AS THE NEW YEAR BEGAN, The Klezmorim returned to 1750 Arch Street Studios,
where Laurie Chastain
recorded energetic lead vocals on Russian/Yiddish and Hungarian Roma songs
from our repertoire. One more session and we'd have an album, maybe.
We were, to be honest, unseasoned dance-party players barely ready
for the burden of posterity. In performance, we could get by on energy and good
intentions; in the recording studio, we knew that every clam would stink aloud forever.
Yet we dared the devil by trying to make the tunes our own... wrangling between
takes over musical arrangements. Recording the ensemble live in real time
rather than on isolated channels, we had to make each part mesh. Chris Strachwitz pushed
us to play quick and dirty; he wanted spirit, not precision. This was perhaps
the first time he had recorded aspiring folklorists rather than indigenous
musicians.
Pressures mounted as day jobs conflicted with art. David Skuse and I desired
longer rehearsal sessions and firmer commitments from the players, but we couldn't
guarantee better pay or steady work. Laurie left the group — granting us
the use of her violin tracks on the album but not her vocals. In March, the remaining four
Klezmorim pulled off the hat trick of recording two-thirds of an album in a
single session. Bob Shumaker patiently guided us through the mixdown, and East Side Wedding —
opening salvo of the klezmer revival — was finally in the can.
While the album was in test pressings, Henry Sapoznik showed up, visiting from Brooklyn. Henry and
I bonded immediately — he, David Skuse, and Martin Schwartz were the three persons on Earth with whom I
could have an intelligent discussion about klezmer music. Henry praised The Klezmorim
and offered useful criticism as well. We continued corresponding after he
returned to New York: he sent me tapes of 78-rpm discs from the collections of
Richard Spottswood and YIVO, while I encouraged his dreams of starting his own
Yiddish band.
Meanwhile, The Klezmorim began evolving brasswards. The flute's refined tone
struck me as wimpy; even when roughened with growls, hums, or folk-flute
simulations, it failed to express the bluesy wail and rhythmic drive that
animated me. After David Julian
Gray shifted from rhythm strings to clarinet, the band needed more punch in
the low range. So I dropped flute to wrangle alto sax.
Precedents for klezmer saxophone were sparse. Initially, my approach was a
pastiche of influences: 1920s dance band music, Serbian "Golden Horns" brass, Brecht/Weill cabaret, norteño sax, and the stylings of Howie Leess of the Rudy Tepel Orchestra, Cheap Suit Serenaders session reedman Paul Woltz, and Macedonian tenor sax wizard Ferus Mustafov. (For inspiration, I started stashing my reeds in a Sarajevo cigarette tin.) From listening intently and repeatedly to 78-rpm recordings, I gradually absorbed straightforward old-time klezmer nuances, as in "What would Naftuli Brandwine have sounded like if we could hear recordings of him on sax?"
Copping klezmer ornaments and techniques from a variety of instruments made sense;
the klezmer style itself seemed to have predated the instruments, which were
of course mere "vessels of song" — one simply needed to tune one's ears
to a Platonic ideal of ur-klezmer independent of whatever instrument one happened to be playing on. With documentary evidence scanty at the time, we synthesized what we knew about acoustic physics, dance music, and Eastern
European folk arts to arrive at a plausible reconstruction of the klezmer sound.
78-rpm discs' brief three-minute duration couldn't answer many of our
you-had-to-be-there questions about traditional long-form klezmer music; questions about sequences and variants of dance tunes, tempos, solo passages in ensemble context, or sound balance in the open air. Until
subsequent research confirmed our guesswork, we felt like Columbus's sailors:
half-afraid of falling off the world's edge.
East Side Wedding turned out to be one of those hills you climb only
to see steeper hills beyond. If gigs came a little more easily to a band with
an album available at Tower Records, income was still negligible... and players
found other fish to fry. Greg Carageorge opted to devote full time to his Russian
band Troika Balalaikas. David Skuse moved East to pursue higher education in
ethnomusicology, first at SUNY, then at Columbia University. Two years after
the birth of The Klezmorim, only two original members remained: me and DJ Gray.
Fortunately the band's unusual repertoire and pioneering zeal attracted a new cadre of adept players: Rick Elmore,
bass brassist for the Cheap Suit Serenaders... Nada Lewis, queen of the Bay Area Balkan music scene...
multi-instrumental arranger/ethnomusicologist Stuart Brotman... and Brian Wishnefsky, street-wise pop jokester. The inside story continues in
1978... >>
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Copyright © 1996 - 2020 Lev Liberman. All rights reserved.