Posts from — December 2012

My cousin David owned a GMC tractor-trailer, which he parked in the May Co. lot in University Heights.  David may have been the only Jewish long-distance trucker in the Heights.  Maybe the only long-distance trucker, period, in the Heights.

In 1975 David borrowed several thousand dollars from my father, Toby, for the truck.  David had a contract with International Truck of Rock, Minnesota.

David moved to Pennsylvania and never repaid my dad.

In high school David had stolen hubcaps.  He had been a Shaker Heights juvenile delinquent.

David even looked like James Dean. My cousin Danny once said, “David’s dad was the most handsome man you ever met.” David’s dad drifted around Cleveland, playing pool.  David’s dad and mother divorced in the 1950s.

When David’s mother heard David hadn’t repaid my dad, she made payments, but she never fully repaid the loan.

My father’s attitude was “win some, lose some.”  Toby believed in lending money to family. My dad had borrowed from his Uncle Itchy to buy his first house.

Last year I called David’s sister. This was a big deal; David and his sister were  out of the cousins’ loop. David is now in his seventies and has had several heart attacks, his sister said.  He is living in a hotel that his son runs in Florida.

No more truckin’.

No more David as family black sheep. Stolen hubcaps and an unpaid loan, is that the worst of it in my family?  I think so.

Now, my wife has an estranged cousin who stole sterling silver . . . Stop.
—
“David” is a pseudonym.

—
SIDE B

FITBIT

I became bionic.  My daughter, Lucy, gave me a pedometer.

I can count my daily steps. I can even monitor my sleep patterns, but that’s too much data — even for a guy like me who likes data.

Brisk walking. If you do it, ipso facto, you’re a dork.

I gave up jogging last year. My right knee wasn’t into it anymore. I miss the “sweat” of jogging.

I walk.

Should I post my step count here? Dieters post their calories online.  Bicyclists post their heart rates.

My step count today is _____. (Will post up at 11:59 p.m for maximum effect.)

Your count?

—

For a couple new illustrations by Ralph Solonitz, please  scroll down to “KlezKamp 2012,” which went up last week.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays at First Night Akron on New Year’s Eve.

share

I went to the White House for a Christmas party.  Did you?

My daughter, Lucy, works for a Chicago event-planning company, and she helped decorate the White House for Christmas.  She got me in.

Lucy and I arrived fashionably late, because my daughter has been to the White House before, and she didn’t want to wait in the long line.  We were the last guests — numbers 485 and 486.

I was denied entrance. What?

I sat on a folding chair in a heated tool shed–like room in the White House backyard. My birth date was listed incorrectly on the White House checklist. I thought I might miss the party.

But the guard, constantly checking her smartphone for updates, finally said, “You’re good. Tell the next security booth, you’re a re-clear.”

I was a re-clear at the next security stop — a dog-sniffing station.

A Marine Band jazz quintet played in the main entrance of the White House. Michelle Obama was there. Lincoln’s portrait was up in the State Dining Room.  There were 54 live Christmas trees, according to the Washington Post.  Plus some fake trees — classy fake trees, like out of glass.

I told the Marine Band’s bass player to tell his boss to bring in Yiddishe Cup for the Chanukah party next year.

I did not see Bo the dog.  I did not sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. I did not see any celebs. The food — at grazing stations — was very good.  Spielberg, dressed like Lincoln, was at the White House a couple nights before, to screen Lincoln with the president.  That was the word at the party.  There was a 300-pound gingerbread replica of White House.

This event was a thrill for me — a once in a lifetime experience. No, wait, I’ve got to talk to my rabbi; he once lit the White House Chanukah menorah.  Maybe he’ll know how to get Yiddishe Cup in.

My rabbi called.  He said,  “Somebody from the synagogue got me in. Or a group of people.  No one person from the synagogue took sole credit.  Maybe the White House wanted somebody from Cleveland.”

The Jews of Cuyahoga County.  Work with them.

Lucy Stratton, Bert Stratton, and Claus.
White House, 2012

—

SIDE B

KLEZKAMP 2012

This year’s KlezKamp theme is anti-NY.

No rush-rush.

The KlezKamp swimming pool has piped-in klezmer music. Don’t do the crawl; your wildly flapping arms will drown out the underwater speakers. (Kapelye’s classic, “Chicken,” is looped.)

New this year: a pretzel bar . . . Rold Gold, Dan Dee, Snyder’s of Berlin, Snyder’s of Hanover. (Trucked in from Cleveland.  Heymish.)

There is a spiritual gathering every morning in the exercise room. Universal love machines. Yarmulkes optional.

You can touch your musical instrument but can’t play it.  Oil keys, apply grease to cork joints, rub valve oil. And calm down.

Dress code?  Only if you insist.  Try the all-cotton plush bathrobes with the KlezKamp logo ($179).  Notice how young klezmer musicians  wear KK bathrobes on stage?

At KlezKamp, director Henry Sapoznik repeats the same spiel every hour, so you don’t miss anything if you skip a lecture. His topic this year: “New York Sucks. I Moved to Wisconsin.”

Also, this year pianist Pete Sokolow blots out — pours Manischewitz on — his classic how-to book, 100 Jewish Music Insults That Really Work.

Before this book disappears forever, here are, for the record, Sokolow’s five favorite putdowns:

1.  What’s your phone number? Junior congregation needs a clarinetist.
2.  You’re slicker than butter on matzo, but there’s no salt.
3.  Tighten your neck strap.  Tighter.
4.  You couldn’t find D freygish with a GPS.
5.  I make desk lamps. Let me see your clarinet.

—-
This is KlezFiction.  KlezKamp is real.  It happens next week.

share

PART I

I worked at a key warehouse as big as Home Depot. But just keys.  The  warehouse supervisor drove a golf cart.

I packed car keys.  This was a summer job.

My dad worked in the front office.

My shift was about seven hours too long.  I rested on my cart for massive breaks. Sarge, the warehouse supervisor, threatened to fire me, but he had a problem — my dad (aka the front office).

I told my father I wanted out of the job; I didn’t want any more money; I didn’t want a car; I didn’t want a UAW card. I had several thousand dollars from my bar mitzvah money.  Let me go.  I could be in Barcelona in a minute.

But I was stuck in the warehouse.  Big presses stamped out car keys.  Kaboom.

A band instrument factory was right next door.  Why couldn’t my dad work there? King Musical Instruments.   King had an employee who stood at the end of the assembly line and blew saxes all day.

Next time around, work at King, Dad.

PART II

The taxicab supervisor, smoking a stogie, asked, “Where’s Charity Hospital?”

“I don’t know, ” I said.

“Where’s the Federal Building?”

“Ninth Street.”

“The Pick-Carter Hotel?”

“I don’t know.”

“The Hollenden House?”

“Downtown — St. Clair.”

“People want to know where their hotel is,” he said.

Fair enough.

But hired me.  Yellow Cab.

I drove welfare recipients with vouchers to hospitals, and workers to Republic Steel Works #4.  I didn’t drive many rich people; I thought I was going to drive rich people, but it was poor people.

I picked up a fare downtown.  The customer said, “Severance Hall.”

“Are you Claudio Abbado?” I asked.

“How do you know!” he said.

I knew because I had seen hi’s picture in the morning paper.

I stopped at my neighbor, John, afterward, and told him I had just driven a famous person.  I said, “He’s a conductor from Italy.”

“Why did he come here?” John said. John’s favorite expression was “Cleveland is the armpit of the nation. ”  Put that slogan on your cab door.  This was 1970.

Taxi driving ultimately didn’t agree with me. A cabbie told me to carry a bat.  He said, “A bat isn’t a concealed weapon. It’s legal.” 

I had a low batting average.

My cab stalled at Fairmount Circle.  The engine smoked.  I left the cab and hitched back to the Noble Road garage.

The supervisor said, “You mean you left your cab, son?”

“I knew I could get back here. ”

“You mean you left your cab unattended?”

“Yes.”

Fairmount Circle, 1970

share

1.
When a groom shops for a band, he doesn’t care what he gets. He is usually on assignment from the bride. I’ve rarely heard a groom say, “Yiddishe Cup is wonderful!” It’s more like “What’s your minimum — minimum hours and minimum rate?”

One groom said to me, “Let’s cut to the chase.  What’s your price?”

I gave him a fair price and we made a deal.  Bye.

A friend told me to act more alive on the phone. She coached me: “Say, ‘Hel-LOH, this is Bert STRAT–tin!’’  I did it that for one day.

If a groom likes the price, beautiful. But he might call the next day and say, “Man, my fiancée is just totally unwavering!  She wants this horrible other band now. If it were up to me, I’d have you. Change of plans, sorry.”

“No problem,” I say. “Marriage is full of compromises.  Get used to it.”

Old bandleader advice.

2.
When a bride asks about cool wedding venues, I mention Windows on the River in The Flats, the Cuyahoga National Park (Bath, Ohio), the Shaker Country Club and Manakiki club.

Brides — at least some of them — don’t want the standard wedding mill, aka Landerhaven party center, by the freeway in Mayfield Heights.

On a typical Saturday night at Landerhaven, the place is hopping with four or five parties: there is background jazz in the Michelle Room; in the East Ballroom, an Asian Indian DJ; in the Lander Room, Yiddishe Cup. During breaks, I hop from one party room to another, talking to musicians and sightseeing. At a Sikh wedding, the groom rides through the parking lot on a white horse to meet the bride.

Landerhaven’s food is good, and the help is attentive, but Landerhaven is very faux Fontainebleau — so many mirrors and fountains.  Brides often want less.

Yiddishe Cup played a gig where the bride married an American Indian by a creek. It rained the whole time.  That wedding moved into a lodge, which held, at most, 50 people.  We could barely find room to toot our horns. At Landerhaven, you’re not going to have problems like that. Landerhaven is well-run.  No surprises at Landerhaven, except maybe the guy on the white horse.

Another option: rent a tent.  Some Jews love to worry and the tent is perfect for that.  At one tent gig, in Dayton, Ohio,  the caterers used 30-gallon wastebaskets to catch the rain pouring in.

Yiddishe Cup's Steve Ostrow, Hunting Valley, Ohio, 2010. No rain.

3.
Yiddishe Cup played a wedding for an anthropology professor and a German professor.

Here’s how it went down, anthropologically speaking:

a) In the Midwest, the band often works Ohio State and Michigan into the repertoire.  The anthro prof’s mother was a Michigan grad, and the groom’s dad was from Ohio State.  We played “Hang on Sloopy” for Ohio State and “Hail to the Victors” for Michigan.

b)  Yiddishe Cup’s bassist sang “Du, Du Liegst Mir In Herzen.”  This bombed.  The German guests — real Germans from Germany — didn’t like it.  Apparently, Germans don’t show much outward pride in their folk culture.  And at a Jewish wedding, who can blame them. (Yiddishe Cup has played “Alouette” for French Canadians and “Guantanamera” for Hispanics, and they like hearing from us.) The Germans were no funt.

c)  When Yiddishe Cup had a wedding guest sing with us, I said, “Attention, anthropologists, please welcome one of the stars of Jewish pop.  He has appeared all over the world . . . Yehuda Cik!”  Yehuda is a former neo-Hasidic Ortho pop star.   Yehuda sang the last verse of L’Cha Dodi, the Sabbath welcoming prayer.  Big hit.

4.
Sometimes the bride and groom are starry-eyed; sometimes, not.

Years later I run into the moms of the brides.  The moms tells me the “kids” are now divorced — the starry-eyed kids.

I run into an old groom. He says, “Isabel and Isaac, this is Mr. Stratton.  He played Mommy and Daddy’s wedding.”   Was the groom starry-eyed at his wedding?  Give me a break.  I can’t remember.  I play a lot of weddings.

The groom is still married after 12 years. He says his daughter’s bat mitzvah is coming up. “She’s a popular kid,” he says.

“That’s bad. Popular kids usually want DJs,”  I say.

—

Two add-ons . . .

1. Dave Brubeck vid

—

2. On the CoolCleveland.com website, 12/6/12. “Keep the Plain Dealer Dealin’.”

share

Notso Kosher Records

My desk is piled high with free CDs: Ezekiel’s Wheels, Golem, all kinds of Dutch and Polish bands, and the old standbys — Klezmer Conservatory Band and the Klezmatics.

The 12 best klez CDs of 2012 jumped out of the pile and said, “Kiss me, I’m Jewish.”

These recordings (listed below) are the nonrequired klezmer albums for the year.  These recordings are essential:

1. Orlando, 3 Days, 2 Nights. Frank London and his Klezmer Brass All-Stars lead us on a klez tour of Disney World. Talk about selling out – but a good selling out.  The cut “Mickey’s Philharmonic” features London on electric toothbrush — pulse position.  “Whistle While You Work” is all about short people — Jewish short people: Billy Crystal, Abe Beame and Menachem Begin, and that’s just the first 30 seconds.

2. I Believe in Cod.  Andy Statman flips out.  Sample lyrics: “May cod bless you and guide you . . . . Praise cod in the high heaven and in the deep sea . . . Teeming oceans, fire and hail, snow and mist, storm and wind, obey cod’s will.”

3. The Room Where I Was Born.  Violinist Steven Greenman recreates the aural architecture of his childhood bedroom in Pittsburgh.  Check out the Steelers pennants and Fiddler on the Roof LPs. Greenman does a cover version of the Klezmorim’s “Medyatsiner Waltz,” which itself was a cover. Sweaty and no A/C.

Alan Douglass, Yiddishe Cup enforcer, 2011

4. This Can’t Be Klezmer by Yiddishe Cup. This Ohio band goes outside the matzo box and constructs a toy jail, complete with corporal punishment. Perfect for the heartbroken, horny and dead.  Yiddishe Cup mixes barely adequate musicianship with a touch of humor.  On “Toot,” an earthy trombone solo morphs into a mimicry of flatulence.  It doesn’t sound like klezmer, but what did you expect from This Can’t Be Klezmer?

5.  Nonhierarchical Dynamics by tsimblist Pete Rushefsky.  Nothing on the 1 and 3; it’s all off-beats.  Drives you crazy, but in a provocative way.  There is an after-party. You have to be in New York City to get full value.  Beer by Brooklyn Brewing.  Be there.

6. The Recluse by Merlin Shepherd.  Shepherd, a British clarinetist and actor, reads Thomas Hardy poems while his wife, Polina, does consecutive Russian translation. The clarinet licks are sparse, but apropos to lyrics.  Novel.

7. Correspondence by Michael Wex.  Wexmaniacs,  you’ll love this: 60 LOL minutes of Wex badinage from his KlezKanada emceeing.  Can anybody top Wex’s Walter-Brennan-is-a-Jew riff?   No.  Almost as good: Wex’s riff about trash-talking Miami Heat Yiddish-spewers.   All but LeBron, who remains the Hebraist.

8. Odorless and Colorless.  Shtreiml.  Bandleader Jason Rosenblatt spent years in the lab on this one.  This record is rotten.  It contains sulfur.  Le jazz hot — and funky — from Montreal.

Jack Stratton, about 2008

9. Without a Net. Acrobat-and-drummer Jack Stratton uses metal parts from surgeries gone bad — mostly hip replacements — to perform Meron-klez drum licks.  Particularly good: “Blur Blind,” “Bodies Thrown Back” and “Clarity.”  The rest of the album is pretty conventional.

10. I Want to Make You Edible by Yiddish Princess.  Lead singer Sarah Gordon does freestyle rapping here about cereal (Kashi Autumn Wheat and Island Vanilla), which leads to kishke, which leads to ka-ka.  Juvenile.  And fun!

11. Red-Dirt Jewboys. Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys go down to Georgia on this one.  How does Margot  balance her terrific cross-cultural composing and heavy drinking?  Margot is the klezmer mixologist for the 21^st century.  Her next album is, efsher, Klezmer Gamelan?

12. Blackout. Henry Sapoznik and the Original Klezmer Jazz Band give us a wake-up call: Pete Sokolow pounds stride-piano chords while Sapoznik plays electric banjo.  On the last cut, Sapoznik smashes his banjo and picks up a clarinet. Tons of squeaks.  Sapoznik whines like a fourth-grader at the end: “I quit!  I quit!”

share