50 Years of Allan Sherman

Before Weird Al Yankovic there was Allan Sherman. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Sherman’s biggest hit, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh," a hilarious song in the form of a letter from a kid at sleepaway camp to his doting parents, and which features hapless campers like Joe Spivey (and his poison ivy) and Leonard Skinner (who got ptomaine poisoning after dinner). The ditty reached No. 2 on the Billboard charts, and Sherman's album, My Son, The Folk Singer, sold 1 million copies.

In the early '60s, Sherman's songs were as ubiquitous as chopped liver at a bar mitzvah, and his oeuvre was just as Jewish. In Sherman's fevered imagination, "Greensleeves" became an ode to Sir Greenbaum, a righteous knight who gave up crusading and moved to heavily Jewish Shaker Heights, Ohio. "Frere Jacques" became "Sarah Jackman," a lady with an exhaustive list of rhyming relatives. President Kennedy himself was allegedly spotted singing about Ms. Jackman in a hotel lobby.

Despite ringing of a bygone era, Sherman's routines are still sidesplitting. For the definitive collection, check out My Son, The Box. And for the sharp-eyed, search Weird Al's debut album cover for a tip-of-the-hat to Sherman. (Hint: Squint your eyes at the foot of the bed.)

Brooklyn cantorial concert a milestone for new Barclays Center

Who knew the man behind the Brooklyn homecomings of Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand had a thing for heimische melodies?

Bruce Ratner, the developer and majority owner of the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, which opened last September with a Jay-Z show and hosted borough native Streisand a month later, holds a special place in his heart for cantorial music.

“My parents are both from Eastern European descent, so that type of Jewish music is in my blood,” Ratner told JTA. “I grew up going to my Conservative synagogue in Cleveland, where they had an amazing cantor who I absolutely loved to listen to. And as I got older, I was always buying cantor CDs. The music is just so refined.”
Ratner, the chairman and chief executive of the real estate development firm Forest City Ratner Companies, is taking personal pride in having spearheaded efforts to put on the first Jewish event at the venue: a Feb. 28 concert featuring the renowned Israeli-born violinist Itzhak Perlman sharing the stage with Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot. The Barclays performance comes on the heels of the pair's recent collaboration, “Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul,” an album of Jewish music released in August.

In an age where klezmer music has gained a following in the downtown jazz scene and Yiddish culture has experienced something of a revival, Ratner is optimistic that between Brooklyn's hipsters and Chasidim, the show will find an audience.

“I know not everyone listens to cantorial music today, but if they really listen, they’ll find such a history behind it,” said Ratner, who became acquainted with Perlman 30 years ago when their daughters attended private school together in Manhattan. “Growing up, cantors used to be treated like rock stars, and I think kids today unfamiliar with it will really find this concert enjoyable.”

A century ago, it was hardly uncommon for Jewish cantors to perform at venues like Barclays. Cantors such as Yossele Rosenblatt and Zeidel Rovener were mainstream stars, recording popular records and gracing the stages of Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall.
Only about a third of Barclays' 19,000 seats are going to be made available for the Perlman-Helfgot show, but it's still likely to be one of the largest cantorial concerts in the United States in nearly a century.

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What is Jewish Music?

Jewish music stems from ancient prayer chants of the Levant some 3000 years ago. The musical notation that developed and that we find in the bible today is one of the most ancient forms of notated music, and yet it is still in current practice all over the world today. Jewish music has been constantly adapting to new conditions and yet retaining its identity in many widely differing ethnic, social and religious environments.

Through its daughter religions, the music of Judaism is one of the fundamental elements in the understanding of the sacred and secular traditions of Europe and the Near East, first having influenced, and then having been influenced by, the music of Christian and Islamic cultures. The study of Jewish music encompasses many genres of religious, semi religious and folk music used in the synagogue and in the Jewish home and also art music using Jewish texts or themes. The study of Jewish music combines distinctively, the essential elements of musicology, ethnomusicology and interculturalism. Jewish music today encompasses a wide diversity of musical traditions and Jewish songs are sung in many different languages.
Ashkenazi Music (Klezmer)

Ashkenazi refers to the Jews who settled in the Rhineland of South West Germany and Northern France from about the third century CE. They developed a distinct culture and spread out eastwards through Central Europe into Slavic lands. Ashkenazi cantorial song reached a very high level of sophistication and ornamentation. The vernacular language was Yiddish, based on medieval German with Slavic and Hebrew words and written in Hebrew script. Yiddish language influenced their popular music. Yiddish language and music travelled with Ashkenazi Jews as they moved to the new world. A musician was called a klezmer.

The term Klezmer comes from the Hebrew words klei meaning “vessel” and zemer meaning “song” - literally meaning “instrument of song.” This was the Yiddish word by which the musicians themselves were known in Eastern Europe. The term “Klezmer Music” was first used in the 1970s to describe the traditional instrumental music of the Yiddish-speaking people of Eastern Europe whose origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages.

Klezmer is enjoying huge popularity world wide and giving pleasure to thousands of listeners and performers. This toe-tapping Eastern European party music imbued with Jewish tonalities and spirituality resonates with people young and old from a wide variety of backgrounds.

For a selection of Ashkenazi/Klezmer music - CLICK HERE 

Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter, not the bassist)

In the vibrant and tight-knit world of jazz music, there is only one Miles Davis, one Ella Fitzgerald, and one Wynton Marsalis. But there are two Avishai Cohens, both of them successful, and both of them Israeli. Fortunately, they play different instruments: one Cohen's on the trumpet, the other sticks to bass. It's the trumpeter who's now enjoying his turn in the international spotlight.

The trumpeting Cohen leads a post-bop trio called Triveni, with bassist Omer Avital and drummer Nasheet Watts. Their unusually piano-less numbers range from soft and bluesy to fiery and Dizzy Gillespie-ish.

In late 2012, the trio released its second CD, Triveni II. All About Jazz called it a "stunning" work by a band whose music is "off-the-wall without veering completely off the tracks." The Jazz Chill Corner wrote that "the quick-time improvisation of the trio is brilliant." And Downbeat named Cohen a rising star in its 2012 critics poll.

Born in Tel Aviv but living in New York, Cohen sometimes performs with his brother Yuval (sax) and sister Anat (clarinet) in a band called The 3 Cohens – the swinging-est siblings in the jazz world today (with apologies to Wynton and the boys).  Avishai Cohen (the trumpeter, not the bassist)