Partly because my daughter had asked me to, but also because I enjoy live performances of music, I watched the Grammy Awards last Sunday night. In all honesty, I should say I watched the Grammys until I nodded off in my very comfortable chair, but I saw a good deal.
I
am one of those boomers who remain addicted to the music that I grew up
to. There’s a wonderful line in the classic movie “The Big Chill” in
which Kevin Kline’s character is accused of playing only the music from
his college years. He replies, “there is no other music.” Largely, I
agree. I’m not quite that exclusive in my tastes, which are actually
eclectic, and incorporate choral, classical, and country in addition to
classic rock. But still… give me some good Crosby, Stills and Nash, or
the Beatles, and I’m good to go.In that vein, it was nice to see Paul McCartney singing with Ringo. But really, who wanted to hear them sing a new song that no one knows? As long as they were singing together, and you the only two surviving members of the Beatles were making music, couldn’t they have done something that they recorded together all those years ago? But I digress…
What struck me most of all about the Grammys program was the degree to which it wasn’t at all about the music as much as it was about the production. This is not particularly a new insight. With the advent of music videos more than twenty years ago, it became nearly impossible for an artist to release a song without an accompanying video. Some, of course, became classics, like Michael Jackson’s. But whether they were memorable or not, they represented a major transition point for rock music. It was no longer about the song per se; it was about a different kind of art form. A video could make or break a song, regardless of whether the song was outstanding on its own, or totally forgettable. (See Miley Cyrus, among others…).
So at these Grammy, you had P!nk singing while impersonating a Cirque du Soleil performer, and enough artists performing to explosions of fire and smoke to satisfy the hardest core pyromaniac. And oh yes… plenty of provocatively dressed back-up dancers, another newly indispensable component of any live rock performance these days (see Robin Thicke).
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Was
there ever a real-life shtetl as joyful, as funny, as musical and,
ultimately, as heartbreaking as Anatevka? Probably not. But after five
decades, "our little village" in Fiddler on the Roof still embodies what
many American Jews imagine Jewish life was like in the Old Country.
When
Benny Goodman, the Jewish clarinetist and so-called "King of Swing"
took center stage at Carnegie Hall on this day in 1938, the audience was
in for more than just a rollicking time.
When
composer Benjy Fox-Rosen was a kid, his grandmother sang him the songs
of her favorite Yiddish poet, Mordechai Gebirtig (1877-1942). "Wait a
little longer, dear," goes one of the Krakow songwriter's most famous
songs, "Reyzele." But she wasn't much of a singer, so, like the
gentleman courting his pious lover in "Reyzele," Fox-Rosen had to wait a
while to discover Gebirtig on his own terms. In his new album, Tsvey Veltn/
Two Worlds, Fox-Rosen sets lesser-known Gebirtig poems to music,
honoring the sounds and rhythms of the Yiddish while still making them
feel current.
The
fuzzy guitars, pulsating bass,and incomprehensible lyrics intrigued me.
So I looked up the song that was streaming on KEXP, the Seattle
indie-rock station I broadcast at home. The band’s name seemed Finnish
or Icelandic, until I realized the words were actually phonetic Hebrew.
Although
it flourished most brightly in the post-World War II era, the
Jewish-Latin connection in American pop music probably goes back as far
as the history of recordings will take us. Even the authors of the
entertaining liner notes for “It’s a Scream How Levine Does the Rhumba:
The Latin-Jewish Musical Story: 1940-1980s” admit that the origins of
this musical marriage are shrouded in mystery. But as the two-CD set,
issued this month by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation,
richly documents, it has been a fruitful, if occasionally dopey
relationship. (As if none of us have been in one of those, right?)