The Year of Irving

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

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

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

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.