the city’s administrator was joking when he said the show must go on.  I said to him, “McDonald’s is closed, there are no street lights, and the radio says stay home.”  He said play.  Our keyboard man switched to upright bass, and our sax player went to acoustic guitar.

We also play regularly for Orange Jews at their summer concert series in Orange Village, Ohio.  (Ohio’s Orange Jews are different from New Jersey’s Orange Jews:  Orange in Ohio is “Or-ange.”  In New Jersey, it’s “Are-ange.”)

We always do a folk festival in Lake County, Ohio.  That’s the Little Mountain Heritage Festival, where very few landslayt (countrymen) show up.

We’ve never played a gig where there wasn’t at least one Jew.  When we played a gig in Lancaster, Ohio, a local Jew disparaged his town, calling it “Lackluster.”  Clevelanders often do the same thing — the we-are-not-worthy routine — when they visit larger towns, like Chicago or New York.

We are not worthy of your Magnificent Mile, your Wrigley Field, your jogging paths along Lake Michigan, your hour-long traffic jams, your 16-inch softballs.

Chicago is a cool town.

So is Pittsburgh, by the way.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/26/09

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This post is for everybody who read my recent Wall Street Journal article about my dad and wants more info on him. (The WSJ article is linked here.)

My father, Toby, got a letter from a Piney Woods Arkansas man, extolling my dad’s homemade foot powder: “Mr. Lesbert: Do NOT stop making the powdor! Do NOT stop!!” Toby used to make the foot powder in the basement. The company was Lesbert Drug Co., named after my sister, Leslie, and me. My dad stopped making the powder. The Arkansas man was about his only customer.

Then Toby started selling cosmetics. Then he starting buying buildings . . . on and on.  He was the Jewish Willy Loman. (Kind of like how klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras was the Jewish Benny Goodman.)

My dad schlepped me to banks. I remember a banker who called my dad “Teddy.” That was weird. My father’s given name was Theodore and his Jewish nickname was Toby. This banker liked to talk Tribe (baseball) and his wife’s spaghetti recipes. The banker was a “people’s person,” he said. (Maybe he was a dogs’ person too.)

My father was not a people’s person.  He was the Lone Ranger. He got the mortgage and we got out of there.

My dad owned one LP record, of the Ohio State marching band. My dad had stock records. Toby bought his first stock, Seaboard Air Line, when he was at Ohio State. Air line meant train line back then. Air line was the shortest distance between two points — the way the crow flies. My dad never made money on stocks. He was too busy buying and selling and not holding. Toby was even a stockbroker for about six months in the 1950s at Bache & Co.

He liked numbers. He was a numbers guy. Totally.

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I like to pay taxes.  I like to do the forms.

My dad taught me to do taxes.  Some dads teach their sons to fix cars.  My dad taught me to fix taxes.  He even kept two sets of books: one pencil, one ink.

These self-made guys — like my dad —  often kept two sets of books.

The second-generation, like me, usually go legit.

I got audited.  I didn’t take an accountant with me.  I left with a credit.

Landlords handle a lot of cash — rents, security deposits.  That’s why I got audited.

Always count cash in front of the custodian to make sure the custodian isn’t skimming.  The custodian can “rent” an apartment for a couple extra days and not tell you.  You should pop in occasionally on those “unoccupied” suites.

Here’s some entertainment law: What happens if you wear a costume for performance and off-stage too?  If it’s just on-stage, you can deduct it — and dry cleaning — as an expense.

I like keeping records.  This is the age of documentation and investigation.  Enjoy.

My bandmates appreciate my attention to detail,  I think.  My musicians never seem to know what they’ve made until I tell them at the end of the year.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/19/09

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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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The  Kleveland Klezmorim would not play “Hava Nagila.”  The group wanted to rock out exclusively with klez fusion.

Yiddishe Cup, on the other hand, would play “Hava Nagila.”  We would play the “Chicken Dance” too.  We would not play “Electric Slide.”  We drew the line in the charoses there.  But we would pop in a CD of “Electric Slide.”  (Charoses is an apples and nuts Passover dish.  Jews, patience.  Three goys in Germany are reading this right now.)

The Kleveland Klezmorim, led by Greg “Seltzer” Selker, disbanded in 1990.  During the 1990s, a lot of people called me “Selker.”

We were both klezmer guys and had similar sounding names.

Nobody ever called me Seltzer.  Nobody called Selker “Seltzer” either.  Two missed opportunities.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/12/09.

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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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A landlord friend turned up his speaker phone to demonstrate how much he was loved.  Some kid, on the other end, asked if he had to hook up his own washing machine and dryer at the rental house.  My buddy said, “No, we’ll supply that.  Save your appliances for down the road when you buy a house.”  The kid was happy.

My friend rents houses in the Heights to medical residents, Case Western Reserve PhD candidates, and Cleveland Institute of Music students.  These people want to live near University Circle. They’re high achievers with no time, or inclination, to trash an apartment.

Has my buddy ever rented to a stripper?  No.  What about a stripper who uses crack? Doubt it.   How about a stripper who cracks a whip while using crack?

The West Side, where my properties are, is a little dicier than the ivory towers of the Heights.   Or can be — particularly if the landlord is lazy and plays the “show me the money and you’re in” game.

My company screens tenants big-time.  (OK, we did let the stripper in.  Make that exotic dancer.  Exotic dancer with child.  Pure innocence.)  We do criminal and civil court checks. Credit checks.  Previous landlord.

That’s called Keeping Up the Neighborhood. Sounds middle-class. True that.

We’re making a significant civic contribution — offering people a decent place to live in a decent neighborhood.  That’s probably a bigger civic contribution than what my band does.  In a nutshell, my plumbers and custodians keep up appearances.  Every day they create an art installation called Decent Neighborhood.

Is this art? The Webb building, Detroit Avenue at Webb Road.

Take the Webb building. It has a mother hen, concerned manager; Lebanese mini-mart guy on the ground floor; Korean dry cleaner; small-town Ohio Suzuki violin teacher upstairs; a Continental Express flight attendant, a truck driver, a welder, etc.

Some of these Webb tenants marry each other.  (That’s bad for business.  They move in together and I have an empty.)
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2 of 2 posts for 8/5/09.

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Highly sensitive people.  That’s a book title: The Highly Sensitive Person. These folks are bugged by eyeglasses that rub their temples; pillows that don’t fluff out enough; shoes that don’t breathe well.  Basically, they’re like Woody Allen but not as funny or famous.

Cleveland has its share.  These highly sensitive people shouldn’t live in apartment buildings.

When I lived in an apartment, I thought the guy upstairs was dropping weights all day.  It was probably Kleenex.  I bailed in three weeks.

In my real estate leases, I put an addendum: “If you’re a party animal, party elsewhere.”

Doesn’t work.

For example, I have a couple piano-playing renters.  Lou, he plays classical all day.  That’s OK.  But then there’s Ragtime — not so well-loved.  Ragtime’s neighbor periodically calls the cops and writes me letters about “headache-inducing, thundering piano music.”

I told Ragtime to go electric — get some headphones and play for himself.  And I told the highly sensitive neighbor, he could move out and I’d give him his security deposit back.

He didn’t move.  He just kept writing.  He could crank it: “Right now I’m hearing piano music at decibel levels designed to throw the planet out of orbit . . . No more piano music!”

He liked to write more than he liked packing.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/29/09.  Please see post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert:  Wade Oval, University Circle, Cleveland.
6 p.m. Wed., April 5
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Watch a new YouTube video of Yiddishe Cup playing  the blue klez classic “Joe and Paul.”
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Read a review of the CD Klezmer Guy, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, 7/15/09, by Lee Chottiner.

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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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I employed a custodian whose family was “a bunch of  burglars,” according to the investigating cop.  Why the cop had waited so long to tell me, I don’t know.

All along, the custodian’s kids had pilfered tools and lawnmowers, but I couldn’t prove anything and, besides, I liked the custodian.  He was a hard-working “hillbilly”— his term by the way.

I was his “little bitty buddy” — and his kids were crooks.  They took the master key and broke into an apartment across the hall.

Then they committed a botched burglary down the street and confessed to that, plus my break-in.

My custodian and his family had to move out.  “See you in the funny papers.”  That was my custodian’s sign-off.  Six years with me, then bye because his kids were crooks.

“I’m getting better by the numbers.”  He said that too.  I never did figure that one out.

Twenty-four years later: A different custodian, Speedy: the hardest working man on earth.  Speedy climbed many a ledge and ladder for me — and upped my workers’ comp.  He fell off a lot of ladders.  And he had some crook relatives and friends.

One relative, his so-called niece, was a prostitute.  The niece took the master key and entered a neighboring apartment and stole the tenant’s checkbook, ID and ring.

At first I thought the burglar was Speedy’s “nephew” Dave, a felon.   But then my plumber  reported seeing a new woman around, Amber, sleeping on Speedy’s couch.  “A black guy is pimping her,” the plumber said.

I told the police about Amber.  The detective said, “Amber Carney.*  She’s a known druggie and thief.” [*Not her real last name but close enough.]

Amber, the “niece,” got caught at the bank, forging checks.

The victim — my tenant—was more upset about the stolen ring than the stolen money.  She said it was an Irish ring.  It was fenced.  It was gone.  She asked if I was Irish.

“No, I’m Jewish,” I said.

“Funny, I’m Palestinian,” she said.

No problem— for her.   She was, as my father used to say, one cool customer. Most females would have been out of that burglarized apartment in a day.  I changed the lock and she stayed another year, pressing charges against the whore.

Amber, the prostitute, went to jail.  Speedy moved out and took a job at an adult bookstore.  I know because I received updates about Speedy’s employment through his workers’ comp lawyer, who kept sending me claims — for years— about Speedy falling off ladders back in the day.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/22/09.  Please see post below too.

Yiddishe Cup concert: noon Sun., July 26, Little Mountain Heritage Festival, Painesville, Ohio.

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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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Real estate has cycles, but nobody knows what, or when, they are.  Real estate is like life.  It’s not orderly like music or tennis.  One day, two-bedroom apartments are moving; the next, nobody will touch them.  Some years tons of tenants move out in January.  Some years everybody stays in January.  There is no pattern to anything in real estate.  The only certainty is 10 percent of your tenants will give you 90 percent of your problems.

I try to avoid certain tenants.  If I say hi to some of these people, it’s going to cost me at least $400.  Could be a new stove.  Could be a bathroom tile job.

I had a tenant whose wristwatch played Beethoven. That was interesting. I talked to him and it didn’t cost me a cent.  He had moved to Cleveland from Buffalo to teach guitar.  And his family ran a musical gifts company, he told me.

A tenant lent me a beat-up clarinet and we jammed.  Horrible reed.

I had a tenant who included a poem with her rent about wildlife outside her apartment window.  “The hawk waits/a dignified duration./Flies.”  Not bad.  I told her to take $25 off her rent — once.

Those were the good tenants.

. . . I had a tenant who regularly won the Miss Cleveland contest for transvestites.  His apartment was jammed with beauty pageant trophies — and young guys who crawled in his ground-floor bedroom window.  The cops — and I — did not like that.  Too many visitors is a big negative.  William, my drug-dealing tenant, also attracted a lot of traffic.  Bad for the hallway carpet.  The cops told me to stand to the side of the door —not directly in front — when I gave him his eviction notice. The cops were right next to me.  William said he wasn’t dealing drugs.  But he did move; he didn’t like the cops bugging him.
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1 of 2 posts for 7/8/09.  Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup concert 7 p.m. Sun., July 12, Hudson, Ohio.

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