BUG ME, PLEASE

 
Some musicians hear every microtone and nuance. They say “oh, he’s flat,” or “she’s pitchy.” Come on.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, hears everything. He tells me to “push in” my saxophone mouthpiece, because I’m often flat. (More on Alan later.)

I’m bringing back an old Yiddishe Cup tune from 2009. We originally learned the piece, “Sam Malik’s Tune,” from the New Shtetl Band, who learned it from one Sami Malik, a Macedonian village musician.

I tried the tune the other day and didn’t nail it right off. I figured out the first section, but not the second. I had forgotten a lot. Which reminds me, clarinetist Sid Beckerman, at a Klezkamp workshop, once said, “I haven’t played this tune in  20 years,” and then nailed some obscure freylekhs.

I didn’t nail “Sami Malik’s Tune.” But I want to perform it at Cain Park. [Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights. 7:30 Sun., June 28. Free.]

Alan listened to the tune, which he hadn’t heard in 16 years, and nailed it. He remembered every nuance. And “Sami Malik’s Tune” is not “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; it’s a strange Macedonian tune. Or maybe Albanian.

Jazz pianist Joey Hunter once said about Alan: “he hears everything.” Alan, on gigs, knows when the other musicians are off, but he doesn’t bug them, except me., because I ask him to bug me. Why not? I don’t want to sound bad if I don’t have to.

(L) Alan Douglass and Bert Stratton, Cain Park, 2022. (Photo by Lloyd Wolf)

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