Musical Magpies

NORMAN LEBRECHT for StandPoint

It is pitch dark, dead of night, in Safed and my feet are crunching gravel in a graveyard. Not any cemetery. Perhaps the holiest in the Holy Land. At the end of this unlit path lie side by side the twin propulsive forces in Judaism, the great masters of mysticism and legalism, the Holy Lion and the House of Joseph.

A candle flickers at the foot of the adjacent tombs. My companion, Eyal Shiloach, takes out his violin. Eyal used to play in the London Symphony Orchestra until he was drawn to the light of faith. He starts a tune that he tells me was sung by Levites in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Both he and I know, exchanging glances, that this cannot be true: tonality, colour and pulse place the melody in eastern Europe, early 19th century. But tradition holds that it is Temple music and there is no arguing with tradition. We stand riven between the mysticism of the Holy Lion (Isaac Luria) and the meticulous rationalism of the House of Joseph (whose surname was Caro).

I am in Israel, gathering testimony for a BBC Radio 3 series titled Music and the Jews. Not Jewish music, note. There is insufficient reason, in my view, to delineate a genre whose main streams — klezmer bands, Chasidic songs, cantorial melismas, Ladino ballads — are no more Jewish than pickled herring. Each is a local catch, harvested and embellished by Jews in the lands of their dispersion. Music and the Jews pursues a different story. It explores how music shaped the history and identity of the Jews, and how Jews influenced the course of music in all its forms.

I am not the first on this trail. In 1905, a cantor called Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem from South Africa and found the streets paved — or squatted — by old men from all corners of the earth, each with his native cantillation for singing the Torah. Idelsohn set to work, like Béla Bartók in the Balkans, recording fragile voices on a wire machine. Analysing the results, he concluded that Yemenites had the oldest traditions and that their tropes bore such affinity to early Gregorian chant that it was likely Christians were singing music of the Temple. All hell broke loose at this hypothesis. (Idelsohn went on to compose an Israeli dance, Hava Nagila, the most popular of its kind. The melody is Romanian.

At the National Sound Archive in Jerusalem I spun some of Idelsohn's cylinders, as well as much weirder items by the obsessive Robert Lachmann who, when Hitler's Reich stopped supplying wax for his project, recorded old men's chants on discarded hospital X-rays. I have handled a celluloid disc with the shadow of human ribs on it.

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NYC's Beloved Yiddishe Music Maven

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

You never know what treasures lurk within NYC buildings. For many years, just blocks from Manhattan's Union Square, a woman named curated the Yiddish music collection at the vaunted YIVO archives.

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The Red Warbler Pete Seeger, 1919-2014.

BY RONALD RADOSH for The Weekly Standard

During the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939-41), Seeger sang antiwar songs that, in effect, called for the support of Hitler. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, he withdrew the songs he had just recorded and suddenly supported the “antifascist alliance” between the United States and the Soviets. During the Cold War, he supported unilateral American disarmament and backed one Soviet propaganda campaign after the other. “Put My Name Down, Brother, Where Do I Sign?” he sang, calling for signatures on the Stockholm Peace Petition developed by KGB fronts in Europe.

During the Vietnam war, Seeger not only helped lead the antiwar movement, he also sang in praise of the brutal Ho Chi Minh. Lyndon B. Johnson was called “a big fool” in one of his most famous songs, while he sang of Ho Chi Minh: He educated all the people, / He demonstrated to the world, / If a man will stand for his own land, / He’s got the strength of ten.

In 1999, Seeger traveled to Cuba to receive an award from the Castro regime. The fading Cuban tyrants honored him with their highest cultural award, given for “humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism,” which was in and of itself a travesty. Accepting an award from Fidel Castro should make it clear that Seeger’s would-be humanism and protest was aimed at one side only: his own country, which he clearly thought was led by the world’s sole oppressors.

One cannot hope to be thought of as a defender of human rights and also accept an award from the Cuban police state. That, too, must be taken into consideration when evaluating what Pete Seeger really learned from his own Stalinist past.

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The Israeli Woman Who's Reviving the Jazz Clarinet

by Marc Davis for Jewniverse

Among the world's top jazz musicians, there are few women instrumentalists, and even fewer Israeli women. In fact, there is only one: Anat Cohen, the best jazz clarinetist alive.

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The Grammys And The Jewish Condition

Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, Jewish Week Online Columnist; originally printed 01/30/14

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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2014: The Year Fiddler Turns 50

 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.

Fiddler managed to create an almost-perfect formula for a Broadway hit: A time capsule of homogenized Jewishness so infectious that goyim love it, yet authentic enough that multiple generations of Jews have embraced it.

Debuting in 1964, Fiddler opened with Zero Mostel as the everyman Tevye. and Bea Arthur as the meddlesome matchmaker Yenta. In 1972, it became the longest running Broadway musical. Although its record has long since been shattered by Grease, Cats and others, few shows have had such a lasting cultural impact. Is there a Jewish father alive who hasn't gotten misty-eyed at "Sunrise Sunset," or a Jewish daughter who hears the "Sabbath Prayer" and doesn't remember Grandma Sophie's Shabbos dinners?

2014 year marks Fiddler's 50th anniversary. L'chaim and happy new year!

- Marc Davis for Jewniverse

The Jazz Concert That Changed Black and Jewish History

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.

The Benny Goodman Orchestra's performance on January 16, 1938 has reigned for decades as the most significant concert in jazz history. It was not only the inaugural jazz show at Carnegie Hall, but also among the first public concerts to feature a racially integrated cast. Goodman was the first leader of a swing orchestra to hire black musicians, such as pianist Teddy Wilson, and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

With classics like "Honeysuckle Rose," Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," and the towering, electric "Sing, Sing, Sing," Goodman led his orchestra brilliantly, shattering barriers with his howling horns. Guest appearances from legends like Count Basie and Martha Tilton peppered the evening.

Goodman had a reputation as being difficult, a perfectionist through and through. And for seldom deviating from what was right. Referring to the great jazz pianist Teddy Wilson, Goodman was asked once why he "played with that n*****?" Goodman didn't miss a beat. "I'll knock you out if you use that word around me again." Fortunately, he didn't have to.

- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse