Oh Helen

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”), ”My Friends — The stars,” a collection of 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

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

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

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

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

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

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).