Real Music & Real Estate . . .

I played a crummy clarinet, blasting against the side of a barn door on a bike trip in rural Ohio.  I nearly destroyed my lip.

Last summer my friend Mark Schilling from Japan wanted to ride the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure (GOBA), so I couldn’t very well say: “Mark, I’m passing on GOBA.  I have a big gig coming up and need to practice.”

I had to practice for Yiddishe Cup’s twentieth anniversary concert, which was the day after the bike tour.

Some musicians don’t need to practice; they practiced in music school and can wing it as adults.  I didn’t go to music school.  I have to feel the notes in my fingers and brain almost daily before a big show.

My borrowed cheap clarinet had decayed pads, squeaky keys and cracked dirty reeds.  The mouthpiece had layers of caked lip gunk. The axe was plastic and generic.  No name.  I got it from a friend.  Ray-somebody in Sioux City, Iowa, had once repaired it; his card was in the case.

Why didn’t I have a back-up axe of my own? Was this an example of rigid thinking on my part?  I had put my professional clarinet through so much — parades and other outdoor indignities — and didn’t own a back-up.  For example, I should have had a plastic horn for the 2004 Israel Independence Day parade when we marched outside in 40 degrees. (One Yiddishe Cup musician went AWOL on that parade because he didn’t play under 50.)

On the GOBA trip, I played next to the Wood County Fairgrounds sheep barn.  If I had stood in the middle of the horse-showing ring and played — without the barn wall to bounce sound off — I would have blown my lip out even more.

I had to practice high notes, which cheap clarinets don’t do well.  You need a decent mouthpiece and a quality reed.  I bit down hard and tore my lower, inside cheek.

Nobody on the bike tour — about 2,500 riders — complained about my playing.  Midwesterners, particularly bicyclists, are very tolerant and polite.

I also practiced at a high school football field. That town, Elmore, had a bass drone coming from the Ohio Turnpike a block away.

I used cortisone cream on my cheek.

The final day of the ride, my friend and I performed at the bike rally’s talent show.  Mark and I had written a song about aching backs, bad food and smelly port-a-potties.  So had all the other contestants.  The difference: our tune had a klezmer clarinet.

We riffed on the melody “Nayer Sher,” a.k.a. the “Wedding Samba,” popularized by Xavier Cugat.  I had heard that 1950s tune on Muzak in a Cleveland grocery store.  The song had crossover appeal.

But we didn’t win.

A barbershop trio did.  They sang about tandem bike riders smelling each other’s gas.  We hadn’t thought of that.

Irwin Weinberger, a veteran GOBA cyclist and Yiddishe Cup’s singer, came in second.  Irwin inserted port-a-potty lyrics into the Kinks’ “Lola.”

Irwin hadn’t practiced all week.  Irwin is a natural.  And he’s a gas.

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GOBA begins June 20 in Logan, Ohio. The GOBA encampment is half Pilot Gas rest stop, half Cabela’s.  There are six semi-haulers and many tents.  The semis carry the cyclists’ baggage.  Two of the semis are actually mobile shower trucks (which are sometimes used for natural disasters). There is close-quarters snoring on the football field, with hundreds of tents pitched within several feet of each other.  Rated: Difficult.
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Yiddishe Cup plays the post-parade concert at Parade The Circle 1 p.m. this Sat. (June 12).  Wade Oval, Cleveland. Traffic tip: Ride your bike to the parade and park in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op lot.

Everybody in world music wants to be the next crossover act.

Eddie Blazonczyk, the Chicago Polish polka musician, tried. And then there was Ruben Blades, the Panamanian salsa guy.

In klezmer, nobody has done it lately.

Lately is the key word.  [Continue by clicking on video]

CLOSED CAPTION.  6/4/10.  The paragraphs below are what the man in the video is saying, more or less, prior to playing “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” . . .

In 1938 the Andrews Sisters made “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (By Me You Look Grand) the number one song on the American pop charts.

“Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is the tune in the klezmer concert repertoire.

Yiddishe Cup was playing a concert in Detroit — just barreling through a medley of esoteric klezmer fusion — when I called an audible (changed the set list) to play “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.”  Bingo, the mostly elderly crowd was right back with us.

My daughter, when she was little, called the song “My Bear, Mr. Shane.”  My youngest son performed it at 3 ½. [Check out the boy’s video.]  Jazz musicians call the tune “My Beer is Duquesne.”

Only Jews think “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” is Jewish.  Everybody else thinks it’s German or plain nothing.  (The spelling on the original record label was “Bei Mir Bist du Schön.”)  I lectured a group of gentile senior citizens in Westlake, Ohio.  I asked if they knew “Bay Mir” was Jewish.  None did.

Sholom Secunda wrote the melody to “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” for a Yiddish play in 1932.  Then he sold the rights to a music publishing house, the Kammen Brothers, for $30.

Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin put English words to the Yiddish version.  The tune became a huge hit for the Andrew Sisters.

Secunda supposedly had a conversation with a shoeshiner, who was whistling “Bay Mir” in 1938:

Secunda: “That song is making quite a hit now, isn’t it?”
Shoeshiner: “Hit ain’t the word.  It’s a riot.”
Secunda: “I guess the guy who wrote that must be making plenty of dough.”
Shoeshiner: “Not him.  That dope sold his song for thirty bucks.”
Secunda:  “And that isn’t the half of it . . .” **

**From the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, Jan. 26, 1938.

Secunda had to split the $30 fee with the original Yiddish lyricist, Jacob Jacobs.

A Jewish tune crosses over to the big-time about once a century.  That’s my guess.  I’m thinking the next hit will be the Hip Hop Hoodios’ “My Nose is Large and You Know I’m in Charge.”
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On Sat. June 12, Yiddishe Cup plays the best event in Cleveland, Parade the Circle. We’re not marching in the parade; we’re playing a post-parade concert at 1 p.m. on Wade Oval. Gonna be a massive bar mitzvah party.

If you’re on the Cleveland Workmen’s Circle concert committee, there’s a 25 percent chance you’ll be dead in 10 years. (I counted the dead from a 10-year-old committee roster.)

An elderly woman suggested we include a tribute to a recently deceased committee member in our concert brochure. But the brochure’s cover already read “in memory of Eugenia and Henry Green,” the concert’s principal funders.

I said, “People are dying on this committee every other year. We can’t be putting in written testimonials.”

“Like who?  Who’s dying?” the woman asked.

I didn’t name names.  Why sidetrack the meeting?

The committee met in a room under a portrait of Eugene V. Debs.  A photo of Norman Thomas was in the hallway.

This committee in its prime — about 20 years ago — was like hanging around the cafeteria at CCNY or Western Reserve University in the day.  There had been Max Wohl, Socialist (capital S) and major ACLU donor; David Guralnik, editor of the New World Dictionary; Herman Hellerstein, the cardiologist who first recommended, in the 1960s, exercise after heart attacks; and Harold Ticktin, Mississippi civil rights lawyer (summer 1965), authority on the Jewish Bund, and former “Kinsman cowboy” (Kinsman Road loiterer).  Ticktin said the Jewish Kinsman cowboys in the 1930s called the Italian Kinsman cowboys “noodles” and shkutzim (gentile boys).

Committee members occasionally called each other “friend,” a quasi-socialist salutation.

Several “friends” decided to honor Yiddishe Cup with a Workmen’s Circle dinner.  What Yiddishe Cup didn’t know: the honoree paid to be honored.

Ben Shouse, friend in charge of fundraising, had a booming voice and a shock of gray hair like H.L. Mencken.  And he wore suits like Mencken, and he smoked a cigar like Mencken.  Politically, Shouse was un-Menckenable.   Shouse was a retired labor union boss, autodidact (he liked inculcate), and an advocate for the arts, especially “Shakespeare for the workers”-type events.

Shouse phoned me, suggesting Yiddishe Cup musicians pony up for the banquet.  He said, “Stratton, you know how these things work. Cooperate!”

I didn’t know how these things worked.  Not in 1994, I didn’t.  I thought Yiddishe Cup was being honored because we were good — some sort of arts prize.  I had played tribute dinners before, but had never understood the dynamics.  Shouse said he had raised thousands at a previous dinner in honor of his elderly girlfriend.

Two Yiddishe Cup musicians told me they couldn’t afford the price of the dinner, let alone bring friends, or crazier yet, “buy a table.”

I corralled three people, including my wife, to attend.  I hesitated to hock friends, particularly for a chicken dinner at a windowless Alpha Drive party center.  And my friends would have to listen to speeches about a fraternal organization, Workmen’s Circle, most had never heard of.

Shouse phoned Yiddishe Cup’s singer and said to him: “Stratton gave fifty-five dollars.  Greenman gave twenty-five dollars.  How about you?  And who are you bringing?”

Shouse nearly traumatized my singer, a sensitive artist.

One Yiddishe Cup musician didn’t bother to show up for the tribute.   Another musician rewound his Shouse phone message for me: “This dinner is in your fucking honor!  You’re sophisticated. You know the rules.  Do your part!”

Shouse died in 2003. He raised a lot of money for the arts in Cleveland.

—

Coda:
This year the concert committee added several younger members. Odds are now probably less than 25 percent of a random-selected committee member dying in the next 10 years.  Also, the  Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas pictures are down. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson is up.  A Chabad-affiliate organization bought the Workmen’s Circle building and shares it with the Workmen’s Circle. Now playing in Cleveland: Enemies: A Love Story.

1. GOT A CARD?  NO!

I was a guest at a wedding where the band’s sign was bigger than LeBron James. The banner was eight-foot, like something you might see on a telephone pole announcing “125 years of excellence in education.”

The wedding reception was elegant, but the band’s sign was totally Bedford Auto Mile.  The sign read “More Acts, Better Music, Higher Standards.”

Higher Standards?  The bandleader was Italian.  I knew him.  Roman standard bearers?  The bandleader said to me, “It’s better to be a guest than to work, huh?”

What?  I always prefer playing over schmoozing.

When Yiddishe Cup does weddings, I hand out business cards.  Nothing gaudy.  And I don’t shovel them out.   These cards are almost collectors’ items.  I’m not going to pass them out willy-nilly.

Everybody already knows Yiddishe Cup.  If you say “klezmer band” in Ohio, it’s us.  Now, if we’re in Buffalo, N.Y., for example, I might go heavier on cards.  But I don’t put out a tray.  That’s too dental office.

Granted, we feature Yiddishe Cup’s logo on our bass drum.  Our logo is cool, whimsical and tasteful, and it gets us some gigs.  (Ralph Solonitz designed the logo.)

At the “Higher Standards” wedding, I met a businessman who did music production as a sideline.  I asked for his card.  He didn’t have one.  And he had 100 employees, he said.

He had achieved placid-plus status: no card.

My goal is to be him.

***

2. BALLISTIC / LOADING / CAVS

A Yiddishe Cup musician went ballistic when he saw a college football game, or so he thought, off in the distance.  He said, “I’m so through with this country’s obsessions with sports!”

Yiddishe Cup was loading-in at a student union by a college stadium.

The Yiddishe Cup musician had fouled.  Here’s why: (1.) The college kids were playing lacrosse, not football.  (2.) It was a Division III game.  The stadium was small, with no crowd to speak of.  (3.) The kids were getting some exercise; this was not a big money, faux-pro game.

Yiddishe Cup musicians, for the most part, are not up on today’s sports scene.  For instance, I just learned a basketball shot “from downtown” means a three-pointer.  And I’m wondering what “the post” is.  I watched several basketball games lately.

I have an agreement with my cousin George, a serious sports fan, to go to the Cavs victory parade. I want to be there.  Depends on my Depends though, because I’ll be very old.  Also, depends if it’s raining.  I’m fair weather.

Last Sunday Yiddishe Cup had a gig, a pre-Shavuot Torah dedication/celebration, which was almost postponed to accommodate LeBron James’ reading of the Book of Kells.  The Cavs were scheduled to play the Celtics then.  (Cleveland lost prior, on Thursday, so the playoff series ended, and everything worked out fine for the Torah dedication.)

About championships . . . My father, Toby, promised to take me to the World Series, but the Tribe never made it when I was growing up.  My dad, instead, took me to Ohio State homecoming games.

I took my kids to the 1992 OSU homecoming game.  The Ohio Stadium scoreboard lit up: This Sat. at the Wexner Center, Don Byron Salutes Mickey Katz.

What next, Bucks?  “Fight the Team Across the Field” in Yiddish?

Don Byron played OSU, I think, because Columbus resident Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of The Limited, paid Byron’s band to entertain Wexner’s elderly mother, who probably requested the Mickey Katz show because she didn’t want to fly to New York.  That’s the only logical explanation.  Don Byron never played any other Mickey Katz–tribute shows in Ohio.

Go Mickey.

Go Katz.

Go ‘Cats.

Go Cavs.

If you’re a Cubs fan, or whatever, be quiet about your sports-induced suffering.  You don’t know anything.

My clarinet teacher, Harry Golub, was nicknamed the Bald Eagle.

Harry was hairless.

A student, Zuckerman, gave Mr. Golub that nickname.

Zuckerman, like many junior high clarinetists, dropped out of private lessons around bar mitzvah time.  I hung in through eleventh grade.  During my high school years, Mr. Golub asked me how the clarinet dropouts were doing.

Mr. Golub was often cranky because, for one thing, he didn’t get along well with the music department at the high school.  They wouldn’t buy instruments and sheet music from him.  The high school was in cahoots with another music store, the one out in goy land, Lyndhurst, Mr. Golub said.

Mr. Golub’s store was in Little Israel, the Jewish quadrant of South Euclid. (Little Israel was across the park from the Italian neighborhood,  where I lived.   At least we had finished second floors. The bungalows in Little Israel were custom-built for Jews; nobody over 5-9 could stand up in the dormers.)

I ran into Mr. Golub frequently years later at Yiddishe Cup gigs.  He still railed against the school system . . . “those mumzers [bastards], those anti-semits.”

I don’t know . . . I don’t know if the school was truly anti-Semitic.  Exhibit A: Steve, a loudmouthed Jewish kid, a NYC-style sasser, and one of the smartest guys in my grade.  [Steve isn’t his real name.]   Steve and his father, from the East, read the Sunday New York Times. Steve knew about Dylan way before the rest of us.

The high school administration — mostly non-Jewish grads of small Ohio teachers colleges, it seemed — didn’t believe in adjusting to different “learning styles” back then.  Steve’s style was to question all authority and study like mad.  Also, he wore jeans and got sent home.  He talked back to teachers.  He got straight A’s.

Steve was turned down by every college he applied to.  Our guidance counselor wrote something like “rabble rouser” on Steve’s college applications.  (Steve learned this when a classmate, working part-time in the Wesleyan University admissions office, snooped around a couple years later.)

I don’t think the high school administration was purposefully anti-Semitic.  They just had no idea what to make of the insanely competitive, antic Semites — children of pawn shop owners, umbrella salesmen and Holocaust survivors.  These students would ask: “Will this be on the next test?” “Are we responsible for all of section A?  “Can I skip marching band because I have SATs tomorrow?”

You can skip marching band and you’ll be out of the band.

Great!

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[Credit to writer Josh Kun for antic Semites.]
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1 of 2 posts for 5/12/10.  Please see the next post too.

We interrupt this blog to tell you this blog is a year old.

Special thanks to our major donors (commenters).  We could have done it without you, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting.

In no particular order, thanks to Marc, Jessica Schreiber, Gerald Ross, Robert K S, Shawn Fink, Teddy, Adrianne Greenbaum, Bill Jones, Mark Schilling, Harvey Kugelman, Wolf Krawkowski, Terri Zupancic, Ellen . . .

David, Irwin Weinberger, John M. Urbancich, Jane Lassar, Zach, Gary Gould, Robin, Ben Cohen, David Budin, Alice, Alan Douglass, Diddle, Don Friedman, Kenny G, Richard Grayson and Steven Greenman.

Get your name on this list next year by contributing at least $2,500, or writing in a lot.

Google Analytics — a spy op — has uncovered Klezmer Guy readers in every state except the axis of evil: South Dakota, Nebraska and Arkansas.  Google also hears Klezmer Guy “chatter” from many foreign countries.  The most active Klezmer Guy cells are in Canada, Israel, England, France and Germany.  And there is a lone-wolf reader in Libya. ( Salaam, bro, don’t shoot.)

Google doesn’t divulge readers’ names, by the way,  just cities and countries.

Expect some Klezmer Guy video this coming year.  These video clips should appeal to a broader readership: non-readers.  Some nudity in the clips. (Facial and hand.)

***

Quiz-time

Several Klezmer Guy readers  report: “I’ve read every word of your blog!”   Kathy, one of these extreme readers, has asked for a quiz.  She thinks she will win.

[The quiz is now in the “comments” section of this post. 5/21/10]

See you at the next Yiddishe Cup concert or “Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo gig.  Or if not there, here.

The bell rings.  Round two.

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2 of 2 posts for 5/12/10

A banda clarinetist in Sinaloa, Mexico, lent me his axe. I played horribly because of that clarinet’s craggy reed; I’ve seen better reeds in a fourth grader’s case. I played a Meron/Israeli nign (wordless melody). The Mexican listeners clapped. They could have whistled.

That was my sole south-of-the-border performance. (My family was on a hiking trip in northern Mexico, where we stumbled upon a horse auction with oompah banda.)

A Cleveland woman announced her Central American wedding — a Jewish ceremony in San Salvador.  I told the bride’s mother to hire Yiddishe Cup.  “I’m sure the groom’s family can afford it,” I said, “or they wouldn’t still be down there.”  The mom agreed to the “afford it” part, but not the band.  The mom burned a CD of horas from my wife’s collection and took that.

Yiddishe Cup plays Latin music fairly well. We have cornered the Latin Jewish doctor market in Cleveland — a market that fits comfortably into the backseat of a Camry.  We did a gig for a Mexican Jewish doctor who headed the Cleveland Clinic evil eye center (Cole Eye Institute).  That was one salsa-dik party.  Latin Jews party second only to Russian Jews.

We played a Cleveland Ecuadorian wedding where I explained the chair-lifting tradition to the groom’s gentile parents.  I said in Spanish: “You will see people seated in chairs in the wind.”

***

In Dallas, when Yiddishe Cup musicians visited the grassy knoll,  I stopped at the neighborhood taco shop to update myself on Mexican drinks.

The taco shop had orange, carrot, horchata, mango, guava and Sidral apple drinks.  They also had bottled Mexican Coke. The clerk explained Mexican Coke is sweeter than American Coca-Cola.

Yiddishe Cup’s ultimate hip-spanic thrill was an outdoor concert in El Paso, Texas, where we played “La Bamba” for 2,500 predominately Mexican-American listeners.  For Jewish flavor we added Hebrew lyrics from Psalm 133 (“Hine Ma Tov” / Behold how good ).  We borrowed that idea from a Kansas City band, Guns ‘n’ Charoses.

From the bandstand, we could see the Rio Grande.   We played “Meshugeneh Mambo.”  We said gracias a lot.

So close to Latin America.

Cinco de Mayo.  Hoy. (Pronounced “oy.”)
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1 of 2 posts for 5/5/10. See the next post too, please.

Busking is a British term.  In the Midwest we say “playing on the street.”  Kind of awkward, but we don’t want to sound British.

In the 1990s, several Yiddishe Cup musicians played on the streets in downtown Cleveland and made nothing. Security guards shooed us away from Higbee’s and the Arcade entrance.

Our parking expenses were more than what we made.  Then we ate out and lost even more money.

We were certainly contributing.  We were putting the viva back in city.

The bus exhaust stunk.  The passersby ignored us — except for the bums,  who ogled our money pot.  Our gelt was immense.

***

I have “busked”; I played on the streets abroad. (Northern Mexico, 2008, doesn’t count; that was a freebie.)  In 2006 I made 16 shekels ($4) on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem.  I had my axe with me in Israel, so why not play for my people?

My people wanted Dixieland.  “The Saints Go Marching In” was killer.  A charedi (ultra-Orthodox) boy kept asking for it.  I tried klezmer but that didn’t sell, except for “Anim Zemiros.” (Song of Glory)

The tzedakah (charity) collectors eyed my coins.  Again, awkward. Give it up for the charedim.

There is a new video clip of Pete Rushefsky, the renowned klezmer musician, playing on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.  Pete is wearing a glove, the wind is blowing, and there is a sole listener, who says to Pete: “My grandfather used to play this stuff.”   Great stuff — the video.  Turns out the grandpa was Louis Armstrong.

Not exactly.   Grandpa was  Jack Boogich of the historic Romanian klezmer family. For hardcore klez fans only, check out this link. Scroll to the bottom of the text for the Brighton Beach video.
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2 of 2 posts for 5/5/10

My father, Toby, owned a modern “apartment community.” The complex was “garden-style,” meaning three-story buildings grouped around a parking lot and pool.  The buildings had mansard roofs and looked like McDonald’s.  The place had an Anglo name.  Jamestown.  Should have been Jonestown.

The development looked genteel but wasn’t.  One guy peed in the heating ducts and poured aquarium gravel in the toilet on his way out.  Some tenants used the hollow-core doors for karate practice.

A high school wrestling coach, who was also a multi-millionaire, bought the complex and turned it into condos in 1977.  Worked out for everybody.  As the banker said to Toby, “You made your money, and he made his. Be happy.”

I used to repair the complex’s roofs, mostly replacing lids on vents.  The lids were called Jap caps because of their coolie-hat shape.

There is no more peaceful place than a roof top — at least a flat roof.  You can see everybody, and nobody can see you.  That’s why cops in The Wire go on roofs so often.

***

“I’m in real estate.”

I say that whenever I don’t feel like saying “I’m a landlord.”  If I say “I’m a landlord,” people often hear “I’m a slumlord.”

I don’t sell houses or flip properties.  I collect rent, evict people, charge late fees, and look for cats in apartment windows so I can charge pet fees. Does that sound like a slumlord?

When I vacationed at the Michigan alumni family camp, I introduced myself at the meet-and-greet as a landlord and klezmer musician.  People laughed at the “landlord” part, particularly the campers with advanced degrees.  “Landlord” was so bad it was good. “Klezmer” was cool — the arts.

I came across a Yiddish anti-landlord song in the klezmer business. “Dire Gelt” (Rent).  The lyrics, in brief, are: “Why should we pay rent when the stove is broken?”

I’ve heard that line before about the broken stove.  Not often.  It’s usually “My bathroom ceiling is falling in.”  It’s all about water damage in the landlord biz.

And it’s occasionally about animals.

What bugs me: tenants who ask for a hotel room because they saw a mouse.

Mice are good people. I’ve had mice in my house. I don’t run to a hotel every time I see a mouse, and my bank doesn’t give me a reduction on my mortgage payment.
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1 of 2 posts for 4/21/10.  Please see the next post too.

While waiting in line at Taco Bell, I tried to unlock the mystery of the restaurant’s warning: “Time Delay/Time-Lock” safe can not be opened for 10 minutes and up to 18 hours.

I couldn’t unlock it.

The other drawback — and a big one — to my West Side T-Bell hangout was the manager locked the restrooms because of vandalism.  I had to ask for a key. The manager lost some of my business because of that.  Please, can I go?  I didn’t like repeating first grade.

I was at Taco Bell when the founder, Glen Bell Jr., died.  I hadn’t known a Mr. Bell existed until I read his obit.  A customer broke the news to me — not about Bell’s death — but about the manager not locking the restroom door anymore.  In memory of Glen Bell Jr.?   In the obit, Bell said customer service was paramount.

Hallelujah for the new open door policy, Brother Bell.

The customer in front of me said, “They finally got smart here.  People come in here after hours on the road, and they have to go!”

I frequented  T-Bell more often because of the new restroom policy.  And I developed a new T-Bell hang-up — a musical one.  I asked the young cashier to name the horrible song playing.  She couldn’t.  Name the artist?  “It’s satellite,” she said.

Put cilantro on that satellite radio station, hon.  Quash the piped-in Lady Gaga music.  The customer comes first.
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2 of 2 posts for 4/21/10

1. CHEERS FOR “L’CHAIM”

I had a funeral gig, or thought I did.  The deceased, Sid Elsner, had booked me years prior.  Sid wanted a New Orleans-style, jazz-klezmer element at his funeral.  Not a kosher concept, but neither was Sid.  [Goys: Jews don’t often have music at funerals.]

When Sid died, none of his adult children mentioned music, so I didn’t play.

At the gravesite, I got a recipe for Sid’s brisket.  His oldest son was passing out the secret list of ingredients (chili sauce, onions).

Food works. That’s why there are shiva (mourning) meals.

A musician in Yiddishe Cup has attended only one funeral.  He has been to hundreds of weddings and one funeral. Lucky.

My mother’s favorite song was “Shenandoah,” which we sang it at her stone setting but not at her funeral.

My dad didn’t have a favorite tune.

Yiddishe Cup’s singer, Irwin Weinberger, wants Yiddishe Cup to play at his funeral.  I hope I can oblige.

After a 2000 Yiddishe Cup gig, I stopped at my father’s grave with my youngest son, who placed an old clarinet reed on my dad’s headstone.  My son had just played his first paying gig, on drums, with Yiddishe Cup.  I wanted to let my father know I was still around, still pushing the ball — cutting the grass, raising a family, starting a klezmer dynasty.  That last notion — the klezmer dynasty — would have flummoxed Toby, my father.  The last time Toby had heard me play I was a Cannonball Adderley wannabe.

. . . Here’s some advice for Jewish dads doing toasts at weddings: make your speech funereal. Pretend you’re updating your dead father, even if he’s alive.  Use flashbacks and talk about your kid’s personality quirks.  Stay on the high road; let the maid of honor do the weird stuff.  And end with “L’chaim,” even if you’ve never said it before.  “Cheers” from a Jew is a big turn off.

***

2. TOWER OF POWER

It’s unnerving when the bride ditches her own wedding.  She gets the flu for example, or a headache or swollen ankle, and has to lie down for a few hours.  Misses the whole party.  That marriage may not last.

Worse: the mom dies during the “Chicken Dance.”  That happened.  Not at my gig, but at one my video guy was at.

Did my video guy get it on tape?  I don’t know.  The video guy died on me.  Not at my gig, but slowly, over months.

He didn’t move around much; he had a stationary video rack.  He just stood by his rack, which I called the Tower of Power, and barely budged the whole night.  In his final days, he really bugged me.  For instance, when Yiddishe Cup would stroll table-to-table taking requests, like klezmer-achis, he would tell me which tables to go to.  “Can you do the head table next?” he would ask.

I didn’t know he was that sick.  “Why?” I said.

“Because I want to sit down,” he said.

I said no.  The head table was nowhere near us.  We had a traffic pattern to maintain.

He said, “I’ll remember this when you want a favor.”

Then he died.

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Yiddishe  Cup plays Mon. April 19, 6:35 p.m., for the community-wide Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) celebration at B’nai Jeshurun Cong., Cleveland.

A handful of klezmer musicians have PhDs and do klezmer-related research.  Hankus Netsky, Walter Zev Feldman, Joel Rubin, Jeffrey Wollock, and probably a few others I’m not aware of.

These men have put in time at the library as well as in the practice studio.  Some speak Yiddish and other foreign languages.  They know  obscure facts.  For instance, there was a close link between klezmer musicians and barbers, “considered one of the lower [professions] among the Jews . . . The barber was considered slightly below the server — the professional baker at weddings — and equal to the midwife.”  (Walter Zev Feldman, “Klezmer Musicians of Galicia,” Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 16, 2003)

These klez researchers often interview old people.  Hankus Netsky — he is so good at interviewing old people he should run a nursing home.  His PhD thesis was on the culture of old-school, 20th-century Philadelphia Jewish wedding musicians.

Interestingly, Netsky and the other PhDs are now kind of old themselves.  Fifties and up.  (Hankus is The Sage.)

For my research (non-academic), I focused on these new klez docs and their peers.  I bought recordings from nearly every klezmer band at the end of the 20th century.  I have CDs and tapes from Di Gojim, a Dutch goy band; Aufwind, a kraut klez band; and even the Alaska Klezmer Band.

Then I gave up. Too much product.  Every Beryl, Meryl and Shmeryl klezmer band was putting out recordings.  Yiddishe Cup — four CDs from them alone.

However, I did keep up with klezmer literature.  Real easy.  Not much product.  There hasn’t been a book on klezmer in at least eight years. The book-buying market spoke and said “No market.”

Here, for example, are some manuscripts looking for publishers:

Call Me Henry . . . No, Hank.  An in-depth look at American Jewish identity by Henry “Hank” Sapoznik, a klezmer and old time banjo player.

100 Jewish Music Insults by Pete Sokolow, pianist.  Putdowns that really work. Culled from the first 10 minutes of a five-hour interview with Sokolow.  Try these the next time you’re at a klezmer jam session:

1. What’s your phone number? Junior congregation needs a clarinetist.
2. You’re slicker than butter on matzo, but there’s no salt.
3. Tighten your neck strap.  Tighter.
4. You couldn’t find freygish with a GPS.  [Freygish is a mode.]
5. I make desk lamps. Let me see your clarinet.

Where Klezmer Meets Corn, a memoir by “Klezmer Guy,” about a klez band’s one-night stands (concerts primarily) in the Midwest.  Some senior sex.

My Tsimbl is in Tune, a mystery by Pete Rushefsky, tsimblist.

Tattoo Jews by Mark Rubin, bass player.  A true-life account of large drawn-on Texas Jews taking on Los Tigres del Norte for bar mitzvah share in Ciudad Juarez.

Where’s Mincha, Helmut? funded by the German National Tourist Board’s “Deutschland ♥ Jews” initiative.  Subtitled “A Jewish Musician’s Guide to Germany.”  By Joel Ruben with Rita Ottens.   [Mincha is the afternoon service.]

Friends of Molly.  A steamy romance about a chick minyan — Friends of Molly — that reconnoiters annually at a Catskill hotel sauna.  By Eve Sicular, bandleader of the Isle of Klezbos.  [A minyan is 10 Jews.]

Just Say “You?” by Michael Wex, Canadian Yiddishist and writer.  Includes  dining-room seating charts from historic klez conferences.  Who sat with whom, why, and what happened post–mandelbroit and coffee. [Mandelbroit is Jewish biscotti.]

Old is the New Thin by Hankus Netsky.  How to improve your love life by looking and acting 10 years older than you really are.  Comes with a CD, Music to Suffer By, from the New Thin Department, New England Conservatory.

1. WHAT YOU CALL HIM

When I wrote to John Demjanjuk’s daughter, she sent me a packet stating her father, the Ukrainian SS man, had been framed by an editor at a small pro-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian, New York newspaper in 1975.

I was interested in seeing Demjanjuk.  I had thought and dreamed about Nazis, but had never been in the same room with one.  (I usually dreamed about being in the same room.)

At the 1981 Demjanjuk trial, lawyers argued over forensics, among other things, at the federal courthouse in Cleveland. I looked on as the prosecution presented a handwriting expert who had studied over 4,000 signatures.  He said Demjanjuk’s signature on the prison guard ID card was the real thing, not a Soviet forgery.

The judge agreed on that and a few other things — after months of testimony — and revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship.

Demjanjuk then spent some time in various American prisons for technical violations, such as missing his first deportation hearing.

In 1986 Demjanjuk was sent to Israel for a second trial.

A cop at the Sixth District police station watched a small TV hidden under his desk that day.  The TV was always on.  (I was covering the police news.)  The cop said, “Hey, there’s that guy — What You Call Him — getting off the plane in Israel.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t take a pill,” I said.

“For what?  He didn’t do it.”

“There are five witnesses,” I said.

“So what. It’s the past.  Let it die.  But the fucking Jews keep bringing it up.  He didn’t do it.  He was told to, or else.”

A lieutenant interrupted, “What would you do if somebody put a gun to your head and said, ‘Do it or else’?”

“He didn’t have to do it,” I shrugged.  I was down for the count with F-ing Jews.

Israel convicted Demjanjuk, and he was in an Israeli prison for years. Then Israel’s high court overturned its verdict on various technicalities and sent him back to America.

When Demjanjuk returned to the States, he went on trial again in Cleveland and was ordered deported.  Nobody wanted him until last year, when Germany said yes.

Demjanjuk turns 90 this Saturday in a German prison hospital.

Dem john’s luck.

Dem john yuck.

Damn john’s junket . . . Kiev Oblast, Flossenberg, Trawniki, Treblinka, Sobibor, Seven Hills/Cleveland, Jerusalem, Munich.

***

2. VOLKSDEUTSCHE

The building across from St. Edward High has two hair salons — one specializing in fades and buzzes, and the other for elderly women, all about perms and tints.

The tint shop is Martha’s.  In 1977 she bought the business from Hildegard, a fellow German. Martha is Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German from Poland.

Sometimes Martha sits in her shop all day and doesn’t get a single customer.  Her clientele is dwindling.  Whenever I come in, she hugs me and cries. This happens every single time.

She always talks about Jews.  Poles, too, occasionally.  She is not, as a rule, fond of Poles. “Every group has its devils, but the Poles had more than most,” she says.  She mentions several East Side Jews who hired her when she came over in the 1950s.  “Wonderful, wonderful people.”

I don’t know these East Side Jews.  Some West Side gentiles think all East Side Jews know each other.

I wonder how much of Martha’s war saga is true.

Martha is often late with her rent. That’s a pain but not a major one.  She’s good for it.

I hope her war stories are all true, but I don’t really want to know if they aren’t.

Martha says her mother rescued a Jewish girl in Kutno, Poland, during the war.  Martha’s mother — along with her Uncle Wilhelm and Cousin Hedwig — saw the little girl at a train station, exchanged furtive glances with the girl’s mom, took the girl home, and raised her.  The girl wound up marrying an Englishman after the war, Martha says.

Martha had Jewish ancestors who converted to Lutheranism in the 1800s, she says.

My dentist thinks he is Larry David.  When he looks at my X-rays, he shouts, “You bastard, you don’t have any cavities!”

My friend Mike, a retired businessman, thinks he is Larry David.  Mike has lived in Cleveland 35 years, but still considers himself a New Yorker.  “I don’t want to lose my standards,” he says when we eat out.  Mike is tough on bread — for starters.  Then it’s on to water: “What?  No Pellegrino?”

I’m Larry David.

A lot of middle-aged Jewish men think they’re Larry David.

I used to listen to comedy records at Harvey Pekar’s apartment.  Harvey had all of Bob and Ray, Lenny Bruce, and even Arnold Stang, the actor who did the Chunky commercials.  I could only listen to jazz for so long at Harvey’s.

Yiddishe Cup has gigged with a couple comedians.  The comics do bits on dieting and airport travel.  Frum (religiously observant) comedians even do riffs on kosher food.  Like “We had a power outage at our house and lost $100 worth of kosher meat — two chickens and a pound of hamburger.”

I could do that.  Every Jewish guy thinks he can do that.

Seder is the training ground for Jewish comedians.  I had a relative who thought he was Phil Silvers.  Ruined everything at Seder.  I like a serious Seder.  Curb the jokes about matzo and constipation.

***

My last close relative left Cleveland in 2001.  Now my Seders are with friends.

My relatives went to warmer places or died.

I hope some of my sun-worshipping, Sunbelt relatives come back.  And if they want a sip of fresh water, that’ll cost five dollars.  That’s the Great Lakes’ big hope: the rest of the country runs out of water.

I’m in about two traffic jams a year in Cleveland.  I would prefer five.  I don’t relish the horrible traffic of Chicago or Washington, but just a few more tie-ups in Cleveland would be nice.

In the 1970s Clevelanders first began imagining the whole town could go under.  T-shirts were silk-screened: “Cleveland: You’ve Got to be Tough.”

A musician in Milwaukee wrote a song called “Thank God This Isn’t Cleveland.”   [Thanks to former Milwaukeean Andrew Muchin for that info.]

Some Clevelanders never got over the trauma of the 1970s.  I know Clevelanders who vacation in Cape Cod; they’re instructed by the national media to vacation very far from the Midwest.  They wait an hour for ice cream on Cape Cod.  I biked around Nantucket in 1979 and it was crowded then.

Some of the best scenery in America is the bike path from Gambier to Coshocton, Ohio.  Rolling farm country, horses, sheep, cows, pigs and Amish buggies.

But some Midwesterners need to see the ocean.  They drive all day to the Carolina shore.  For what?  Lake Erie has beaches, waves, fat people and miniature golf.  Check out Geneva on-the-Lake.

Seder with friends . . . It’s not the same as with Aunt Bernice, Cousin Howard, and the rest of the gang at the old Seder table.

I live three miles from where I was born.  I’m always running into things that don’t exist anymore.

Is it unusual for a college-educated Jewish baby boomer to live so close to where he was born?

Yes.

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[To my three goys: Pesach, in the post title, is Hebrew for Passover.]

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See the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show tonight (Wed. March 24) at the Malt Shop (Maltz Museum), Beachwood, Ohio.  7 p.m.  Features the mail-fraud team of  Stratton & Douglass.
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Jack Stratton, drums, and  Bert Stratton, clarinet, are featured in the movie “First Voice Ohio” at the Cleveland International Film Festival Fri. March 26, 2:15 p.m.
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See Yiddishe Cup Sat. March 27, 9 p.m., at COW, the College of Wooster (Ohio).

Yiddishe Cup is not a klezmer band.  Our recordings — and our stage shows — are dark and light, funny and serious.  Check us out.  We stretch out.  Every tune is different.

Klezmer is a clichéd marketing term, and we aren’t a party to it.

We aren’t even Jewish.  I’m not.  I gave it up for Lent.

Y Cup — formerly Yiddishe Cup, formerly Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band — fits perfectly into the world music/jazz scene.

I admire musicians who, when you hear their recordings, you immediately know who is playing.  Like “Hey, that’s Arnie!”  You know it’s Arnie by the hogs snorting in the background.

Y Cup has a new signature piece: “Mayor of West 83rd Street.”  You can smell natural gas when the tune starts.  Y Cup is a band with a very, very volatile — and totally unique — sound: intricate arrangements and constant shiftings of the lead.  We bring out different colors, different dynamics, different brews.  At a six-hour wedding, an open bar is imperative.

We write so many tunes, we can’t even name them. We gave up trying. Our newest tunes are 10-56, 10-57, 10-58.  Then ’10’ stands for 2010.

Our album in progress is titled No Name, but that is so lame.  Maybe we’ll call it 10-10-10 and release it that day.  October 10 is going to be a huge wedding date.  If we don’t have a gig that day, we’ll disband and call the album Thank You for Your Kindnesses.

Y Cup is not a star show. It’s not about one musician standing above.  The rest of the band — the sidemen — I could replace them with one quick phone call — and I’d probably have a better group too — but I don’t.  The whole is less than the sum of the parts.  Add it up.

My musicians have skills.  One guy can belch whole notes.  Doesn’t feel academic either.

Non-Jews love our music.  Non-Christians too . . . Jewish people.

When I told my wife I was leaving Judaism, she said, “Then why are you saying a brocha over the wine?”  I told her, “It’s Friday night, that’s why.  TGIF.”

Klezmer is a niche I refuse to get boxed into.

We used to do klezmer, I’ll admit.  We played it on occasion.  Even Charlie Parker played klezmer at bar mitzvahs.  In his later days he didn’t.  Granted, he died at 34.

Y Cup plays what Parker would if he were playing bar mitzvahs today. That’s our esthetic.

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1 of 2 posts for 3/3/10.  Please see the next post too.
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Readers’ advisory:  This post, “Our Esthetic: We are not a Klezmer Band,” is fiction.   Made up. 
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See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Beachwood, Ohio, Wed. March 24, 7 p.m.  Stratton, clarinet and spoken word (i.e. this blog), and Douglass, chauffeur and fuel-injected keyboards, plus vocals.  Jewish and American music.  DUO.

Yiddishe Cup at the College of Wooster (Ohio).  Sat. March 27, 9 p.m.
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Yiddishe Cup / Klezmer Guy has a  Facebook fan page.

A tenant almost sued me for icicle damage to her body.  A falling icicle grazed her shoulder.  She said it was a 25-pound icicle.

She wouldn’t have won.  There is no law stating I control the weather.  But she might have endlessly bugged me, so I told her to take some money off her rent.

There is no way to prevent ice buildup unless you put a heating cable in the gutter.  And I’m not going to do that.

Icicles: Ice==ik=uhls==.  I’ve seen six-foot icicles.

Icicles are in the playoff series, nature division, along with cardinals, sycamores and lightning bugs.

At the Webb building on the West Side, the icicles look like Niagara Falls in stop-action. The alleyway in back of the Webb building should be declared a national sanctuary for icicles; it is so frigid and dark back there.  The alley is a mile from frozen-over Lake Erie and gets no sun because apartment buildings dwarf it on each side.

A college film crew shot a crime/action movie in the alley.  They strewed litter to make it look worse.  (They picked the litter up afterward.)  They spread rock salt to melt the snow and ice.  Use the snow, use the icicles. Work with it.  Dueling icicles.
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2 of 2 posts for 3/3/10

Jim Guttmann, the bass player in the Klezmer Conservatory Band, said his biggest thrill was playing nursing homes.  Guttmann, who has toured the world, can pull that off.  He said nursing home residents appreciated him the most.

Other jet-setting klezmers claim young Germans are the best audience.  Or the Poles.  Some of these young Europeans treat the visiting klezmer musicians very deferentially, like Old West buffs treat Indians at powwows:  “Nice to see you made it through, dude.”

I don’t know about Europe, but I do know about the nursing home scene.  If you don’t play “Tumbalalaika” and “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” don’t bother showing up.  Those tunes are classics.

Humor goes over too — usually.  I did a comedy number at a nursing home, and an old man in a wheelchair interrupted, “Play music!  Sit down!”

I was heckled, I was flustered, and I blurted out, “I’ll sit down when you stand up!”  That quieted him — and everybody else.

When I’m in an audience, I often feel like bellowing “Talk!” at the performers.  I don’t go for the laconic Miles Davis/Bob Dylan model.

Performers: Make your banter interesting.  Don’t just say, “The next tune is . . .”  Tell the audience about your favorite candy bar — anything.  Say more than the set list.

At Yiddishe Cup’s next nursing home gig, I’m going to read blogospheric Klezmer Guy prose while our keyboard player improvises behind me.  One piece might be “Stop Talking and Play.”  I’ll read two paragraphs, pause, and my keyboard player will lead the audience in a shout chorus of “Stop talking and play!”  I’ll read a couple more paragraphs, and again the audience will shout the chorus.  This will continue until we play “Tumbalalaika.”
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1 of 2 posts for 2/24/10.  Please see the post below too.

At some bar mitzvahs, the teens are kept in a holding pen — a separate room — with a DJ, while the klezmer band plays in an adjacent room for the older people.

I prefer everybody in the same room, but I’m not in charge.  A party planner is.

Reality: It’s rare to see a klez band in any room at any bar mitzvah. Klez is the Uncola and DJ is the cola — Coke, Pepsi and cocaine combined.

The good news: Klezmer attracts interesting customers.  These clients don’t let their kids tell them what to do — entirely.  These clients might want a Jewish theme for a party, as opposed to a ski theme.  These clients might not like ear-splitting DJ music.  These clients might not relish watching their kids perform simulated sex to rap.  In other words, these clients are out-of-it professors, aeronautical engineers and musicians.

Musicians — as clients — love to hire other musicians.  The problem is many musicians are broke.  Luckily, some are married to doctors.  We get these gigs.  We always eat well there.  That’s a big thing with musician clients — making sure the musicians eat well.

Hadassah sponsors Simchapalooza, a bar mitzvah fair, every year, where bar mitzvah moms go to the I-271 Marriott to check out DJs, balloon twisters, video guys and caterers.

I had a booth one year.  I shouldn’t have.   A herring-reeking klemzer guy up against Giant Inflatables.  I lost.

The Bar Mitzvah King — DJ Terry Macklin — had about three tables at Simchapalooza.  He was full-service: invitations, catering, canned music and photo booths.  Everything except haftorah tutoring.

Macklin drove a Jag.

Then Terry got kind of old, so younger guys encroached on his coolness turf.  Rock the House is the DJ company now.  They aren’t black like Macklin, but they’re working on it.

There was another DJ, Joey Gentile, who advertised “Mitzvah services” in the Cleveland Jewish News.  I sent that ad to Moment — the national Jewish mag — for its spice box humor section, where Moment regularly reprints media and signage faux pas, like “Easter Challah $3.99 Special.”  Moment adds a wry caption, such as, “So that’s what they ate at the Last Supper.”

My Joey Gentile mitzvah ad didn’t make it into Moment.   It should have, with the caption, “A gentile mitzvah.  No bar?  Not likely.”

A New York salesman from the Bar Mitzvah Guide phoned me to buy an ad in his slick glossy, which his company distributed throughout the Midwest.  The Bar Mitzvah Guide carried ads for everything from bottle dancers to personalized chocolate bars.  The salesman called me way too often.   Finally, I said, “I’ll place an ad, but I bet you won’t take it.”

He said, “Try me.”

I said, “I want the text to read ‘Yiddishe Cup. If the other ads here aren’t your bag, we are.'”

He took the ad.

We didn’t get any gigs.
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Yiddishe Cup is at Nighttown, Cleveland Hts.,  7 p.m. Sun., Feb. 28. $15.

Last month, when Oakwood Club, a Cleveland Heights yekkie (German Jewish) country club, went under, the powers-that-be (charitable foundations, city government, the club’s board of trustees) came to Yiddishe Cup for ideas to reinvent the place.  The machers were considering a Jewish theme park.

Yiddishe Cup said no thanks.  We weren’t going to participate in a Yiddishland Epcot.  Not our thing.  We won’t even play Fiddler on the Roof unless the audience begs.  And they do.  (And we play it.)

The Oakwood Club machers begged Yiddishe Cup to take a second look at the theme park idea.  We did.

The Yiddishland theme vied with the steering committee’s Plan B, called “Oakwood Park, an Oasis for People and Wildlife.”  That plan was just a front for owls, hawks, woodpeckers, songbirds, foxes, flying squirrels and dragonflies.  The old golf course would become a meadow.

Songbirds don’t pay the bills.

A Friday night klezmer shabbat would work.  It would feature a very lite, ecumenical Yiddishe Cup. Yiddishe Cup has a piece — “Friday Night Service-able” — with no words, like a jazz mass.

We’ve done the number a few times.  It’s basically a D-minor drone with a lot of modal improvising on top.  The composition is 45 minutes to an hour.  We’ve had a few listeners/worshippers “fall out,” or faint.

A Yiddishe Cup klezmer shabbat would draw visitors from Columbus, Pittsburgh and Detroit.  And they would want to stay over.  So we would put them up at Oakwood. We would find space.

Beat this: For $450 per person, the out-of-towner gets a Friday night klezmer shabbat (with brisket and fries), the hotel room, and a Saturday morning round-robin tennis tournament with kiddush (sanctification/vino) and coconut bars. Followed by a nap, followed by golf and swimming.

Need an extra day? Take a hike on the Tribute to Reform Rabbis exercise trail.

Sunday afternoon would be Jewish wedding central, featuring the house band, the one and only . . .
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Readers’ advisory: This post is made up.  Fiction. Based on the fact Oakwood Club is closing and is for sale.
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1 of 2 posts for 2/10/10.  Please see the post below too.

When my wife’s computer started whirring and stinking up the house, I told her not to worry.  It would correct itself.

It crashed.  No biggie.   She got a new computer.

Then my violinist’s computer crashed.   It was a laptop he carried on every trip.  It was like a Strad to him.  A Stradivarius.  Three days after the crash, he was back online.  No big deal.

My computer crashed.

Big deal. I went nuts.

My real estate data disappeared.  I lost five years of checkbook data.

My computer repairman was dead; he was killed in a freak bicycle accident.  And my back-up computer guy was in medical school — in Hungary.  I couldn’t even write a check, and I didn’t know my bank balance.

I called Quickbooks and got a technician from the Pacific time zone.  Pacific Coast people, they seem smart on the phone. The tech person found the problem — after three hours of phone jabber — and fixed it for $172.  I would have paid triple that.

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:  “Triggers for broken-heart syndrome seem as varied as the number of people affected . . . Being overwhelmed by new software at work, seeing a poultry barn burn down, or losing money at a casino all have brought the condition on, doctors say.” The article’s headline was “Hearts Can Actually Break.”

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2 of 2 posts for 2/10/10