Gebirtig, Improvised

On a chilly night a few days before Hanukkah, a quartet came onstage at New York City’s Bowery Poetry Club to improvise to the songs of Mordkhe Gebirtig. The pairing of Gebirtig and improvisation isn’t obvious: Can the works of the best-known Yiddish folk composer, shot to death in the Krakow ghetto, really be comfortably interpreted with the chief deconstructionist technique of modern music? But on second thought, the two do go together. Gebirtig’s creations are often mistaken for folk songs because he made sophisticated works of art that are clear, emotive and easy to understand. Similarly, the improvising musician sounds deep because he taps into the musical intuition shared by everyone.

Benjy Fox-Rosen is casual and deep, like most bassists. He came to New York in 2002 to study jazz, and has broadened his interest to include other alternative music. Yiddish music — “klezmer” is too limiting a term — is by now a member of the alternamusic constellation in good standing. There is jazz-inflected Yiddish music, hip-hop Yiddish music, punkish Yiddish music. Fox-Rosen’s quartet makes improvisational Yiddish jazz. Past decades have seen an upsurge in Yiddish music, with a solidification and dissemination of knowledge. So, there is now a repertoire, even an orthodoxy. Improvisation (which crosses boundaries) is something today's Yiddish-music listener needs.

But you shouldn’t get the impression that improvisation was the sole focus of the set. What I heard at the Bowery Poetry Club — sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture as part of the Kavehoyz series — was a vivifying concert of old lyrics in new bottles. First came seven Gebirtig compositions, favorites of the Yiddish musical repertoire and across the emotional spectrum, from tragedy to drinking song to savage pre-Holocaust irony. Fox-Rosen wrote the music to two of these (“Hayse Trer,” or “Hot Tear,” and “A Zuniker Shtral,” “A Ray of Sunlight”), and the effect (as always, with fitting musical settings) was to put the words in a new frame.
Next came a suite of four songs: Mark Warshavsky’s elegiac “Dem Milners Trern” (“The Miller’s Tears”), followed by improvisation, then Gebirtig’s “Hob Rachmones” (“Have pitty”), and then more improvisation. Finally, Gebirtig’s “Minutn Fun Bitokhn” (“Moments of Confidence” — defiance, that is, in the face of oncoming destruction) yielded to Avrom Reisen’s bitterly minimalist “Hulyet Hulyet Beyze Vintn” (“Howl, Howl, Raging Winds”). The songs are diverse, as their titles make clear, though the listener unfamiliar with Yiddish music of this vintage (that is, prewar) might be forgiven for finding it all a touch sentimental. In particular, when I heard “Hulyet Hulyet” I couldn’t get out of my head the version by Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, driving, nasty and wholly Reisenish in its forthrightness.

But Fox-Rosen’s versions have their own inventive charms. I listened well that evening, and I came away with an appreciation of the power of context. Improvisation, when done as convincingly as it was here, is a special current animating even overly familiar music. Improvisation and composition combined are the best of both worlds.

Improvisation is about both the performance and the final product. Fox-Rosen, who is also a lead vocalist, managed to narrate in an off-the-cuff way, combining stories from his time in Argentina with impressions of old synagogues from a recent tour of Transylvania. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether he was telling the stories to entertain himself or the crowd (“crowd” is an exaggeration here; it was 25 to 30 diehard Yiddish enthusiasts, all of whom I know too well). But I don’t think it mattered. His good humor was transmitted to the audience, which in turn was ready to follow him down musical byways.

Fox-Rosen was accompanied by Judith Berkson on voice and accordion, Noah Kaplan on saxophone and Juan Pablo Carletti on drums. I don't know if the rest of the quartet besides Fox-Rosen has any close connection to Yiddish music. This lack would be quite salutary for Yiddish music: It means, for example, that Gebirtig’s songs, now a part of the broad canon of alternative music, might find from an unexpected quarter another interpreter as fresh as Fox-Rosen in another 20 years. Thus (as the old Jewish idiom has it) will Gebirtig’s lips whisper in his grave, improvising a greeting for Yiddish musicians above ground.

Applied Nostalgia

My daughter and I had a fight last night (she's four; it happens) and we made up with me singing songs to her. The songs were in Yiddish, the language we speak at home. I was randomly singing whichever Yiddish songs happened to come into my head, and in the middle I thought: Isn't this ridiculous? The last three songs were a Bund ballad about blowing up a German ammunition convoy; a paean to Vilna; and the Partisans' Song. (I'm not usually so historical, but there you are.) It struck me, not for the first time, how unrooted my Yiddish language and culture is in my individual, quite ordinary-American-Jewish experience, and how an outside, Eastern-European-born observer might think that my use of these historically freighted songs is disrespectful, jokey, or obscene. (Some do.) What do I know of guerilla warfare, Jewish Vilna (I mean its physical bricks-and-mortar), or the routes of the Baal Shem Tov (the subject of another song)?

I used to answer "No" (a little hurt) when asked if my attachment to things Yiddish was due to nostalgia. How can I be nostalgic for something I wasn't born into? But that's precisely the point. We yearn for what we are not conditioned against. The tension of my ideological attachment to Yiddish is to be aware of the sunken past while not drifting away from the present in which Yiddish, very much extant, is quite un-Eastern European.

As for nostalgia, Jews couldn't get along without it. One of my daughter's favorite songs is Yah Ribon, whose last verse recollects the Temple. I never saw that either.

Listen!

Miryem-Khaye Seigel has such a voice, I can only think our generation must be doing something right. She writes great Yiddish songs too. Now she has a Web page -- go look.

Lipa-logy: Or, in which a reader does my research
Just like the big-name blogs!

Cut-n-pasted from an e-mail. No editing, no effort . . .

Zackary,

A Google search on Lipa Schmeltzer unearthed a post of yours from this time last year.

Truth be told, I myself, was not too much into either FJM (Frum Jewish Music) in general or Lipa Schmeltzer in particular until last week when someone showed me a clip of Lipa's Hebrew Academy For Special Children (HASC) 2005 concert video performance. Lipa did a Yiddish sendup of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

The song, as you may know, started life in 1939 in South Africa as Solomon Linda's "Mbube", was recast as "Wimoweh" by the Weavers in 1950, as the immortal, international chart-topping "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" by the Tokens in 1961 and from there, after many re-recordings finally made it into the epic Lion King. However, arguably it did not reach its true destiny until it got its first Yiddish rendition.

While Lipa's version hues musically to the original, lyrically it does not. Interestingly though, the lyrics give two nods to the original. Suggestively, perhaps, the chorus "A-wee-ma-way" becomes the vaguely rhyming "Abi Me'Leibt" and more persuasively, the phrase "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" makes a cameo appearance in a scene at Penn Station.

In 2004 Lipa did a special rendition of "Gelt" for the HASC concert and both that performance and his "Abi Me'leibt" can be seen here. Additionally the "Abi Me'Leibt" video [can be seen here]. As something of an after-thought, if you wish, you may certainly use any of the above material for your blog, if you see fit, in which case I would prefer anonymity.