Posts from — December 2015

I was allergic to everything from buckwheat pancakes to peaches. I went to the Asthma and Hay Fever Clinic for shots with my dad. He got shots too.  The treatment for asthma and allergies back then was shots, which didn’t work too well — at least for me.

My mother said, “Sit up. I’ll get your pills.” The pills were red tabs I put under my tongue in the middle of the night. This was before albuterol and steroids. This was when there were leeches and cupping. I had a difficult time breathing.  I’m not saying I was going to die, but I had some bad nights as a kid. My mother said, “Stick another pill under your tongue and press it down, and try to keep your mouth closed.” I couldn’t keep my mouth closed; I had to breathe.  “Get on your bathrobe and stand up,” my mother said. So I walked around.

I was 13, and I was the wheezer.

The asthma attacks tapered off in my teenage years.  Breakthrough: at 31 I participated in a drug trial at the VA hospital and got Cromolyn and started jogging. Everything worked out for the best, except I’m probably more morbid than the average person.

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Yiddishe Cup plays First Night Akron tomorrow night, New Year’s Eve, 10-11:30 p.m, John S. Knight Convention Center, Goodyear Ballroom.

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Stefan Kanfer, a biographer of Humphrey Bogart, wrote an article about the “misery called the Book Tour.” He wrote, “I had planned to have dinner at my hotel, but the plane was three hours late . . .”  [City Journal, Summer 2011.]  Also a limo driver talked too much.

I can handle plane delays and limo issues. I wouldn’t mind a book tour. I would bring extra cough drops because I might strain my throat from talking so much about myself.

Where’s my book? Where’s my book?  (Friends, don’t bring up my coming-of-age lost manuscripts.)

I saw Jon Fine at a book reading recently. He wrote Your Band Sucks, a memoir about his bands that toured extensively in the 1990s. The book was about the quintessential non-famous band.

I could do that.

My limo is here!

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Notso Kosher Records

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

Drum roll . . . Here are the best klezmer recordings of 2015:

1. Orlando. Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars take us on a tour of Disney World. “Mickey’s Philharmonic” features London on electric toothbrush (pulse position). “Whistle While You Work” is 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. Steven Greenman recreates the sonic architecture of his Pittsburgh childhood bedroom, complete with Steelers pennants and Fiddler on the Roof LPs. Sweaty and no A/C.

Alan Douglass, Yiddishe Cup enforcer, 2011

4. This Can’t Be Klezmer by Yiddishe Cup. A musical jail complete with corporal punishment. Perfect for the heartbroken, horny and dead. Yiddishe Cup mixes barely adequate musicianship with a touch of humor. It doesn’t sound like klezmer, but then what did you expect with a title like This Can’t Be Klezmer?

5. Strung Out by Pete Rushefsky. Nothing on the 1 and 3; it’s all off-beats. Drives you crazy, but in a good way. There is an after-party. You have to be in New York.

6. Anti Semit by Michael Wex. Sixty LOL minutes from Wex’s KlezKanada emceeing. Can anybody top Wex’s Walter Brennan-is-a-Jew sketch? No.

7. Odorous by Shtreiml. Jason Rosenblatt spent years in the lab on this one. This smells like sulfur.  Le jazz hot — and funky — from Montreal.

Jack Stratton, about 2008

8. Without a Net. Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton uses metal parts from surgeries gone bad — mostly hip replacements — to perform Meron drum licks. Particularly good cuts: “Bodies Thrown Back” and “Clarity.”  The rest of the album is pretty conventional.

9. In the Klezmer Aisle by Yiddish Princess. Sarah Gordon does freestyle rapping about Kashi Autumn Wheat and Island Vanilla cereals, which leads to kishke, which leads to ka-ka. Juvenile and fun.

10. Blackout. Henry Sapoznik gives us a wake-up call, smashing his banjo, then picking up a clarinet. Tons of squeaks. Sapoznik whines like a fourth-grader at the end: “I quit! I quit!”

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This post first appeared 12/5/12 in slightly different form.

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My mother taught me the cha-cha, not the hora. We were very assimilated. We hung stockings at Christmas. No tree though!

I got into klezmer in 1980, when I first heard the record Mickey Katz Plays Music for Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and Brisses. (Reissued in 1994 as Simcha Time.) My mother was from Yazoo City, Mississippi, but we weren’t blues people — for sure. We didn’t listen to much music around the house. My sister had a handful of 45s. I bought one record growing up: “Small Sad Sam,” a parody of “Big Bad John.” The lyrics were “Here’s a tale of a man who was puny and weak, stood four-foot-six in his stocking feet.” (Phil McLean, 1961).  I’ve always favored comedy.

My freshman year at college, I bought The Greatest Hits of Miles Davis, The Greatest Hits of Thelonius Monk, The Bebop Era, and Bechet of New Orleans. I bought the records from a sewing-machine store owner — a friend of my father. I bought the albums after reading Blues People and Black Music by Leroi Jones.  I wrote music reviews for the Michigan Daily my sophomore year, and I was a macher at the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival.

At college I heard Texas blues man Mance Lipscomb  and was overwhelmed by his  down-home, salt-of-the-earth presence and his music. Mickey Katz became my Jewish Mance Lipscomb. Bonus points for Katz; he was funny. Katz: “My kugel is hot for Xavier Cugat.”

In South Euclid, Ohio, at Jack Saul’s house, I heard many Katz parody records. Jack lent out his recordings to the Kleveland Klezmorim in the early ’80s, when klez recordings were hard to come by. Jack had Lee Tully’s Seltzer on the Rocks, the Barton Brothers, Belle Barth, Leo Fuchs and Eli Basse. Jack had multiple copies of most albums. He even had a record by Sam Liberman, a klezmer musician from Argentina.

Yiddishe Cup started in 1988. Enough.

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I caught the bank in a $505 error. The bank had debited my account instead of crediting it. I said to the bank clerk, “I’ve never caught the bank in an error before. This is great!” The clerk, on the phone, didn’t react. I’ve been checking my bank balance my whole life, and it paid off at last.

My friend Carl never checks his balance. He says the bank never screws up. How would he know? My adult kids never balance their checkbooks. They laugh that I do. Stop laughing! That was a $1010 swing, kids (-$505 instead of +$505).

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I wrote “Punk rock guitarist versus the St. Edward High band” for the Cleveland Plain Dealer Friday (11/27/15). About noise wars.

St Edward High marching band

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