And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl

Proof that you can't tell a book by its cover

2009-07-26T21:19:00.003-04:00

We read this book over the weekend and it was impossible to put down. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel by the amazing Motti Regev. It tells the story of the evolution of Israeli ideology via the development of the nation's music scene. Enjoy this classic from the High Windows, pioneers of Israel's pyschedelic scene. If any one has any albums from this era, we would love to hear about them.

Our Take On Poland Runs In Tablet

2009-07-10T11:41:00.005-04:00

As promised, a bit about our Krakow experience with the remarkable Seymour Stein, from Tablet, which is one of the smartest web sites we have come across in a long, long time.

We Salute the Career of Jo Amar. Another Legend Lost.

2009-07-09T14:16:00.010-04:00

Jo Amar, Genre-Bending Jewish Singer, Dies at 79

By Bruce Weber (from the New York Times)

Jo Amar, a Moroccan-born Jewish singer whose melding of Andalusian and Israeli musical influences made him a star in Israel and a popular performer in Jewish communities around the world, died on June 29 at the home of his son Ouri in Woodmere, N.Y. He was 79 and lived in Jerusalem.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son David said. Mr. Amar had been in failing health for several months, and he came to the United States in February to be with his children and grandchildren, all of whom live in the New York metropolitan area.

Mr. Amar’s music was a hybrid, fusing Sephardic and North African-Arab songs, Jewish liturgical vocal styles and even Western-style harmonies into a kind of Middle Eastern pop. He sang in a bright, engaging tenor, recording about 20 albums, and with his crowd-pleasing manner, he performed not only in large performance halls with full orchestras but also in cabarets and at weddings and other private functions. He was often asked to be the guest cantor on Jewish High Holy Days, invitations he accepted selectively, in cities including Paris and Casablanca.

A composer of songs as well, he performed for Jewish audiences throughout the diaspora, in places like Brazil and South Africa; in 1963 he even toured in Iran, performing before mixed Jewish and Muslim audiences and appearing on Iranian television.

Yosef Amar, who was known as Jo from an early age, was born on June 1, 1930, in Settat, Morocco, where his grandfather had been the chief rabbi. He studied at a yeshiva in Meknes, Morocco, and planned to become a Hebrew language teacher, but his affinity for music directed his life. During a visit to Israel, before moving there in 1956, he persuaded a radio station to listen to his music by gathering an impromptu choir on the street outside to perform one of his songs. He became popular in Israel, especially among immigrants from northern Africa and the Middle East, his hybrid music helping to open European Jewish ears to new, exotic sounds.

Mr. Amar came to the United States in 1965 to perform at Carnegie Hall, in a well-received concert that eventually persuaded him to move to New York with his family in 1970.

“In a variety of Oriental-flavored popular songs he displayed a broad range of feeling, a penetrating projection, regionally nasalized intonation and strong rhythmic sense that communicated warmly with the audience,” the music critic Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times.

In the late 1980s Mr. Amar returned to Israel with his wife, Raymonde. She died in 1997.

Besides his sons David, of Fresh Meadows, Queens, and Ouri, Mr. Amar is survived by two daughters, Esther Umanoff of Tenafly, N.J., and Madeleine Labovitz of Highland Park, N.J.; 11 grandchildren; 5 great-grandchildren; and 7 siblings, who live in Belgium and Israel.

From: The New York Times

Back in one piece...

2009-07-08T13:55:00.002-04:00

We are back... full report to come... but here are some images...

We are going to Polska

2009-06-24T21:49:00.003-04:00

The Idelsohn Society has been invited to participate in the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Poland which is a big honor. If you are in the vicinity, come see us speak about our work on Friday July 3rd at midday. We are excited to attend the festival which is one of the world's greatest, and to track down many of the musicians and sounds from Eastern Europe who have influenced much of the music we are tracking down with such passion over here. We will be blogging from Poland, but if you are going to be there, be in touch.

Idelsohn Showcase rocks San Francisco

2009-05-27T09:28:00.011-04:00

Part of the reason we formed the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation was to change the legacy of the performers we meet. Over the past five years we have uncovered a lost world of Jewish Music replete with performers whose careers have been in danger of being written out of history. A core part of our strategy is getting them back on stage to rock a young audience. A little like the Buena Vista Social Club but a little less Cuban. We were elated to sell-out the CJM in San Francisco on April 30th with an Idelsohn showcase that saw 93 year-old Irving Fields play the city for the first time, Jonny Yune, the Korean master of Jewish melody, and a special guest return to the stage by Lynn Burton of the Burton Sisters who were re-found thanks to readers of this site.

Thanks to Connie Wolf and the board and staff at the CJM in San Francisco for giving them the opportunity to take the stage again, so a young audience can rock out to their sound and appreciate their legacy. Next stop, the Lincoln Center on August 23rd.
Sold Out crowd at the CJMIdelsohn Society co-founder David Katznelson welcomes Lynn Burton of the Burton Sisters onto the stage for the first time in 50 years.
The sell-out audience mobs Irving Fields, Lynn Burton, and Jonny Yune. Scenes not enacted since Beatlemania.

Irving Fields, 93, rocks the kids.

Jonny Yune closes the show with a sterling version of Ose Shalom.

Why Gavin Newsom Should be Governor...

2009-05-04T09:53:00.006-04:00

Irving Fields played in our showcase Thursday night with the Korean Master of Jewish melody, Mr. Jonny Yune, and Newsom made April 30th officially, Irving Fields Day in San Francisco. This was the first time Irv had played the city in his 93 years, proving that it is never too late to try something new. More photos from the magnificent gig, which also saw the return to teh stage for the Burton Sisters for hte first tiem in 50 years, to follow.

The Legendary Lionel Ziprin: Our Friend

2009-03-21T09:23:00.004-04:00

From today's New York Times about our dear friend, the remarkable Lionel Ziprin. May his name be a blessing, and may his family have a long life.

Lionel Ziprin, Mystic of the Lower East Side, Dies at 84

By William Grimes

“We are not after all intended to be consumed.”

So begins Lionel Ziprin’s “Sentential Metaphrastic,” a “poem in progress” of more than a thousand pages. “I reduced it to 785 pages,” Mr. Ziprin told The Jewish Quarterly in 2006. “I call it the longest and most boring poem since Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ ”

Many more poems by Mr. Ziprin remain to be discovered, inscribed on spiral-bound notebooks and stuffed into a closet in his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And that is nowhere near the half of it. Also in the apartment are the Jewish liturgical chants intoned by Mr. Ziprin’s grandfather, untold hours of sacred music that Mr. Ziprin tried for more than half a century to bring to the wider world.

This legacy now passes to his family — whether to delight or puzzle posterity, no one knows. Mr. Ziprin, a brilliant, baffling, beguiling voice of the Lower East Side and the East Village in all its phases — Jewish, hipster and hippie — died last Sunday in Manhattan. He was 84. The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his daughter Zia Ziprin said.

For decades, Mr. Ziprin, a self-created planet, exerted a powerful gravitational attraction for poets, artists, experimental filmmakers, would-be philosophers and spiritual seekers.

He ran his apartment, on Seventh Street in the East Village, as a bohemian salon, attracting a loose collective that included the ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, the photographer Robert Frank and the jazz musicia Thelonius Monk, who would drop by for meals between sets at the Five Spot. Bob Dylan paid the occasional visit.

There the art of conversation took a backseat to the art of listening to Mr. Ziprin hold forth for hours at a stretch on magic, interplanetary rhythms, angels, apparitions and Jewish history.

“He was larger than life and so far beyond a certain kind of description that I am bamboozled,” said Ira Cohen, a longtime friend. “He was much larger than a poet, though that’s hard for me to say, as a poet. He was one of the big secret heroes of the time.”

Often categorized as a beatnik, he created an artistic circle that overlapped with the worlds of jazz and beat poetry but remained distinct and apart. A poet prey to visions and hallucinations, a philosopher, a Jewish mystic with a deep understanding of the kabbalah, an enthusiastic consumer of amphetamines (legal at the time) and peyote (also legal) — he was all of these, and something else besides.

“He combined Old World mysticism and New World craziness,” said the poet Janine Vega. “He really was one of the great white magicians of the era.”

Mr. Ziprin was born on the Lower East Side and, after his parents separated when he was a small child, lived with his mother and her parents. The decisive influence on his life was his maternal grandfather, the rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, an immigrant from Galilee who founded the Home of the Sages of Israel, a yeshiva on the Lower East Side.

The home atmosphere was devout.

“I thought I was living in the Bible,” Mr. Ziprin said in a documentary produced by Jon Kalish for public radio in 2006. “ My grandparents were like biblical people. The only problem I had as a child, I looked outside, and there were automobiles. There’s a big contradiction.”

While undergoing a tonsillectomy, young Lionel — called Leibel or Leibele by his family — was badly overanesthetized. After emerging from a 10-day coma he developed St. Vitus’s Dance and epilepsy. He was seized by fits of uncontrollable laughter and experienced hallucinations. For the rest of his life, he saw visions and conversed with the spirit world.

Physically unfit for military duty, Mr. Ziprin began writing poetry after attending Brooklyn College and worked at an assortment of extremely odd jobs. He helped create a short-lived puppet show called “Kabbalah the Cook” for television. For $10 apiece, he wrote the text for a series of war comic books published by Dell.

In 1950 he married Joanna Eashe, a dancer who made a living as a hand and foot model. In the early 1950s the couple started a totally unsuccessful greeting card company, Ink Weed Arts. She died in 1994.

In addition to his daughter Zia, of Manhattan, he is survived by a brother, Jordan, of Phoenix; another daughter, Dana Ziprin of Richmond, Calif.; two sons, Leigh and Noah, both of Berkeley, Calif; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Ziprin’s poems, including “Math Glass” and “What This Abacus Was,” appeared here and there in magazines like Zero, but he barely bothered to pursue a career. A poet in the prophetic tradition, he did not so much write as open himself up to otherworldly voices.

“He would read the stuff we published and would have no idea that he’d written it,” said Judy Upjohn, who, with Sandy Rower, published a selection of Mr. Ziprin’s verse in “Almost All Lies Are Pocket Size” (Flockaphobic Press, 1990).

Clayton Patterson, who is writing a history of the Lower East Side, filmed Mr. Ziprin reading his “Book of Logic ” and organized a screening of 10 two-hour installments at Anthology Film Archives in 1989. “The first night there was a full house,” he said. “By the third night there were three people, besides Lionel and myself. That ended the series.”

Mr. Smith, the ethnomusicologist who produced the seminal Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways Records, heard Mr. Ziprin’s grandfather chanting at a public celebration and became obsessed. Setting up sound equipment in the rabbi’s yeshiva, he spent two years recording hundreds of hours of Hebrew liturgical chants, along with Arabic songs and Yiddish stories, which were distilled into 15 long-playing records.

Shortly before his death in 1955, the rabbi begged his grandson to bring the records to a wider audience, inspiring a half-century quest whose end remains uncertain. Folkways released one album from the set, but for religious reasons, family members objected to further distribution of the material.

In the late 1960s Mr. Ziprin’s wife took the children and moved to Berkeley, Calif., plunging Mr. Ziprin into a spiritual crisis. It was resolved when, acting on instructions from his grandfather in a dream, he returned to the Judaism of his youth and to the Lower East Side, moving into his mother’s apartment on East Broadway to care for her until her death in the late 1980s.

From the mid-1970s until his death, Mr. Ziprin spent his days studying the Torah and other texts at what was once his grandfather’s yeshiva. He held court at his apartment. He scribbled thoughts on postcards and sent them to just about anyone.

He also searched for someone willing to produce his grandfather’s records. As the years went on, and some of the tapes were lost to fire, flood and theft, the mercurial and often cantankerous Mr. Ziprin often seemed to be sabotaging his own cause, eager to disseminate his grandfather’s legacy but reluctant to let it go.

Briefly it looked as if the composer John Zorn had secured the rights to release the records, but Mr. Ziprin could not let go. At his death, the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation had made a compilation CD from the material that seemed to please Mr. Ziprin, clearing the way for the production of a full boxed set.

A man of many words, he managed to write his self-portrait in just a few:

I have never been arrested. I

have never been institutionalized.

I have four children. I am in

receipt of social security benefits.

I am not an artist. I am not an

outsider. I am a citizen of the

republic and I have remained

anonymous all the time by choice.

Mordechai Kaplan Rocks Out

2009-03-10T21:50:00.004-04:00

When the great Jewish theologian wanted to bring his Reconstructionist thinking to the attention of Jews across the country, going into the studio to record an album was the natural thing to do. This six-disc box set dropped in 1963, the same year as the Beatles' Please, Please Me, and it is a masterpiece of creative thinking. Somewhat of a concept album, actors take it in turns to cue up questions that the great rabbi methodically answers. Some he swats away quickly. Others he chooses to unravel deliciously long responses. Our favorite? "Is there any warrant for the general apathy on the part of Jews to the fact that a large number among them are involved in all kinds of rackets and shady deals?" Listen to that here and wonder how many Rabbis today are dropping such masterworks...

Israeli Army Songs

2009-03-03T11:21:00.011-05:00

This album, replete with rusty looking grenade and handful of bullets was sent to us by Dave in San Francisco. We love the headlines especially, Hagannah Blows up Gang Nest. The album and the other we have collected over the past couple of years spring from an era in which the military side of Israel was the catalyst for a whole genre of albums. When we see the Six Day War Recorded Live! as if it was The Who: Live in Leeds, we begin to wonder. What role did these albums play in the life of those who bought them? Were they purchased as symbols of pride and identity alone after the Six Day War? Or were they really listened to as if they were musical magic? Here is a track from Chaim Herzog's The Six Day War Original Radio Broadcasts. Click here to listen. And if you once owned any of these albums, we would LOVE to hear the story of what compelled you to buy it and how you experienced the recording.

Burton Sisters... in glorious technicolor

2009-02-25T11:50:00.006-05:00

Two weeks ago we did not know the story of The Burton Sisters. Now we have received this stunning story in glorious technicolor which takes us on a whirlwind tour from the stock rooms of Philly to the recording of "Doin' the French Can-Can." Check out Mickey Katz wowing "America's best known singing sister team" with his cowboy antics. (click on any image to expand)

Burton Sisters... Case Closed!

2009-02-17T07:09:00.003-05:00

We were delighted to receive this definitive history of the Burton Sisters by a man in the know, Jim Shipley. His email began with the declarative statement, "O.K., I married one." And if you read the below, Mr. Shipley became the Burton Sisters equivalent of a Yoko Ono. It is a riveting read. If anyone has more images, albums, memories, or ephemera, we would LOVE to see/hear them...

The Burton Sisters are from Logan, in North Philadelphia. Their dad was a "Song and Dance Man" - even a singing waiter at one time. No matter the hardships of the depression, there was always a piano in the house. Moe Jaffe who wrote such hits as "Gypsy in My Soul", "Chanukah Candles", "If you are But a Dream" and "If I had My Life to Live Over" among others was a friend of the family.

From this background, the eldest sister, Rae became a singer and a local star in Philadelphia. The two younger sisters, Rose and Evelyn then followed by harmonizing their way to gigs at bar mitzvahs, lodge meetings and the like. Rose (who became Carol in the act) and Evelyn (shortened to Lynn) finally were signed by the Stan Zucker agency in New York.

This took them from Fall River Massachusetts to Dothan, Alabama, to six month stints in French Canada where they performed in French. From there to the Borscht Belt, Grossingers, the Concord and the like where they appeared with stars of the day like Eddie Fisher, Buddy Hackett and others. They toured with a USO troupe and were regulars on the radio program "Jewish Cavalcade of Stars" on WMGM in New York.

During one of their nightclub appearances they were heard by song writer Bob Merrill who wrote among other things, the show "Funny Girl" and "How Much is that Doggie in the Window". He signed them to a contract along with his partner, Murray Kaufman, known as "Murray the K" a New York disc jockey.

Bob got them a contract with RCA Victor. They had been recorded on Banner Records, the all Yiddish label founded by Yiddish star Seymour Reichseit.

With RCA they recorded "French Can-Can", "Divided Love," "Please Don't Touch" and "Let Me Go Lover". Rose, nee Carol, met the RCA Distributor in Cleveland on a disc jockey tour and the two became Mr. and Mrs. Jim Shipley, bringing to an end the career of the Burton Sisters.

Sister Evelyn continued in show business, touring with the show "Fiorello" and making night club appearances until she married Dr. Manny Fertman and moved to San Francisco.

Burton Sisters... tell us more...

2009-02-10T20:30:00.005-05:00

Russ in San Francisco sent in these beauties... The Burton Sisters, Barry Sisters predecessors... about whom we know little but would love to hear more. The covers are intriguing. Those square jaws. The poodles floating overhead. The tag line, "They're Double Dynamite." If anyone knows anything about this handsome duo, we would LOVE to hear it.

Jews on Vinyl ads

2009-02-10T17:00:00.007-05:00

We had a blast last week in San Francisco. More images of the exhibit launch to come... for now, let it be known we have achieved a long held ambition... to have our project promoted on the backside of a public lavatory. The CJM is one of the most creative museums in the country and they have taken our vinyl collection to places we have only dreamed of...

Excellent article here in the San Francisco Chronicle. Delfin Vigil is an amazing gent.

Idelsohn Society takes on San Francisco

2009-02-03T13:56:00.004-05:00

We are honored to announce that an exhibit showcasing the album covers from the book and featuring many of the artists tracked down by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation is opening February 6th at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in good old San Francisco.

We have had a blast curating this exhibit which will be housed in a reconstructed 1950's living room, showcasing hundreds of album covers and playing a couple of handpicked playlists which are absolutely swinging. If you are in town, we would LOVE to hear what you think...

My Yiddishe, American, Spanish Mama

2009-01-27T20:17:00.001-05:00

My Yiddishe Mama was the legendary Sophie Tucker's signature song. One she started to rock in 1925 after the death of her own mother. She originally released it in English with a Yiddish version as the B-side and it became a smash hit, despite the heaviness of its lyrics:

"She would have leaped into the fire
and water for her children.
Not cherishing her is certainly the greatest sin."

Every Jewish stereotype of the Jewish mother-child stereotype succinctly captured in just three lines. Brilliant craftsmanship that perhaps has contributed to its longevity. It has been recorded by everyone from Itzhak Perlman to the Barry Sisters... and here are four of our favorites. The original and arguably still the best, by Sophie Tucker. Yossele Rosenblatt, the greatest cantor of his generation lending his signature sobbing sound to the Yiddish. Tom Jones leading Australian singing sensation John Farnham in a duet. Jones was want to introduce the song in concert by saying, "This is a song I learned, from my father, when I was a boy." And then romantic balladeer, the late, great Spaniard Nino Bravo takes it to a new level with his version, My Querida Mama, My Beloved Mama. If you have a favorite, we would love to hear about it.

Sophie Tucker

Yossele Rosenblatt

Tom Jones and John Farnham

Nino Bravo

Little Eva Mystery

2009-01-21T10:52:00.002-05:00

Many of you will no doubt remember Little Eva, who made it big with the smash sensation, The Locomotiion, after landing the prime job as Carole King's baby sitter. But does anyone know why this song about a gorilla was named Magilla -- as in, "the whole Magilla..."?

Yodelling Ahroni

2009-01-14T20:19:00.003-05:00

This website has sung Hanna Ahroni's praises before... and so we were delighted to receive this track from Lorne in New York, Hannah's Hora. Part haimishe, part yodel, where the Semitic meets the Alpine. Listen and be enthralled...

And you shall know us, by the trail of our radio clips...

2009-01-01T15:38:00.009-05:00

Happy New Year to everyone, and a massive thanks to all those who have been in touch to discuss the albums and artists featured in our book, as well as those of you who have kept sending your vinyl finds our way.

Our project has garnered some gorgeous coverage over the past few weeks. In the wake of our All Things Considered feature, the amazing Michael Raphael did this piece on the (deeply lamented) Weekend America focusing on the magical and evolving world of cantorial sound.

Very Short List gave us a great hit -- as well as placed the great Sol Zim on their banner, which is where he surely belongs.

The iconic Irving Fields took news of our project to the salacious territory of New York Post's Page Six.

And WNYC's Soundcheck did a great piece here. The kicker to this feature was that Soundcheck invited Conrad Keely of the band whose name inspired us, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of our Dead on the show the next week for an interview and live performance and Joel Meyer, the show's brilliant producer, sent us the above snap, which kind of brings the whole project together in a rather surreal way. Conrad. You rock.

Trail of Our Vinyl rocks New York City...

2008-12-21T20:09:00.017-05:00

New York Times preview here

But for our review... read on:
On December 11th, The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation rocked New York with the sounds that once reverberated everywhere across the city. Many of the artists we have met over the past eight years took the stage one more time at Joe's Pub, playing for a sold out crowd who packed the club even as the heavens opened outside. By the line to get in, you would have thought the Beatles had reformed. Sodden masses clad in North Face, braving the elements to hear Irving Fields, El Avram, Gershon Kingsley, and Sol Zim hit it hard. The gig itself was an eighty-five minute roller coaster through time. 93-year old Irving Fields kicking things off with an animated version of Miami Beach Rhumba segueing into his Hava Nagila, replete with signature finger pyrotechnics which bought the audience to their feet. We could have closed the show right there. Irving felt the love and told the audience that they "could not understand how fulfilling it was to hear the applause of a crowd at his age."
Irving had set the bar high, but Avram Grobard, the mighty El Avram, had no fear, unleashing his ridiculously addictive "El Avram's Theme" on the audience who surely left the show with the chorus rebounding through their minds. A remarkable performance from a master of stagecraft.
Moog pioneer Gershon Kingsley took the audience on a journey into the Hebraic origins of his anthem, "Popcorn" leaving the stage to a flute driven tribute laid down by band leader, Paul Shapiro who was a giant throughout.
The show was closed by Sol Zim, the last in a royal lineage of five generations of Cantors whose career was inextricably changed when he attended a KISS concert at Madison Square Garden in the seventies. Sol toyed with the audience with his thumping rendition of Am Yisrael Chai, gyrating his crotch through the chorus, dragging the audience through the chorus, and yes, knickers were thrown...
The gig was a blast. For the audience, and most importantly, for the performers who rocked so hard, killing in their own way, and challenging the audience to consider both their individual pasts and their sense of collective history. Thanks also to Jessi Klein, Jody Rosen, and Kandia Crazy Horse, who toasted Streisand/Diamond duets, Jewface sheet music, and The Temptations doing Fiddler in that order... Nextbook and Alana Newhouse for hosting the afterparty, and Jackie Hoffman who channeled the spirits of Belle Barth and Ruth Wallis in inimitable fashion. We are planning a much bigger show in New York in Summer '09. But next up, a west coast gig... San Francisco, February 5th....

Leonard Nimoy Names That Tune

2008-12-17T11:14:00.012-05:00

Last week was a busy, bi-coastal one for us here at Trail of Our Vinyl with two book launch parties on opposite sides of the country. We started West where our friends at the Santa Monica Museum of Art were kind enough to let us stage an amazing night of music and book- signing right in the middle of an exhibition by Martin Kersels. We knew that the one and only Leonard Nimoy was a Jewish music buff-- turns out Spock is also a veteran of Yiddish theater and Fiddler on the Roof-- so we decided to test his skills live on stage with a round of Name That Tune featuring artists and songs from the book.

We started with Irving Fields' slow-boiled bongo-peppered take on the Second Avenue chestnut "Belz Mein Shtetele Belz" and then moved to Terry Gibbs' take on "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" (featuring klezmer legend Sam Musiker on clarinet and Alice Coltrane on piano). Nimoy knew both tunes right away but hadn't heard these versions before, which started a good conversation about authenticity and tradition and about just how flexible musical Jewishness has been, which only intensified when he heard "Bei Mir" done by 30s "vout" jazzers Slim and Slam and a surprisingly cantorial sounding Judy Garland. Nimoy could easily differentiate between the voices of Yossele Rosenblatt, Richard Tucker, and Pierre Pinchik, and had no problem with Aaron Lebedeff's 40s version of "Roumania, Roumania," even if he scoffed at Eartha Kitt's rendering of it. There were tall tales of down-and-out cantors on his childhood streets of Boston ("Tabatchnik is Coming! Tabatchnik is Coming!") and fond memories of singing the staples of the Yiddish stage. Yet his Fiddler experience had him in disbelief when he heard The Temptations doing "If I Were A Rich Man" and he explained his resistance to the songs of Mickey Katz and Leo Fuchs, which he thought-- at one time-- were poor substitutes for the glory days of pre-WWII Yiddish music (we did our best to convince him otherwise).

The night's best moments came when Leo Fuld's "Where Can I Go?" got Nimoy going on the power of Jewish song as a diaspora tool-- longings for home, longings for a place to go-- and when Theodore Bikel's version of "Tumbalalaika" inspired him to lead the audience in a warm, group sing-a-long that somehow managed to feel as old-school as it was brand new.

The Playlist:

"Belz"- The Irving Fields Trio
"Belz Mein Shtetele Belz"- Seymour Rechzeit "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"- Terry Gibbs Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"- Judy Garland Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"- Slim and Slam "Roumania, Roumania"- Aaron Lebedeff ""Roumania, Roumania"- Eartha Kitt "Tikanto Shabbos"- Yossele Rosenblatt "Sim Shalom"- Richard Tucker "Rozo D'Shabbos"- Pierre Pinchik "Fiddler on the Roof Medley"- The Temptations "Where Can I Go?"- Leo Fuld "Bashana Ha'Bah"- Jon Yune "Yiddishe Mambo"- Mickey Katz
"Tumbalalaika"- Theodore Bikel

Can anyone crack the mystery that is... Benji?

2008-12-08T20:00:00.002-05:00

This album was sent to us by Ollie from Los Angeles. We appreciate its design simplicity and the fact that the artist clearyly foresaw the Sleeveface fad. But who is Benji? His music is pop with a Mediterranean inflexion. But that is all we have to go on. If anyone can shed any light on Benji (a dead ringer for Donald Sutherland if ever there was one) and his career or even connect us to the man himself, we would love to hear from you.

The Riddle of Marcus Goldman... Uncovered

2008-12-02T13:14:00.008-05:00

Marcus Goldman's album, Marcus Goldman Orchestra has long been an enigma. Marcus Goldman himself stares from the cover, sphinxlike. Secure in the knowledge that his name is etched across both his signature accordion and the large velvet yarmulke he sports, suggesting he is either extremely forgetful or heavily into personalizing his effects. We are indebted to a reader, Barry Mitchell, who enlightened us via email:

"I know Marcus Goldman posing with his accordion is of particular interest to you. The album actually dates back to at least 1972, the summer I played in a dance trio at Schenck’s Hotel in Fallsburg, NY. Marcus (also known as Alex, which probably accounts for the label’s name, Al-Mar) sold his self-pressed albums while leading the Catskill ladies in afternoon poolside dance lessons. He’d show up, set up his sound system, and blast Eydie Gorme’s “Blame It On The Bossa Nova.” If I remember correctly, the album featured the keyboard stylings of Bob Reisenman, who had the house band at Schenk’s.

It’s the same summer I wrote and performed at Schenk’s, the Evans Hotel, and the Homowack Hotel my parody of Sammy Davis’s then-popular hit, “Candy Man.” (“. . .who makes cherry blintzes, tender, light and sweet? Latkes that are flaky and borscht that can’t be beet? The Flonken Man. . .”)"

Our next challenge in researching this material is to hear about how the listeners encountered the music. If you have any stories at all... please be in touch! We would LOVE to hear them. trailofourvinylATgmail.com

Ornette and Yossele

2008-11-24T10:39:00.009-05:00

We knew that there was a time when Cantors were the Jewish spiritual world's equivalent of rock stars, when they juggled careers in the synagogue with the bling allure of Broadway and the Opera stage. We knew that Richard Tucker could put out LPs for Shabbat and Yom Kippur one minute, then show up on a Christmas album the next, right alongside Sammy Davis Jr. and Dina Shore. We knew that Bela Herskovitz showed up on This Is Your Life and then played Carnegie Hall with Eddie Cantor. We knew that Cantors played the Catskills just like Tito Puente and Buddy Hackett, only the Cantors got backing from symphony orchestras. We knew that Al Jolson and Harold Arlen were the sons of Cantor fathers and often spoke of Cantorial commonalities with African-American spirituals, blues, and jazz. We knew that Johnny Mathis did his Cantorial best on his own version of "Kol Nidre."

But we had no idea that Yossele Rosenblatt, arguably the greatest U.S. based Cantor of the 20th century (and the highest paid-- he could get up to 15k for a single Yom Kippur gig) was a voice in the head of jazz legend Ornette Coleman. In his fantastic new book, The Jazz Ear, NY Times critic Ben Ratliff sits down with Coleman to listen to music that Coleman chooses. His first pick is a 1916 recording of Rosenblatt singing "Tikanto Shabbos," a mix of crying, singing, and praying that when Coleman first heard it, made him cry. "I said, wait a minute," he tells Ratliff. "You can't find those notes. Those are not 'notes.' They don't exist...I think he's singing pure spiritual. He's making the sound of what he's experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, and what he's singing to is what he's singing about. We hear it as 'how he's singing.' But he's singing about something. I don't know what it is, but it's bad.”

These days it's easy to conflate old-school Cantors with frozen tradition (Warner Brothers wanted the Ukranian-born Rosenblatt to play Jolson's stubborn Orthodox father in The Jazz Singer-- Rosenblatt declined), write them off as symbols of conservatism or insular identity. But Coleman's ears remind us of the great Cantorial legacy in American and Jewish music, re-establishing Cantors as practitioners of avant-garde outness, as spirit voices departing from the soul and heading up and out for what Sun Ra used to call "other planes of there," or in the words of Coleman himself, "something else!!!!"

Sreading the Word: All Things Considered/Josh Spear

2008-11-23T14:48:00.004-05:00

And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl was on All Things Considered this Friday. Our long time love for Melissa Block has reached new levels. Listen here.

And thanks to Josh Spear, the tastebuds of a generation, for spreading the word about this project. Massive stuff.

Can anyone crack the mystery that is Mr. Lou Mason?

2008-11-18T11:32:00.008-05:00

We have collected so many comedy albums over the past couple of years that at times, it has felt as if they were the only kind that Jews ever recorded... from Rodney Dangerfield's quintessential Shlemiel, The Loser, to the "Bawdy women of Jewish comedy," Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, Totie Fields, and Rusty "Knockers Up" Warren, not to mention the Yinglish maestro, Mickey Katz, and the Jewish jazz tones of Lenny Bruce. Time Magazine, that veritable newssource, had a 1970 lead article dedicated to exploring why "nearly 80% of the top comedians in the country are Jewish." They focussed on the work of clinical pyschologist Samuel Janus who studied 76 different Jewish comics concluding that a life spent in poverty and despair was the crucial step on the road to entertainment success. "What makes them funny, says Janus, is their pain." You don't say... But even we were stumped by this album which has just come in... by Lou Mason, the self-styled "Master of Lafter." His tailored velvet jacket says superstar, but we had never heard of him and can't find a trace of him on the internet. Our first thought was the obvious one -- that he was Jackie Mason's brother. The Dan Swayze to the more famous Patrick, if you will. But we have found no evidence of that, and frankly he looks too self-condifident for that to possibly be. Listen to his sweet repartee. This is his "take my wife, please" bit, which he calls Wives Stories. If any of you can shed light on this mystery, we would be indebted. Please be in touch...

Jewish Twists

2008-11-11T10:01:00.009-05:00

When Hank Ballard and The Midnighters released a minor blues number they called "The Twist" back in 1959, it was a forgettable b-side. When Chubby Checker covered it a year later, it not only became an a- side single that rose to #1 on the Billboard charts, it became a social event, a culture-spanning dance craze to end all culture- spanning dance crazes-- apologies to all of you still mastering your lambada, electric slide, and Aunt Jackie steps. Thanks to Checker, everybody was dancing The Twist, an entire nation's body turning and bending to a blues shuffle and curing the country of a cultural cancer that Eldridge Cleaver diagnosed as "Bing Crosbyism, Perry Comoism, and Dinah Shoreism." Kids of all colors shook off the vanilla purr of the 50s and The Twist became, in Cleaver's famous words, "a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books." Young Jews were key pioneers in the suburban shift of the 50s and key players in the civil rights movement so it's no surprise that they added their own two cents to The Twist's musical legislation. Checker himself made sure that Jews were dancing with him when he re-recorded The Twist to the tune of "Hava Nagilah," even switching between the song's original Hebrew and his own Hava-fied English that invites you to get on the dancefloor.

Mambo king Perez Prado was onto the same idea but knowing how much Jews loved the mambo, Prado got rid of the "Hava Nagilah" lyrics and turned it into into a Twist, complete with his signature grunts and sparkling brass section. When it was time for the Twist to "go Latin," Prado knew it also had to "go Jewish."

Of course, Jews themselves chimed on The Twist, none better than the Yiddish Fred Astaire himself, Leo Fuchs. Fuchs is best known for his work on the stages of Broadway and the Yiddish Theater, but we're partial to his Shalom Pardner LP on the Tikva label, where he drops "Yiddish Twist," a bi-cultural stomper that, around 1:20, makes Yiddish speakers get twisting to the sound of-- who else?-- "Chubbele Checker."

Found! Israeli song bird, Hanna Ahroni!

2008-11-01T07:17:00.013-04:00

Fewer of our finds have been as alluring as the Hannah Ahroni Sings Songs of Israel which we discovered on one of our collecting sorties in the thrift stores of Boca. A beautiful songbird cutting a ripe, exotic, and confident figure, laughing casually against the backdrop of a freshly harvested wheat field. How many young Americans were enticed to move to Israel by this record cover alone when it was released in 1962?

Ahroni (also variously spelled Aharoni and Aroni) was the most succesful of a gaggle of Israeli female solo performers who broke in America at the same time -- Yaffa Yarkoni, Shoshana Damari and Geula Gill were also soulful and stunning -- but there was something about this cover that haunted us and forced us to track her down. When we went round to meet her last week, Uptown in Manhattan, we had the same sense of trepidation as if we were visiting Kathy Ireland or Elle Macpherson.

We are delighted to report, age has dimmed little of her beauty. Her apartment is covered with mementos from a career which saw her play Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Caesar's Palace which she opened with a month long residence alongside Johnny Mathis. A hallway plastered with album covers was as beautiful to us as anything in the Louvre.

We heard tales of her career which blossomed under the guidance of her manager and husband, the legendary Chaim Tishman, who carefully surrounded her with talent. Tishman persuaded H.B. Barnum, Aretha Franklin's producer, to make A Taste of Hanna (RCA, 1963) the record which made her a household name on American television where she starred in an hour-long special with Paul Anka, and shared a bill for a month with Harry Belafonte at the Hilton Plaza in Miami. Rock out to these two tracks soaked in sobbing vocals and heart-tugging horn arrangements, her version of A Taste of Honey, a song made famous by Herb Alpert, and a haunting version of Hava Nagila.

Hanna's real fame came in South America where her show "An Hour With Hanna Ahroni" made her a legend in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The song which put her over the top, Viva Espana, which she originally recorded as a throwaway during a recording session in Germany, was faintly audible all over Europe in the early '70s. Enjoy it here on German TV and marvel, as the German producers do, in her polyglot abilities...

Lena and Nina Go To Israel

2008-10-28T10:33:00.008-04:00

One truth that became even truer on our collecting sprees: the scope of American Popular Music is unimaginable without the creative commingling of Black and Jewish musicians. The evidence is everywhere, from headline stories like Tin Pan Alley's Jewish composers creating pop standards out of African-American blues and spirituals and African-American jazz greats paying them back by turning those standards into jazz anthems, to lesser known tales of The Temptations and Cannonball Adderley doing Fiddler on the Roof tunes, Slim Galliard and Cab Calloway rocking songs in Yiddish about bagels, matzoh balls, and tailors, and Herbie Hancock sitting in on a recording of a Jewish prayer service. Yet as so many of the LPs we gathered seemed to suggest, Black women artists played a key role in all these exchanges. We stumbled on Eartha Kitt doing "Sholem" and "Roumania, Roumania" (see our earlier post) and Billie Holiday doing "My Yiddishe Momme" and Ethel Waters doing "Eli, Eli" and Alberta Hunter taking a trip to Israel and coming back to talk about it on the Dick Cavett show in 1979 where she proudly sings the old Alexander Olshanetsky tune "Ich Hob Dich Tsufil Lieb." She does it all in Yiddish instead of in its better known English version as "I Love You Much Too Much."

When Lena Horne-- a veteran of plenty Hadassah benefits in the States-- went to Israel in 1952, she sang some Israeli tunes she had learned phonetically over the years. Israel was in the midst of independence fever and Horne was taken by what she called "history-in-the-making in a brand-new country." She visited kibbutzes and a camp for Yemenite children, "terribly oppressed people of color, people just emerging from the kind of bondage Negroes have been struggling so long to emerge from." Nearly a decade later, in the midst of U.S. civil rights upheavals and inspired by the folk protest scene, Horne went through a career transformation and decided she needed to start singing political songs. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote her "Silent Spring" (based on Rachel Carson's influential book on environmental destruction) and Broadway vets Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and Jules Styne wrote her "Now!," an incisive rant against civil rights abuses that Styne cpmposed, believe it or not, to the cheery tune of "Hava Nagilah." Horne performed them both at a SNCC rally at Carnegie Hall. Then as film scholar Michael Renov thankfully revealed to us-- in 1965, "Now!" became the soundtrack to a pioneering experimental documentary about the civil rights movement by Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez. Must be seen and heard to be believed.

Now. (Santiago Alvarez).
Uploaded by zohilof

Nina Simone played Israel in the 70s and was shocked to find that when her El Al fight landed at the Tel Aviv airport, there were throngs waiting to see her. "They had been waiting for me to come for ten years," she wrote in her autobiography. Simone left Israel in 1979 and claimed that her visit put her back in touch with herself and with God and put her career back on track. She should have seen it coming-- Nina already had Israel on her mind in the 60s. She sang the circle-dancing ode to the Land of Milk and Honey, "Eretz Zavat Chalav," when she played Carnegie Hall in 1963. You can hear it on her incredible live LP Folksy Nina, or just be awed by this:

I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail...

2008-10-24T12:13:00.015-04:00

Israel and Folk Music have always gone together like Mr. Roarke and Tattoo. Partially because the genre's love of flowery lyrics gave Israeli poets permission to let themselves loose ideologically. And partially because like most things, electric guitars were in scarce supply in the nascent state, so the stripped-down style was the perfect sound for the day. A rich and varied folk industry was the result. Acts like Ron and Nama, The Lirons, and the Ofarim unleashed fine vinyl in the sixties and seventies. One of the combos we have come to love through our collecting is The Paravim (The Suburbs) who were known as Israel's Simon and Garfunkel. Not only did they they physically resemble the American duo and translate their material into Hebrew, they even split up though musical differences were not this cause on this occasion. One of them became Ultra-Orthodox. Here we present two tracks from their 1972 release, The Paravim Sing Simon and Garfunkel (In Hebrew.) The first is their version of America, a track about clinging onto big dreams amidst bruising realities, which was no doubt quite fitting in 1970s Israel. The second is a rollicking rendition of El Condor Pasa, the traditional folk tune plundered from the Andes with new lyrics applied Graceland style, resounded as an Israeli folk song.

Click to listen here:

America.

El Condor Pasa.

Thanks to Ari Kelman for sending in this beauty.

Found!!! Fred Katz: The Zen of Fred

2008-10-22T13:03:00.001-04:00

To get to Fred Katz, you must find your way through the manicured suburban back-streets of Fullerton, then cross a Zen garden (complete with wooden bridge over a sea of pebbles), then walk over a SHALOM doormat. Once you find him, it will be hard to stay away. We've spent many an afternoon in Katz's living room-- full of his old LPs, family photos, and collection of books on magic and Kabbalah-- and his converted studio garage, a magical space itself where Katz's cello takes center stage alongside reel-to-reel decks and piles of sheet music.

We've posted the basics on Katz's remarkable career before but suffice it to say there is nobody quite like him: the first cellist in jazz, an emeritus professor of anthropology, a composer for Roger Corman films, and an arranger for Lena Horne, Carmen McRae, Sidney Poitier, Ken Nordine, and Harpo Marx. That's not to mention his years on cello pioneering West Coast jazz with the Chico Hamilton Quintet and his numerous solo albums, from Soul-O-Cello to Fred Katz and His Jammers (where he played cello on Malibu Beach in his pajamas)...

...to Folk Songs For Far Out Folk, his landmark 1959 jazz orchestration of American, Hebrew, and African folk songs. We re-issued Folk Songs last year (more on that here) and are happy to say that it helped re-introduce Katz's incredible story to new audiences.

Jon Kalish's visit to Katz's home for NPR was one of our favorites and you can listen here.

Our Billboard Top Five

2008-10-18T08:02:00.010-04:00

Here are five tracks which are barely off our gramophones. Something for everyone to listen and fall in love with below.

Fiddler on the Roof by Motown's favorites, The Temptations

Belz by our hero, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass

Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed, the only song of lust to involve religious denominations by Bernie Knee

The infectious Dunkin' Bagel by the ever innovative Slim Galliard

The deliciously named, Dance of the Semites, by the sexiest man in the world, Herbie Mann

Hedva and David: Big In Japan?

2008-10-15T20:17:00.014-04:00

We just received this work of beauty from Samuel Shep in Cleveland and after unpacking it and giving it a spin, are intrigued. The album is a thumping funk cocktail. Taste it yourself with Side two's kick off adrenalin shot, Illusions. And the liner notes tell a cryptic and unbelievable tale of Hedva, a Yemenite Israeli who met David in the Israeli army and went on to represent Israel in an "International Popular Song Contest" which they won with a rendition of the Hebrew song Naomi. The song went on to become Nippon's number one, going gold and selling over a million records. We would love the story to be true, but it is undercut a little by the album itself. Make no mistake. Each track is a roller coaster that plays with your emotions, but it is self-produced and the liner notes are written on a type writer. But no sooner were we tempted to dismiss the whole story as some publicists creative license, we found this on the You Tube. Hedva and David singing Naomi in Japanese, and then the below. Two of the cream of Japanese crop performing their version of the track on Japanese television as if the song is a national treasure... If anyone knows where Hedva and Ron are now... we would LOVE to learn more...

Found! Moog Pioneer Gershon Kingsley!!!

2008-10-14T20:01:00.001-04:00

If you grew up loving Kraftwerk like we did, then you probably own a copy of The In Sound From Way Out, the first ever electronica album, recorded by the Moog pioneering duo, Perrey and Kingsley in 1966. After breaking up, Jean Jaques Perrey kept noodling away on his Moog, but Gershon Kingsley went on to experiment with the Fairlight and the Synclavier and released the anthem of many of our youths, the infectious 1972 dance hit, Popcorn,which is still faintly audible across the whole of Italy and huge swaths of Germany. The tune has been covered over 100 times by everyone from DJ Mystik to Herb Alpert to Ben Folds... (to listen to these golden interpretations and more click here) Imagine our delight then when these two albums were mailed to us by a reader from Chicago... Kingsley's lesser known attempts to fuse the machine and the divine -- Shabbat for Today... recordings made between 1968 and 1974 which utilize creativity, the Moog, and a few choice Proverbs to create meditations on identity and freedom in the form of a gospel-driven rock opera for the Sabbath. The album is as infectious as it is intelligent. It blew our minds on first listen. And then we were tipped off that Gershon was alive and well and living in Midtown Manhattan. We dialed him up, as nervous as if we were calling Don Johnson, Adam And or any other icon from our youth, and Gersh invited us over. We sped over to his beautiful home/recording studio, in which he keeps enough technology to launch a Sputnik. Gersh's biography spans pre-Holocaust Euope, pre-State Palestine, California and New York and his career arc is a parable of the modern Jewish experience. But most of all, he rocked us with his continued creativity, recording daily with a slew of young collaborators, and his incessant efforts to analyze our fragile psyches with his Jungian skills. You can glimpse Gershon's studio here and get a taste of the Shabbat for Today sound with his synth-funk version of U'Shoreem with chug-along drumming reminiscent of a young Stewart Copeland.

Make this year, a Mathis Yom Kippur...

2008-10-06T20:55:00.010-04:00

Eddie: When you're making out, who do you prefer? Sinatra or Mathis?
Boogie: I like Presley
-- Diner, Barry Levinson, 1982

The Jewish Day of Atonement -- Yom Kippur -- has always been one of our favorite holidays and not just because we have more to repent for than the average gent. Our unfettered delight comes from our ownership of this seven inch masterpiece by "Mr. When A Child Is Born" Johnny Mathis himself, who recorded the Kol Nidre melody —the nullification of personal promises that cannot be fulfilled—on his 1958 LP, Good Night, Dear Lord. On the album itself, Mathis' versions of Eli Eli and Where Can I Go? nestled alongside renditions of Ave Maria and Sweet Rosary but even more staggering than the tracks cropping up on an album sung by the universally acclaimed King of Romance, is that Mathis devoted the time to mastering Aramaic, Hebrew and Yiddish so he could record them fluently. Savor the track and appreciate the awe of the liturgical melody and Mathis' velvet virtuosity. And if you find it sub-consciously putting you in the mood for romance as opposed to reverential atonement, click here and calm yourself down.

We wish all of readers happiness and health for the year ahead. In the Hebrew calendar this is 5769... the end of the Sixties era... so rock on.

The Exodus of Johnny Yune

2008-09-25T14:56:00.009-04:00

It took some pleading with his manager and a few weeks of hilarious cell phone tag, but we finally made it to a Korean bakery in a strip mall in the heart of L.A.'s Koreatown to sit face to face with the great Johnny Yune. Pop culture junkies will recognize Yune from his 1982 "Asianploitation" martial arts satire They Call Me Bruce:

which helped get Yune spots as a judge on the 1984 Miss Universe pageant, as a guest on The Love Boat, and as host of his own variety show:

But for us, he is forever the "Jon Yune" of Ose Shalom, his 1975 album of Jewish and Israeli songs, sung entirely in Hebrew and Yiddish. The cover of the album finds Yune posing in front of the United Nations, which we always thought was an odd choice for such a culturally specific record, but Yune had his reasons. "I could sing in 16 different languages and I wanted to have a symbol of the whole world there," he told us. "But especially the American flag, because only in this country could a Korean guy sing Hebrew and Yiddish songs." Yune left Korea for New York in 1962 and he became a regular in the audience at Cafe Exodus, one of a few Jewish-themed nightclubs in 1960s Manhattan. After a fluke invitation to get on stage to sing a number (he did it in Italian), Yune was invited back but he had to sing in Yiddish or Hebrew. He started listening to albums by Israeli chanteuse Yaffa Yarkoni and had "My Yiddishe Momme" down cold, and was soon making 85 bucks a week and all the falafel and pita he could eat at Exodus, El Avram, Cafe Sabra, and Cafe Tel Aviv.
"Before I knew it I knew so many Hebrew and Yiddish songs and I had fallen in love with the music," he said. "Almost every Jewish song is in a minor key. There is a sadness to life. Koreans went through almost the same situation with 60 years under Japanese occupation and they treated Korean people like animals, just like the Jewish people were treated so badly. So I could feel that. Im not Jewish but I feel the same oppressions from when I was a kid under occupation." Which is why to this day, Yune still closes his Vegas act with his rousing version of "Exodus," putting his own spin on "walking without fear" across a "land that is mine."

There is nothing novelty about the music on Ose Shalom-- it is a deeply earnest and often intense album, so much so that when we played it for legendary TV producer Norman Lear (who writes about it in our book), Lear got emotional, steamrolled by memories of his own Yiddish-speaking family. Yune is mostly known as a comic and Ose Shalom was his first and last recording, but when he talks about it, it's clear that it still ranks as the most profound moment of his career.

For us, it's a major testament to the power of cross-cultural exchange and an amazing window into a 1960s Jewish music scene where all outsiders could find their voice. 'I dont converse fluent Yiddish, a bissel, you know, a little bit," Yune said before we left. "When I speak in Yiddish they say I used to have a Gilitzyaner accent! Some people tell me I speak with a Litvak accent! My Hebrew pronunciation is pretty good actually. I still enjoy speaking in Yiddish when I can and when I perform for Jewish audiences I always sing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold. When I was in Israel, I sang that sang overlooking the Gethsemane garden and Golden Dome of Jerusalem. I had tears in my eyes."

Found! El Avram, Avram Grobard...

2008-09-24T21:07:00.019-04:00

The journey was only from New York City to Wachtung, New Jersey -- but the distance we traveled was best measured in decades rather than miles. We are proud to say that we have just located and interviewed Avram Grobard, the legendary former Israeli paratrooper turned West Village night club owner and performer who fused Israeli, Jewish, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Arabic, and Japanese sounds into a folk cocktail. His El Avram clubs in New York and Florida became a veritable underground railroad for a flood of Israeli acts hoping to strike it big in America after the Six Day War and were frequented by the likes of Louis Armstrong while acting as a launch pad for performers as universally beloved as George Karlin, Gabe Kaplan, and cult heroes like Jonny Yune.

In Grobard's own words, the clubs were "a downtown bouillabaisse of Mediterranean condiments -- an Israeli owner, an Amermenian oud player, an Israeli Arab chef in the kitchen, and Greek, Italian, Spanish, and French Music in the air." The bouilabaisse had Spanish ingredients to begin with -- the club was previously El Chico, a latin music hub with a bull's head and a sombrero hanging over the stage. Mr. Grobard informed us in interview that the name change was part homage to the El Chico roots, and part a money saving stroke of genius, as in Hebrew, El is one of the names of the deity and so El Avram translates through roughly as Almighty Avram. With that justification, Grobard was able to forgo the expense of totally rebranding the club and kept the Latin decor. To our delight, he took us to the finished basement of his beautiful home, and revealed that he had moved the entire club to Wachtung, fixture by fixture. The tables, chairs, stage, and bar were all there, replete with PA system, and El Avram's personalized accordian. Put a bouncer on the door, and the club could be back in business.

It was an honor to interview El Avram and to video the story of his arrival, club success, and recording career. His funk guitar classic Any Time of the Year is rarely off our turntable. Grobard's swarthy chest hair drawing the eye despite being surrounded by what we now know were three Playboy bunnies. We thank El Avram for his patience and detail in interview and celebrate his career by sharing our favorite track, Orcha Bamidbar, in which the relentless horns and jaunty keys play off Grobard's precise yet seductive vocal magic.

If you know of any former musical performers like El Avram, please let us know so we can capture their story for our archive.

El Avram performs in his nightclub, reconstructed in the basement of his home:And how it looked back in the day. Louis Armstrong drops in to check out the talent, and El Avram celebrates. He was told there'd be cake.

Euro-tastic!

2008-09-17T09:21:00.004-04:00

When it comes to emotional attachment to the Jewish State, previous generations may have had the Six Day War, or the Raid on Entebbe. If you came of age in the 1970’s you had the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes, the annual continental battle of warbling tonsils that launched the juggernaut careers of bands such as ABBA, and… well, ABBA.

The tournament was must-see stuff across the country, despite the fact that it was perennially won by innocuous Scandinavian warblers and dastardly French lounge acts. But in 1978 all that changed when Israel’s entry Izhar Cohen and Alphabeta took to the cavernous stage in their glitzy kibbutz shirts with sneaking hint of chest hair. Since when has Israel been in Europe? The song, A-Ba-Ni-Bi gave us no chance to ask the question. It was all stabbing cut and thrust with tight horn work and orchestration adding a screaming urgency. The combo sang as if their lives depended upon it, even though the lyrics of the song were somewhat curiously about how children relate to love. When it became clear in the voting that Israel had won, Jordanian television cut their live broadcast and replaced it with a screenshot of spring flowers, telling their populace that the Belgian song had won the competition.

But I was in England. 8 years of age, and watching till the sweet, sweet end with everyone else in Europe. The performance was breathtaking. Israelis who could rock. I went to bed that night unable to sleep. My body still giddily thrilled by what I had seen, counting down the days till the next years competition which would now be held in Israel… for the first time the mighty Eurovison would be held outside of Europe.

And lo and behold, if Israel did not win that one too… with Gali Atari and Milk and Honey’s performance of Hallelujah, a song that built from a solo voice into a quartet’s crescendo. Replete with spangly bow ties and braces and formulaic shoeshine shuffle. A song purpose built to be played by bar mitzvah bands for years to come. Hallelujah has become the more famous song, entering the pantheon of popular Jewish sing-a-longs but A-Ba-Ni-Bi is forgotten masterpiece. A throbbing, soulful moment of Jewish triumph.

Mambo Chicano

2008-09-11T09:41:00.001-04:00

For American Jews, ghosts of the past, ghosts of other worlds, languages, longer names, are part of what it means to occupy the present. How Jews embrace or ward off those lingering spirits is a prime ingredient in configuring identity. That, at least, is what Donald Weber, an old friend of Hippo’s, and a particularly inspirational one, talks about in his must-read book from earlier this year, Haunted in the New World. The haunting is what makes Jewish-American culture play its changes and duck-and-cover in its transformations — the whole Jewish chameleon, Jewish mercurian theory (check Yuri Slezkine on this for at least one particularly sweeping history). I’ve been thinking about all this while listening to Rene Bloch, a Mexican musician born to French Jews who immigrated to Sonora before they moved the family north to Los Angeles. Bloch became a primo sax man in the LA R&B scene, dropping one of THE quintessential West Coast solos when he gigged with the Johnny Otis Band on 1945’s “Harlem Nocturne.” Bloch soon set out on his own in the 50s and led a number of different Latin dance bands that were the liasons to big name East Coast players like Tito Puente , Mongo Santamria, and Perez Prado (Bloch also had a stint as the leader of Prado’s band). Bloch’s particularly interesting in the kinds of mergers he pulled off in his career: bridging the Black & Mexican scenes in 40s LA, and bridging the coastal divide of the Mexican and Latino scenes in the 50s and 60s. You can hear it loud and clear on forgotten LPs like Latin Heat With A Beat (which featured him alongside Santamaria & Willie Bobo) where he did “Las Chiquillas” and on Let’s Dance The Mambo where he trailblazed with his own Mexican-Americanization of the mambo craze on what should be a classic, “Mambo Chicano”. The haunting comes in strong years later, when Bloch digs into his Jewishness, finds Christ (I mean, Yeshua) while he’s looking for the Messiah, becomes a Messianic Jewish rabbi, and now (in his early 70s) puts out albums of Messiah tunes when he’s not leading his congregation at temple Beth Shalom in Rancho Cucamunga. The Al Jolson Story it ain’t.

Locusts! Matzoh! Cowboys!

2008-09-02T10:16:00.000-04:00

The last good passover seder we had in our family was when everyone was still alive and we videotaped it. It was instant performance art, tossing red wine onto white china with exuberant cries announcing each plague, goofing on the four questions while doing our best Henny Youngmans, and feeding matzoh to the dogs (who quickly spit it out–what do dogs know of desert suffering and guerrilla baking skills?). Well, it’s passover time again (which means college students everywhere will be invoking Bob Marley over bitter herbs), so Mr. Campus thought he’d send over a little something you might want to play while pouring a little liquor for Elijah. No Jewish holiday should go uncommercialized and nobody knows that better than Manischewitz, resident matzoh monopolizers and the reason for all Jewish pre-teens’ first hangover (”Manischewitz wine, the original Jesus Juice”). They out did themselves in the 60s by releasing this 45 that paired “a real honest-to-goodness Jewish cowboy” named Harold Stern (he’s pre-law, single, and can ride bareback!) with Avram, a former Israeli paratrooper who sings tunes in Hebrew and, without explanation, Italian. It’s a plug for Passover products that interrupts Stern’s aw-shucks musings on Jewish prairie seders with Avram’s international song stylings. Stern wasn’t the first Jewish cowboy of course and he wasn’t the last: rewind to Jewish gauchos in Argentina and “Yonkle the Cow-Boy Jew,” then flip to pioneer, gold rush Jews out West, then head to Mickey Katz’s “Haim Afen Range” settlers and Gene Wilder’s reluctant Polish cowboy Avram Belinsky (Frisco Kid), then end up with Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys and this guy, a Yiddish singing chicken rancher up in Petaluma. The wagon train must be murder on the allergies.

The Year of Irving

2008-08-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

Irving Fields is a favorite of ours We used to play the Star Liner cruises with him and would never miss a night of his piano melodies at the Waldorf. We still try to catch him at Nino’s in Mahattan when we can– nothing goes better with spaghetti bolognese than Irving doing “Blue Danube” as a pasodoble. The finessed piano stylings on Bagels and Bongos are only a taste of what Irving has done over the years– everything from horn-honking sock-hop twists and velvet mash-ups of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to odes to Davy Crockett and Costa Rica. There’s also this 70s sizzler, “West Indies”, a tight bit of electric, Fender bass funk fom his 44th LP (!) Caribbean Cream, released on the Ford label. The congas come courtesy of one of Latin jazz’s top players, Bobby Matos. The copy of I have was signed by Irving in 1977: “To Mary and Rod, two wonderful people!” Irving has always been all about his public and in 1960 he even tried to teach his fans how to play piano on an E-Z Learn LP. If you follow the eight steps and practice on the piano keys sketched on the LP’s back cover, you’ll be playing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as a rumba in no time. Give it a try, and let a little Irving in your life.

The H Song, Part Two

2008-08-19T11:52:00.000-04:00

Life is full of disappointments, but few compare to dropping the needle on Glen Campbell doing “Hava Nagila” and finding out it’s an instrumental. For weeks, I had been imagining what Mr. Wichita Lineman’s voice would sound like twanging its way through our beloved Hebrew Hallmark card, but alas we only get his legendary country guitarwork. Which is, of course, pretty stellar. Before he was known for having one of the best celeb mugshots ever and for making country Hollywood and pop (is that why when I was kid I always confused him for Fran Tarkenton?), he was one of the 60s most sought after guitarists, a vet of sessions with Sinatra, Presley, Nat King Cole, Jan & Dean, and the Beach Boys. The best part of his 1969 take on on the H Song is that it was released as a 45 b-side to “True Grit,” the theme song to the famed Western of the same name, in which Campbell played the Texas Ranger sidekick to John Wayne’s hard-living US Marshal. The H Song has shown up in the most suprising of places, but being the b-side to gun-slinging “rinches” and badge-flashing Marshals, sharing vinyl with Wayne and Campbell, just might rank as one of its oddest couplings ever.

She’d Rather Be Burned As A Witch

2008-08-18T12:02:00.000-04:00

It’s well known that Eartha Kitt is a linguistic tongue-twister schooled in at least nine languages, from Spanish to Turkish. But she rarely meshed them all together in a single musical Babel like she did on her fifties version of “Shalom Aleichem” the all-time #1 hit on Billboard’s Shabbat Hot 100 List. For observant Jews, it’s what you’re supposed to sing when you get home from Shabbat services (”Peace Be Upon You”), and as a tune it dates back to the Kabalists, first showing up on the page in 17th century Prague. But the chorus is also a common “What up?” greeting and Kitt mines both here, even throwing in a bit of the H Song for good measure. Which makes her “Sholem” not really a cover of “Shalom Aleichem” at all then (see below for a more “standard” interpretation, albeit a Latin one, by Edmundo Ros), but more like a mash-up: part old-school hymn, part street dictionary, part Jewish greatest hits, and part “Introduction to Greetings of the Globe.” Kitt drops by France, Turkey, Italy, German, Spain, the American midwest (”how-dee-do?”), and finally “the old, old MIddle East.” The track appeared on Kitt’s first album for the Kapp label, after she had already been a Katharine Dunham dancer, a Victor/RCA recording artist, and an actress who could play Helen of Troy and later, Catwoman. It was joined in proto-world music style (Kitt beat Byrne, Cooder, Simon, & Gabriel to the internationalist punch by decades) by “Shango,” “Tierra Va Tembla,” “Jambo Hippopotami” and another Hebrew staple “Ki M’Tzion.”Maurice Levine conducted the orchestra and on the album’s back cover photo, the woman whose not-in-my-name-anti-war riffs made Lady Bird Johnson cry at a White House luncheon, is cradling a sleek black cat.

Oh Helen

2008-08-16T14:48:00.000-04:00

Helen Shapiro was Britain’s buck-toothed teen pop queen of the 60s, who never changed her name. Shapiro’s first gig was lead singer of Susie and the Hula Hoops, a band that included a bass player named Mark Feld who did change his name, to Marc Bolan. She quickly left the band and in ‘61, at the age of 14, had her first solo chart hit, “Don’t Treat Me Like A Child.” She was no kid novelty act, though, and over the next few years Shapiro released tons of hit singles and a stack of LPs that made her so huge that when she did her first nation-wide tour in England, The Beatles were her opening act. She even published her own teen advice book, Helen Shapiro’s New Book For Girls. Campus curls up with it at night and reports that it includes the top ten rules of good dress (Golden Rule number 2– “undies may not show but they mattter - -they are a secret between you and your dress”),Â ”My Friends — The stars,” a collection ofÂ photos of her with (Jewish-American) Neil Sedaka and (Arab-Canadian) Paul Anka, and Films of the Year (Steve Reeves in the little remembered Son of Spartacus).This is her version of Sedaka’s “Little Devil” which is remarkable for Shapiro’s lack of vocal re-interpretation– a nearly note for note gender-flipped replica of the original. The track appeared on the 1962 LP, Tops With Me, which she recorded with another no-name-changer, Martin Slavin and His Orchestra. The liner notes tell us that her hobbies include “jiving, netball and playing banjo.” In the 1980s, Shapiro hit the gospel circuit and traded it all for Jesus: “One of the interesting things for me when I first became a believer in Jesus was to find out how Jewish it is and that I didn’t have to stop being Jewish to believe in Jesus.” I blame the netball and the banjo.

Los Hermanos Ames

2008-08-16T09:47:00.000-04:00

The Ames Brothers, a strapping sibling quartet known for their easy-does-it Main St. America appeal, were actually the Urick Brothers, the four sons of two immigrant Ukranian Jews who set up family shop in Massachusetts. In the 40s, they were the first signees to the Coral label, where their knack for audio vanilla scored over 20 Top 50 pop hits. RCA Victor was next, and in the wake of albums full of breezy standards, lite exotica, Christmas faves, and Italian hits, they dropped a south of the border bomb, Hello Amigos, in 1960. On the front cover, they disembarked a plane carrying serapes and sombreros, and on the back was a cartoon stick figure plucked from Old Mexico. But don’t let the tourist vibe turn you off– the Brothers enlisted the help of Juan Garcia Esquivel and His Orchestra, the visionary Mexican composer and sonic eccentric recently revived by the bachelor pad crowd. Ed Ames does most of the Spanish-singing here because, they tell us, he had a Cuban wife. Like Nat King Cole’s “Saludos Amigos” Latin Americana albums, Hello Amigos was meant to serve as a tribute to the “colorful nations of the Spanish-speaking world” and the “unswerving loyalty of the Latin character.” Here’s them taking on Otilio del Portal’s classic “Me Lo Dijo Adela” (which they could have done in its well-known English incarnation, “Sweet and Gentle,” but didn’t) and Ary Barroso’s endlessy covered “Brasil” where Esquivel’s trademark orchestral sound effects have a particularly memorable co-starring role. “Perhaps we shall find that Buenos Aires is not as far from Boston as the maps would have us believe,” they mused in the liner notes, and then passed up the perfect groaner of a punchline. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

The Jewish Atlantic

2008-08-15T09:27:00.001-04:00

Edmundo Ros was something like England’s Cugat, a skilled, kitsch-friendly bandleader schooled in Latin rhythms and committed to making them popular with the mainstream. Ros was born in Trinidad and raised in Caracas before moving to London in the late 30s and becoming the UK’s leading advocate of rumba mania. But the tune that put Ros on the Latin exotica map was his 1949 version of “The Wedding Samba,” which was Yiddish songwriting chief Abe Ellstein’s “Der Nayer Sher” dressed up in bananas and maracas. No wonder then that Ros would try to repeat the formula by making a few more Jewish nods later in his career. This is him doing a spooky, horn-blasted take on Friday night’s most-requested hit (originally for Decca), “Latin Shalom” and then him heading to California to go south of the border to go north of the border with a version of “Spanish Flea” the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass smash (penned by Mexmeister Sol Lake) that was supposed to evoke a make-believe Mexico and ended up as the theme music to The Dating Game.

The "H" Song: Part One

2008-08-14T01:48:00.001-04:00

I should be fair to “Hava Nagila.” The song has been good to us, the standard to beat all standards, theme music that can be used for any show. Plus, it’s been covered by everyone, from Belafonte to Celia Cruz and Dick Dale. Funny thing though is that the song most synonymous with traditional notions of Jewish identity– the Anthem of The Jewish Diaspora, really– is a modern tune cobbled together just after WWI in a Jerusalem musicology classroom by Abraham Idelson and Moshe Nathanson out of a European melody that had become a hasidic nigunim (warning: like the song itself, there are multiple versions of this history floating around and this is just one). Since then, the song has never been the same, changing hands and styles constantly. Its power is in its serious flexibility, its ability to go far beyond being a Hora stomper and cross cultural divides to fit the mold of any genre. The story of the H Song will keep unfolding on this site, so stay tuned. But for starters, check this stab at it by The Spotnicks, a group of sixties Swedes with a Yiddish-inflected band name who were best known for the space suits they often wore, not for managing to get the H Song on the English pop charts.

Far Out Katz

2008-08-13T09:01:00.002-04:00

Much like Gershon Kingsley (see below), Katz has had one of the more extraordinary, if off-beat careers, in contemporary music. A vet of Army bands and Hollywood orchestras, plus sessions with Lena Horne and Carmen McRae, Katz made his biggest mark by bringing the cello into the forefront of the jazz repetoire. He did it best as a member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, an ever experimental ensemble that among many great albums, dropped “Zen”, a Pacific Jazz gem of Katz compositions that went from nirvanic riffs on the title to the Latin dash of “Montuna.” Of course, he also did all the arranging for Harpo Marx’s “Harpo in Hi-Fi” LP, Ken Nordine’s classic “Word Jazz” project, the original score to The Little Shop of Horros, and yes, the ever popular Sidney Poitier Reads Plato record. He also did an A&R stint at Decca before setlling into a long-time academic gig as a must-take music prof. The most admired, if under-discussed, Katz album though is probably this one, Folk Songs for Far Out Folk, which he said was dedicated to the idea that all jazz is born from “the roots of people.” The roots he explores here are folk songs– American, Hebrew, & African. The Hebrew ones no doubt speak to Katz’s own roots as the son of a Kabbalist and Hebraic scholar. On “BAAL SHEM TOV” and “RAV’S NIGUN” Katz is joined by Paul Horn on sax and legendary LA jazzman Buddy Collette on flute. The tracks are from 1959 and sound prophetic in their way pre-Knitting Factory, avant tackle of jazz and Jewish tradition alike.

This album was rereleased by Reboot Stereophonic Records. You can buy it here.

Axelrod's Oath

2008-08-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Fans of beats, breaks, and all things drummed (and drummed well) have long appreciated the production and composition work of David Axelrod. Working in house for Capitol in the 60s, his great achievement as a sound sculptor was to merge dreamy, lush symphonics with crackling chunky rhythmics, equally adept at conjuring a sweet urban romance as a careening car chase–just peek at his work with Lou Rawls, Letta Mbulu, and Cannonball Adderley in the 60s or Funk Inc in the 70s, or any of his own solo experiments (including two tripped out William Blake odes and a 70s “Earth Rot” bid for environmental protection). Axelrod grew up in South Central LA in the 30s and 40s, the son of an IWW ragman, and fell into jazz and blues via Central Avenue. While the Blake LPs and his collaboration with the The Electric Prunes on the loved-or-hated Mass in F Minor album are his best remembered concept albums, he also did two on Jewish themes– the 90s shoah meditation Holocaust: Requiem and his 1968 Release of an Oath, which he arranged and wrote even though the Electric Prunes get artist credit (the band was non-existent at that point). Release of an Oath explored Kol Nidre in seven liturgy-filled compositions that were as dramatic, grandiose, and solemn as they were funky and psychedelic– much in the same spirit as Gershon Kingsley’s arrangements for his 1968 moog rock opera for a Shabbat friday night in East Orange, New Jersey. The LP presented Kol Nidre as a modern liberation song, a lament against “the conqueror’s yoke,” a chance for all man to “break the chains that bind him to any oath made under duress and in violation of his principles.” Dick Whetstone’s drumming does most of the album’s best protesting, as you can hear on “Holy Are You,”proof that even Kol Nidre themes can be sampled by Fat Joe and Quasimoto.

My Mammy, Your Mammy

2008-08-11T11:27:00.000-04:00

I give up. Is Jack Robin becoming Al Jolson becoming Eddie Fisher? Or is Eddie Fisher becoming Jolson becoming the blacked up Jolson-as-Jack Robin in The Jazz Singer? Who’s ghosting who? Does blackface haunt the Jewish entertainer, or is blackface the Jewish entertainer’s inevitable, utlimate desitination? This RCA LP from 1968 (you can tell it’s from the 60s because the blackface is faded into the background and not paraded front and center) is a pretty remarkable testament to both the lingering influence of Jolson on American popular song and the lingering influence of blackface on American popular song. Fisher came up in the 50s after Jolson had already died, but they were both Russian Jewish products of immigrant parents who did some name changing (Yoelson became Jolson, Fisch became Fisher). Their voices speak to their different eras as jazz singers who didn’t really sing jazz, and Fisher’s Jolson tribute is wrapped in the kind of over-produced pop shmaltz that Jolson didn’t need (his booming, elastic voice had more hammy drama than any producer could conjure in a studio). Fisher sings nothing but Jolson staples here, but it’s his version of “My Mammy” recorded in the thick of the Civil Rights era that is hardest to swallow. Jolson sang it– infamously– in blackface, on one knee, to his immigrant yiddishe momme in The Jazz Singer, as part of his bid for white Americanism via racial masquerade. Fisher sings it in whiteface, as an American, for mammy nostalgia, right when African-Americans were overhauling the racial legacy that blackface minstrelsy symbolized. By the late 40s, it was even hard to find Jolson doing harcore mammy shtick. On this LP released just after Jolson died (just after he returned from entertaining Korean War troops).

Exodus for Everyone

2008-08-08T11:04:00.001-04:00

What does it say about us that we care less about the subject of Otto Preminger’s film about the founding of the State of Israel (which starred Paul Newman and was based on Leon Uris’ novel), and more about how everyone from Richard Clayderman to Edith Piaf and Count Basie thought it wise to take a crack at Ernest Gold’s rousing, chest-swelling main theme from the film’s score? Gold fled Vienna in 1938 and started making his mark as a film composer in Hollywood in the mid-forties. His Exodus theme was a huge, Oscar-winning hit in 1960, the perfect launch of a decade when Jews became synonymous with America– as Leslie Fiedler once put it, “when Zion became Main Street.” So much so that when it was time to add lyrics to “Exodus” the task fell to Daniel Boone’s great-great-grandson Pat. “This land is mine,” Boone wrote of Israel a year before the southern Church elder recorded his Reads From The Holy Bible LP, “God gave this land to me.” In 1969, Jimmy Scott (with Junior Mance on piano and Ron Carter on bass) did one of the most beautiful takes on the Gold/Boone version that was as much dirge as patriotic celebration, and four years earlier, the original Gold instrumental got one of its best workouts from Nuyorican conguero Ray Barretto on his Viva Watusi LP (Barretto had already worked the Jewish angle as a member of Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen). The other history of Israel: from Vienna to the Watusi via Pat Boone.

Israel’s B-Side

2008-08-07T13:07:00.003-04:00

Check out “Israel,” originally written by John Carisi back in that fateful year of 1948. This isn’t his version or Miles’, but the trombone duo of J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding who made it the title of their 1968 A&M stunner. Herbie Hancock, who also played on Jonathan Klein’s “Hear O Israel” session around the same time, was on board, as was Ron Carter and Grady Tate. In his Israel liner notes, Ira Gitler wrote, “Herbie Hancock shifts over the sands of Sinai with both hands before getting into some straight-ahead, right-hand swinging.” Even in 1968 it was still possible to score Israel with a level of sand-shifting calm and straight-ahead swing. Blues, for sure, but not the menacing, dark, tragic, suffering, embattled blues you’d have to score now. Of course, you could also just put on a real fantasy record, “Israeli Sha Sha” from the great Machito. At least Carisi heard the blues as a permanent Israeli score. Machito is pure romance, a tropical, playful Zionism swishing across a dancefloor that for these three minutes at least, has room for everyone. A sigh for the CNN ticker–if only politics actually sounded like this.

The Barry Sisters: Our Way

2008-08-06T22:43:00.003-04:00

Claire and Merna were The Bagelman Sisters before they became The Barry Sisters and, soon after, the reigning queens of Yiddish swing from the late 30s on. Though best known for turning Yiddish folk tunes into jazzified pop hits (their purring “Tumbala-Lika” can still survive any tasteful DJ set), I’ve always liked them best when they go slightly off book, especially all of their impressive Spanish-language sides (check back here soon for those). But my fave Barry Sisters album comes when most thought their career had long fizzled, in 1973, when they released Our Way on the aptly named Mainstream Records. Instead of Yid hits in pop idioms, this time they did big pop hits in Yid idioms– “It’s Impossible,” “Mame,” “Love Story.” The best of the lot is this version of Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” (sung originally by BJ Thomas on the Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid soundtrack). In Yiddish, it became “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop” and proved that even a dying language could save 70s radio from itself.

Middle Eastern Mann

2008-08-05T12:27:00.001-04:00

Brooklyn’s own Herbie Solomon became jazz’s most hirsute flutist and devoted fusionist. Mann started on the clarinet as a Benny Goodman disciple, but then switched to flute to make his mark, mixing jazz with Afro-Cuban, R&B, funk, reggae, and most importantly Brazilian– he was one of the first US jazz musicians to collaborate with the likes of Jobim and the newly-hip-again Sergio Mendes. Before he died in 2003, Mann recorded Eastern European Roots which lacked the raw sizzle of his earlier work but which he talked about as a return to who he “really” was. I sure hope not. I’d hate to think that his roots voyage would erase all the other versions of Mann we got to meet– from trolling the “Memphis Undergound” to being a “Sultry Serenader” to hustling the “Discotheque” to having a bad case of “Latin Fever.” (Cue Carrie Bradshaw voice-over…)Does getting in touch with our roots negate all the branches? Is Jewishness just a one-way ticket? Plus, Mann may not have done Eastern European before, but he did do the Middle East on his killer 1967 album Impressions of the Middle East. The liner notes make no mention of Mann’s roots and don’t exploit any connection he might have had to the lands he visits here. There’s references to ouds and odalisques and Turkish coffee, the Jewish staple “Eli, Eli,” and this Mann original, “DANCE OF THE SEMITES”, which features Chuck Ganimian on oud, Mohamed Elakkad on zither, the always deft Reggie Workman on bass, and (DJs get ready) the Semitic percussion breaks of Robert Marashlian and Moulay Ali Hafid.

Genuine and Persuasive

2008-08-04T03:10:00.000-04:00

Our favorite thing about Richard Hayman’s Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine album is the use of the word “genuine.” As if there were a slew of fake “electric latin love machines” flooding the market. And who better to offer a maraca-shaking Mexican robot in a sombrero as genuine than a Jewish arranger who started off as a harmonica guru before heading for the Boston Pops. Maybe that’s why the LP was subtitled “Persuasive Electronics.” There was some convincing to do. Hayman recorded this gem of Moog antics well after his stint with Borrah Minevitch’s Harmonica Rascals, a group which also produced Johnny Puleo, the harmonica shortie who would go on to do his own Jewish-hits-on-harmonica album. Love Machine was a first (and a last), a contribution to two crazes at once: the Moog craze and the Latin craze. As far as I know, it was a one-of-a-kind analog electro experiment, applying the tonal kaleidoscope of Moog oscillations to “The Peanut Vendor,” “La Comparsa,” and why not, “Hare Krishna.” Hayman lulls us with a version of “Scarlet Ribbons” writer Evelyn Danzig’s “Melody #2″ and goes hardcore on his own “Samba de Victoria”. Flip the album cover over, though, and you learn that even the latin love machine has limits, not to mention a whole history of stereotype to uphold. Unplug the robot and all you’re left with is another sleeping Mexican.

That Levy Boy

2008-08-03T11:08:00.002-04:00

There were plenty of Jews who got tangled up in the Latin music scene in the 40s and 50s, but only a few went for the name-change masquerade (think radio man Dick “Ricardo” Sugar). Alfred Levy could have become Alan Land but instead opted for Alfredito and morphed into a top percussionist on the NYC mambo scene. He gigged with Tito Puente and Joe Quijano before cooking up his own mambo unit that eventually got signed up to Tico Records (run by two of his lantzmen, George Goldner and Art “Pancho” Raymond). Early on Alfredito’s insider-outsider status produced tracks like this one, Chinese Cha Cha Cha which first appeared on Rainbow Records’ Alfredito Plays Mambo! 10″ and later as one of the “tantalizing rhythms” on Tito Puente’s Latin Spectacular LP showcase alongside cuts from Puente, Machito, Tito Rodriguez, Joe Loco, and Martino Savanto. In 1966, Alfredito went boogaloo for a Cotique release that showed him dabbling in Latin soul and R&B and even grabbing the mic. Here he does Sweets For My Sweet a classic from Doc “Jerome Felder” Pomus that was first made famous by The Drifters (even then it had a Latin shuffle to it), then covered by a host of folks including dubnaut Lee “Scratch” Perry.

Belle Barth: Uncensored

2008-08-01T10:57:00.002-04:00

Pearlstein, Bernstein, Levitt, and Fink. Not a law firm, but a roll call of forbidden fruit, the “Nice Jewish Girls” who torture and taunt the Gentile bloodline of a young Loudon Wainwright III perhaps the most un-Jewish of all non-Jewish American singers. “Not Nordic names, I know,” he whines. It’s a short, odd ode to Country Day school boy-lust for the Other girls, the ones with the long names, the ones in the same tax bracket who hold out the mythical promise of exotic possibility somewhere deep in the suburbs. Jewish girls don’t usually get a good rap in pop culture– the wallet-draining, life-ruining, soul-stealing Jewish American Princess archetype has pretty much held Jewish women in a representational stranglehold for decades– and his song is no Jewish feminist anthem, but at least it’s momentarily celebratory. Plus, Wainwright comes off as the deprived and depaved one here. He may have the blue-blood, but they make his “juices flow” and by the song’s end, he sounds desperate for what he can’t have, like he’d do anything for them, like he’d stalk their Shabbas dinners, like he’d memorize Funny Girl, like he’d have a poster of Grace Adler on his dorm room wall (if she’d been invented yet). I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Wainwright had added Salzman to his Hebraic Hall of Fame– Annabelle Salzman to be exact. In the 50s and 60s, Salzman became the bawdy wonder Belle Barth, the gruff, potty-mouthed queen of a not-so-nice-Jewish-girls court that also included the likes of Pearl Williams and Patsy Abbott. Barth was a working-class trash-talker who worked nights in Miami Beach and Manhattan, sitting in front of the piano, singing about shmucks and oral sex, dishing insults at the insurance men in the front row. “If I embarrass you,” Barth liked to say, “Tell your friends.” Wainwright would have been on the next train back to Westchester.

Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites

2008-07-23T14:31:00.000-04:00

Test

2008-07-22T17:26:00.001-04:00

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