Real Music & Real Estate . . .

1. CHEERS FOR “L’CHAIM”

I had a funeral gig, or thought I did.  The deceased, Sid Elsner, had booked me years prior.  Sid wanted a New Orleans-style, jazz-klezmer element at his funeral.  Not a kosher concept, but neither was Sid.  [Goys: Jews don't often have music at funerals.]

When Sid died, none of his adult children mentioned music, so I didn’t play.

At the gravesite, I got a recipe for Sid’s brisket.  His oldest son was passing out the secret list of ingredients (chili sauce, onions).

Food works. That’s why there are shiva (mourning) meals.

A musician in Yiddishe Cup has attended only one funeral.  He has been to hundreds of weddings and one funeral. Lucky.

My mother’s favorite song was “Shenandoah,” which we sang it at her stone setting but not at her funeral.

My dad didn’t have a favorite tune.

Yiddishe Cup’s singer, Irwin Weinberger, wants Yiddishe Cup to play at his funeral.  I hope I can oblige.

After a 2000 Yiddishe Cup gig, I stopped at my father’s grave with my youngest son, who placed an old clarinet reed on my dad’s headstone.  My son had just played his first paying gig, on drums, with Yiddishe Cup.  I wanted to let my father know I was still around, still pushing the ball — cutting the grass, raising a family, starting a klezmer dynasty.  That last notion — the klezmer dynasty — would have flummoxed Toby, my father.  The last time Toby had heard me play I was a Cannonball Adderley wannabe.

. . . Here’s some advice for Jewish dads doing toasts at weddings: make your speech funereal. Pretend you’re updating your dead father, even if he’s alive.  Use flashbacks and talk about your kid’s personality quirks.  Stay on the high road; let the maid of honor do the weird stuff.  And end with “L’chaim,” even if you’ve never said it before.  “Cheers” from a Jew is a big turn off.

***

2. TOWER OF POWER

It’s unnerving when the bride ditches her own wedding.  She gets the flu for example, or a headache or swollen ankle, and has to lie down for a few hours.  Misses the whole party.  That marriage may not last.

Worse: the mom dies during the “Chicken Dance.”  That happened.  Not at my gig, but at one my video guy was at.

Did my video guy get it on tape?  I don’t know.  The video guy died on me.  Not at my gig, but slowly, over months.

He didn’t move around much; he had a stationary video rack.  He just stood by his rack, which I called the Tower of Power, and barely budged the whole night.  In his final days, he really bugged me.  For instance, when Yiddishe Cup would stroll table-to-table taking requests, like klezmer-achis, he would tell me which tables to go to.  “Can you do the head table next?” he would ask.

I didn’t know he was that sick.  “Why?” I said.

“Because I want to sit down,” he said.

I said no.  The head table was nowhere near us.  We had a traffic pattern to maintain.

He said, “I’ll remember this when you want a favor.”

Then he died.

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Yiddishe  Cup plays Mon. April 19, 6:35 p.m., for the community-wide Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) celebration at B’nai Jeshurun Cong., Cleveland.

A handful of klezmer musicians have PhDs and do klezmer-related research.  Hankus Netsky, Walter Zev Feldman, Joel Rubin, Jeffrey Wollock, and probably a few others I’m not aware of.

These men have put in time at the library as well as in the practice studio.  Some speak Yiddish and other foreign languages.  They know  obscure facts.  For instance, there was a close link between klezmer musicians and barbers, “considered one of the lower [professions] among the Jews . . . The barber was considered slightly below the server — the professional baker at weddings — and equal to the midwife.”  (Walter Zev Feldman, “Klezmer Musicians of Galicia,” Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry, Vol. 16, 2003)

These klez researchers often interview old people.  Hankus Netsky — he is so good at interviewing old people he should run a nursing home.  His PhD thesis was on the culture of old-school, 20th-century Philadelphia Jewish wedding musicians.

Interestingly, Netsky and the other PhDs are now kind of old themselves.  Fifties and up.  (Hankus is The Sage.)

For my research (non-academic), I focused on these new klez docs and their peers.  I bought recordings from nearly every klezmer band at the end of the 20th century.  I have CDs and tapes from Di Gojim, a Dutch goy band; Aufwind, a kraut klez band; and even the Alaska Klezmer Band.

Then I gave up. Too much product.  Every Beryl, Meryl and Shmeryl klezmer band was putting out recordings.  Yiddishe Cup — four CDs from them alone.

However, I did keep up with klezmer literature.  Real easy.  Not much product.  There hasn’t been a book on klezmer in at least eight years. The book-buying market spoke and said “No market.”

Here, for example, are some manuscripts looking for publishers:

Call Me Henry . . . No, Hank.  An in-depth look at American Jewish identity by Henry “Hank” Sapoznik, a klezmer and old time banjo player.

100 Jewish Music Insults by Pete Sokolow, pianist.  Putdowns that really work. Culled from the first 10 minutes of a five-hour interview with Sokolow.  Try these the next time you’re at a klezmer jam session:

1. What’s your phone number? Junior congregation needs a shofar blower.
2. You’re slicker than butter on matzo, but where’s the salt?
3. Tighten your neck strap.  Tighter.
4. You couldn’t find freygish with a GPS.  [Freygish is a mode.]
5. Let me see your clarinet.  I make desk lamps.

Where Klezmer Meets Corn, a memoir by “Klezmer Guy,” about a klez band’s one-night stands (concerts primarily) in the Midwest.  Some senior sex.

My Tsimbl is in Tune, a mystery by Pete Rushefsky, tsimblist.

Tattoo Jews by Mark Rubin, bass player.  A true-life account of large drawn-on Texas Jews taking on Los Tigres del Norte for bar mitzvah share in Ciudad Juarez.

Where’s Mincha, Helmut? funded by the German National Tourist Board’s “Deutschland ♥ Jews” initiative.  Subtitled “A Jewish Musician’s Guide to Germany.”  By Joel Ruben with Rita Ottens.   [Mincha is the afternoon service.]

Friends of Molly.  A steamy romance about a chick minyan — Friends of Molly — that reconnoiters annually at a Catskill hotel sauna.  By Eve Sicular, bandleader of the Isle of Klezbos.  [A minyan is 10 Jews.]

Just Say “You?” by Michael Wex, Canadian Yiddishist and writer.  Includes  dining-room seating charts from historic klez conferences.  Who sat with whom, why, and what happened post–mandelbroit and coffee. [Mandelbroit is Jewish biscotti.]

Old is the New Thin by Hankus Netsky.  How to improve your love life by looking and acting 10 years older than you really are.  Comes with a CD, Music to Suffer By, from the New Thin Department, New England Conservatory.

1. WHAT YOU CALL HIM

When I wrote to John Demjanjuk’s daughter, she sent me a packet stating her father, the Ukrainian SS man, had been framed by an editor at a small pro-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian, New York newspaper in 1975.

I was interested in seeing Demjanjuk.  I had thought and dreamed about Nazis, but had never been in the same room with one.  (I usually dreamed about being in the same room.)

At the 1981 Demjanjuk trial, lawyers argued over forensics, among other things, at the federal courthouse in Cleveland. I looked on as the prosecution presented a handwriting expert who had studied over 4,000 signatures.  He said Demjanjuk’s signature on the prison guard ID card was the real thing, not a Soviet forgery.

The judge agreed on that and a few other things — after months of testimony — and revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship.

Demjanjuk then spent some time in various American prisons for technical violations, such as missing his first deportation hearing.

In 1986 Demjanjuk was sent to Israel for a second trial.

A cop at the Sixth District police station watched a small TV hidden under his desk that day.  The TV was always on.  (I was covering the police news.)  The cop said, “Hey, there’s that guy — What You Call Him — getting off the plane in Israel.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t take a pill,” I said.

“For what?  He didn’t do it.”

“There are five witnesses,” I said.

“So what. It’s the past.  Let it die.  But the fucking Jews keep bringing it up.  He didn’t do it.  He was told to, or else.”

A lieutenant interrupted, “What would you do if somebody put a gun to your head and said, ‘Do it or else’?”

“He didn’t have to do it,” I shrugged.  I was down for the count with F-ing Jews.

Israel convicted Demjanjuk, and he was in an Israeli prison for years. Then Israel’s high court overturned its verdict on various technicalities and sent him back to America.

When Demjanjuk returned to the States, he went on trial again in Cleveland and was ordered deported.  Nobody wanted him until last year, when Germany said yes.

Demjanjuk turns 90 this Saturday in a German prison hospital.

Dem john’s luck.

Dem john yuck.

Damn john’s junket . . . Kiev Oblast, Flossenberg, Trawniki, Treblinka, Sobibor, Seven Hills/Cleveland, Jerusalem, Munich.

***

2. VOLKSDEUTSCHE

The building across from St. Edward High has two hair salons — one specializing in fades and buzzes, and the other for elderly women, all about perms and tints.

The tint shop is Martha’s.  In 1977 she bought the business from Hildegard, a fellow German. Martha is Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German from Poland.

Sometimes Martha sits in her shop all day and doesn’t get a single customer.  Her clientele is dwindling.  Whenever I come in, she hugs me and cries. This happens every single time.

She always talks about Jews.  Poles, too, occasionally.  She is not, as a rule, fond of Poles. “Every group has its devils, but the Poles had more than most,” she says.  She mentions several East Side Jews who hired her when she came over in the 1950s.  “Wonderful, wonderful people.”

I don’t know these East Side Jews.  Some West Side gentiles think all East Side Jews know each other.

I wonder how much of Martha’s war saga is true.

Martha is often late with her rent. That’s a pain but not a major one.  She’s good for it.

I hope her war stories are all true, but I don’t really want to know if they aren’t.

Martha says her mother rescued a Jewish girl in Kutno, Poland, during the war.  Martha’s mother — along with her Uncle Wilhelm and Cousin Hedwig — saw the little girl at a train station, exchanged furtive glances with the girl’s mom, took the girl home, and raised her.  The girl wound up marrying an Englishman after the war, Martha says.

Martha had Jewish ancestors who converted to Lutheranism in the 1800s, she says.

My dentist thinks he is Larry David.  When he looks at my X-rays, he shouts, “You bastard, you don’t have any cavities!”

My friend Mike, a retired businessman, thinks he is Larry David.  Mike has lived in Cleveland 35 years, but still considers himself a New Yorker.  “I don’t want to lose my standards,” he says when we eat out.  Mike is tough on bread — for starters.  Then it’s on to water: “What?  No Pellegrino?”

I’m Larry David.

A lot of middle-aged Jewish men think they’re Larry David.

I used to listen to comedy records at Harvey Pekar’s apartment.  Harvey had all of Bob and Ray, Lenny Bruce, and even Arnold Stang, the actor who did the Chunky commercials.  I could only listen to jazz for so long at Harvey’s.

Yiddishe Cup has gigged with a couple comedians.  The comics do bits on dieting and airport travel.  Frum (religiously observant) comedians even do riffs on kosher food.  Like “We had a power outage at our house and lost $100 worth of kosher meat — two chickens and a pound of hamburger.”

I could do that.  Every Jewish guy thinks he can do that.

Seder is the training ground for Jewish comedians.  I had a relative who thought he was Phil Silvers.  Ruined everything at Seder.  I like a serious Seder.  Curb the jokes about matzo and constipation.

***

My last close relative left Cleveland in 2001.  Now my Seders are with friends.

My relatives went to warmer places or died.

I hope some of my sun-worshipping, Sunbelt relatives come back.  And if they want a sip of fresh water, that’ll cost five dollars.  That’s the Great Lakes’ big hope: the rest of the country runs out of water.

I’m in about two traffic jams a year in Cleveland.  I would prefer five.  I don’t relish the horrible traffic of Chicago or Washington, but just a few more tie-ups in Cleveland would be nice.

In the 1970s Clevelanders first began imagining the whole town could go under.  T-shirts were silk-screened: “Cleveland: You’ve Got to be Tough.”

A musician in Milwaukee wrote a song called “Thank God This Isn’t Cleveland.”   [Thanks to former Milwaukeean Andrew Muchin for that info.]

Some Clevelanders never got over the trauma of the 1970s.  I know Clevelanders who vacation in Cape Cod; they’re instructed by the national media to vacation very far from the Midwest.  They wait an hour for ice cream on Cape Cod.  I biked around Nantucket in 1979 and it was crowded then.

Some of the best scenery in America is the bike path from Gambier to Coshocton, Ohio.  Rolling farm country, horses, sheep, cows, pigs and Amish buggies.

But some Midwesterners need to see the ocean.  They drive all day to the Carolina shore.  For what?  Lake Erie has beaches, waves, fat people and miniature golf.  Check out Geneva on-the-Lake.

Seder with friends . . . It’s not the same as with Aunt Bernice, Cousin Howard, and the rest of the gang at the old Seder table.

I live three miles from where I was born.  I’m always running into things that don’t exist anymore.

Is it unusual for a college-educated Jewish baby boomer to live so close to where he was born?

Yes.

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[To my three goys: Pesach, in the post title, is Hebrew for Passover.]

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See the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show tonight (Wed. March 24) at the Malt Shop (Maltz Museum), Beachwood, Ohio.  7 p.m.  Features the mail-fraud team of  Stratton & Douglass.
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Jack Stratton, drums, and  Bert Stratton, clarinet, are featured in the movie “First Voice Ohio” at the Cleveland International Film Festival Fri. March 26, 2:15 p.m.
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See Yiddishe Cup Sat. March 27, 9 p.m., at COW, the College of Wooster (Ohio).

My father, Toby, admired Bill Veeck, who owned the Cleveland Indians when the Tribe last won the World Series — 1948.  Veeck didn’t wear a tie.

My dad didn’t like to wear a tie.  Toby was his own boss — even when he wasn’t his own boss.

When Greyhound instructed Toby to take down his wall-mounted postage-stamp machines, I schlepped the machines to our treelawn. The scrap metal scavengers took the machines right away.

As for Toby’s cosmetics company, Ovation of California, he was lucky to pawn the remaining inventory off on a sucker from Indiana.  So my dad only went three-quarters broke on that one.

He put together a board game called Stock Market, like Monopoly.  He sent his Stock Market prototype to Parker Brothers, which returned it, but kept Toby’s play money, which was Monopoly money.  Parker Brothers was monopolistic about its play money.

My dad worked as a real stock broker for approximately six months. Didn’t go so well.  He was not the most personable fellow.

He wound up as an office worker at a key company, Curtis Industries.  And eventually — two years into the job — the key company gave Toby an evaluation.  Turns out my dad “would do well on a desert island,” “[may] be difficult to get along with,” and “much prefers to do things in his own way.”  Nevertheless, he lasted 17 years at that job.  That was the job where he worked on his other jobs.

Theodore "Toby" Stratton in 1967. Age 50.

Toby invented another game, Win-Sockey.  He sent it to Wham-O along with a 45 rpm recording of the song “Buckle Down Win Sockey.”  Cross marketing.

Toby’s Win-Sockey was a paddle game, modeled after Caddy, a 1920s street game.  The player used a wooden peg and paddle.  You placed the peg on the ground and karate-chopped it into the air with the paddle. When the peg sprang up, you swatted it.  Outfielders tried to catch it.

It was pretty popular in my driveway for a summer.

Wham-O said no thanks.

Toby considered buying a Burger Chef.  They had the open-flame, charbroiled, conveyor-belt cooking method — different than McDonald’s cook ‘em by the pan.  Back then, McDonald’s slogan should have been “Have It Your Way?  Wait 20 Minutes.”  Burger Chef was a lot quicker.

Toby didn’t do Burger Chef because the franchise fee was too high.

Toby put in an offer on a building in East Cleveland.  That was his first stab at real estate. The deal fell through.  East Cleveland became a slum — on the order of East St. Louis, Ill. — right after that.

Toby bought a building on the West Side.  That worked. 1965.  He bought more buildings and eventually quit the key company.  From then on, Toby only wore a tie at simchas (celebrations) and High Holiday services.

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See the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” DUO show, Wed. March 24, 7 p.m, at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Beachwood, Ohio.  Bert Stratton on clarinet and spoken word.  Alan Douglass on mood-enhancing keyboards and vocals.  Premiere of the tune “Berkowitz-Kumin (Funeral Home).”
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See Yiddishe Cup at COW, College of Wooster (Ohio), Sat. March 27, 9 p.m.

Pete Shimrak, a banker, had my number.   He, my father, and I were in the banker’s office.  Shimrak turned to Toby, my father, and said, “Does money turn the kid on?  I want to know.”

Toby didn’t answer.

Me?  I tried to disappear.  I wasn’t into money; I was into Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Shimrak said to me, “Does it turn you on?  Do you want to get rich?  You don’t have to play games with me.  If money doesn’t turn you on, say so.  You’d rather be poor than rich, right?”

Shimrak — a self-described “Croatian dead-end boy” — had come up the hard way and was friends with the bank’s principal owner, a Slovak.  The bank had originally been Orol Savings.  (Orol is Slovak for eagle.)

“I like money to be around,” I said.

“Stick with your father.  He knows how to find it.”

I did stick with my father — until he died in 1986.

Then my dad came back! I became my father.  That took several decades, but I managed it: marriage, kids, college tuitions, excessive worrying.

When I was young, I liked to aggravate my father, like so: “I think thirty-five grand is enough to get by on, Dad.”

Toby thought that was preposterous.  “What about when you’re married and have a family?”

Family? Married?

. . . The guys in Yiddishe Cup, we talk about 401(k)s and which shuls are moribund and which rabbis are in trouble, sometimes in flagrante delicto stuff.  And how much the Jewish Federation boss makes.  Basic old-man talk.

I used to disdain old people’s shul talk.  Like:

Aunt Bernice: “The young rabbi thinks the Young People’s Congregation gives out the lifetime tenures.”

Uncle Al: “The new rabbi isn’t too smart.”

If my parents and aunts and uncles could come back from the dead right now — and I had just an hour with them — I would devote at least eight minutes to shul talk. I would lay out who got fired, why, who moved, who did what to whom, and in what room.

Shimrak, the banker, liked my dad and me, because for one thing, we weren’t Mayflower descendants.  Shimrak’s wife, an Italian, made a terrific spaghetti sauce, he said.

“I’m not a bitch moaner, I’m not a negativist,” Shimrak said, showing us to the door. “Nobody gave me anything.  Nobody gave your father anything either.  Listen to him.”

I did listen.

I’m still listening to my father.  I just wish he would come back for an hour and listen to me.

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See the “Driving Mr. Klezmer” show at the Maltz Museum, Beachwood,  Ohio, Wed. March 24 ,7 p.m.  It’s  a one-hour prose-music performance by Stratton & Douglass LPA.

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See Yiddishe Cup at COW, the College of Wooster (Ohio), Sat. March 27, 9 p.m.

Yiddishe Cup is not a klezmer band.  Our recordings — and our stage shows — are dark and light, funny and serious.  Check us out.  We stretch out.  Every tune is different.

Klezmer is a clichéd marketing term, and we aren’t a party to it.

We aren’t even Jewish.  I’m not.  I gave it up for Lent.

Y Cup — formerly Yiddishe Cup, formerly Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band — fits perfectly into the world music/jazz scene.

I admire musicians who, when you hear their recordings, you immediately know who is playing.  Like “Hey, that’s Arnie!”  You know it’s Arnie by the hogs snorting in the background.

Y Cup has a new signature piece: “Mayor of West 83rd Street.”  You can smell natural gas when the tune starts.  Y Cup is a band with a very, very volatile — and totally unique — sound: intricate arrangements and constant shiftings of the lead.  We bring out different colors, different dynamics, different brews.  At a six-hour wedding, an open bar is imperative.

We write so many tunes, we can’t even name them. We gave up trying. Our newest tunes are 10-56, 10-57, 10-58.  Then ‘10′ stands for 2010.

Our album in progress is titled No Name, but that is so lame.  Maybe we’ll call it 10-10-10 and release it that day.  October 10 is going to be a huge wedding date.  If we don’t have a gig that day, we’ll disband and call the album Thank You for Your Kindnesses.

Y Cup is not a star show. It’s not about one musician standing above.  The rest of the band — the sidemen — I could replace them with one quick phone call — and I’d probably have a better group too — but I don’t.  The whole is less than the sum of the parts.  Add it up.

My musicians have skills.  One guy can belch whole notes.  Doesn’t feel academic either.

Non-Jews love our music.  Non-Christians too . . . Jewish people.

When I told my wife I was leaving Judaism, she said, “Then why are you saying a brocha over the wine?”  I told her, “It’s Friday night, that’s why.  TGIF.”

Klezmer is a niche I refuse to get boxed into.

We used to do klezmer, I’ll admit.  We played it on occasion.  Even Charlie Parker played klezmer at bar mitzvahs.  In his later days he didn’t.  Granted, he died at 34.

Y Cup plays what Parker would if he were playing bar mitzvahs today. That’s our esthetic.

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1 of 2 posts for 3/3/10.  Please see the next post too.
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Readers’ advisory:  This post, “Our Esthetic: We are not a Klezmer Band,” is fiction.   Made up. 
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See “Driving Mr. Klezmer” at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Beachwood, Ohio, Wed. March 24, 7 p.m.  Stratton, clarinet and spoken word (i.e. this blog), and Douglass, chauffeur and fuel-injected keyboards, plus vocals.  Jewish and American music.  DUO.

Yiddishe Cup at the College of Wooster (Ohio).  Sat. March 27, 9 p.m.
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Yiddishe Cup / Klezmer Guy has a  Facebook fan page.

A tenant almost sued me for icicle damage to her body.  A falling icicle grazed her shoulder.  She said it was a 25-pound icicle.

She wouldn’t have won.  There is no law stating I control the weather.  But she might have endlessly bugged me, so I told her to take some money off her rent.

There is no way to prevent ice buildup unless you put a heating cable in the gutter.  And I’m not going to do that.

Icicles: Ice==ik=uhls==.  I’ve seen six-foot icicles.

Icicles are in the playoff series, nature division, along with cardinals, sycamores and lightning bugs.

At the Webb building on the West Side, the icicles look like Niagara Falls in stop-action. The alleyway in back of the Webb building should be declared a national sanctuary for icicles; it is so frigid and dark back there.  The alley is a mile from frozen-over Lake Erie and gets no sun because apartment buildings dwarf it on each side.

A college film crew shot a crime/action movie in the alley.  They strewed litter to make it look worse.  (They picked the litter up afterward.)  They spread rock salt to melt the snow and ice.  Use the snow, use the icicles. Work with it.  Dueling icicles.
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2 of 2 posts for 3/3/10

Jim Guttmann, the bass player in the Klezmer Conservatory Band, said his biggest thrill was playing nursing homes.  Guttmann, who has toured the world, can pull that off.  He said nursing home residents appreciated him the most.

Other jet-setting klezmers claim young Germans are the best audience.  Or the Poles.  Some of these young Europeans treat the visiting klezmer musicians very deferentially, like Old West buffs treat Indians at powwows:  “Nice to see you made it through, dude.”

I don’t know about Europe, but I do know about the nursing home scene.  If you don’t play “Tumbalalaika” and “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” don’t bother showing up.  Those tunes are classics.

Humor goes over too — usually.  I did a comedy number at a nursing home, and an old man in a wheelchair interrupted, “Play music!  Sit down!”

I was heckled, I was flustered, and I blurted out, “I’ll sit down when you stand up!”  That quieted him — and everybody else.

When I’m in an audience, I often feel like bellowing “Talk!” at the performers.  I don’t go for the laconic Miles Davis/Bob Dylan model.

Performers: Make your banter interesting.  Don’t just say, “The next tune is . . .”  Tell the audience about your favorite candy bar — anything.  Say more than the set list.

At Yiddishe Cup’s next nursing home gig, I’m going to read blogospheric Klezmer Guy prose while our keyboard player improvises behind me.  One piece might be “Stop Talking and Play.”  I’ll read two paragraphs, pause, and my keyboard player will lead the audience in a shout chorus of “Stop talking and play!”  I’ll read a couple more paragraphs, and again the audience will shout the chorus.  This will continue until we play “Tumbalalaika.”
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1 of 2 posts for 2/24/10.  Please see the post below too.

Yiddishe Cup played its one and only bar gig at Wilbert’s in downtown Cleveland.   It was winter and we didn’t have much going on, so I figured why not.  We promoted the show, got written up in the Plain Dealer “Friday” magazine, and had our name listed in the Wilbert’s ad.  I had always wanted to be in a laundry-list bar ad: Feb 10 Lil Brian and the Zydeco Travelers, Feb 11 C.J. Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band, Feb 12 Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band.

Our crowd — East Side Jews — didn’t make the trek downtown.

After the show, the club owner said, “You don’t really expect me to pay you X thousand dollars, do you?  How’d we come up that figure?  We grossed X-1000 at the door.”

I said, “OK, give me what you want.”  So he started handing me single dollar bills.  Singles.  Those are worth a quarter.  I said, “How about a check?”

He said, “You wouldn’t want a check from me.”

True.

He eventually got out some $50s and $100s, plus 100 singles.

At least it felt like a lot of dough.

No more bar gigs, unless they’re bar mitzvahs.

Until now:

Yiddishe Cup plays Nighttown Sunday (Feb. 28, 7 p.m. $15).   But Nighttown is not just a bar, it’s a renowned restaurant, and according to Downbeat, one of the top 100 jazz clubs in the world.

We could open with “I Got Flanken (with Horseradish on the Side).”

First, somebody has to write it.
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2 of 2 posts for 2/24/10

At some bar mitzvahs, the teens are kept in a holding pen — a separate room — with a DJ, while the klezmer band plays in an adjacent room for the older people.

I prefer everybody in the same room, but I’m not in charge.  A party planner is.

Reality: It’s rare to see a klez band in any room at any bar mitzvah. Klez is the Uncola and DJ is the cola — Coke, Pepsi and cocaine combined.

The good news: Klezmer attracts interesting customers.  These clients don’t let their kids tell them what to do — entirely.  These clients might want a Jewish theme for a party, as opposed to a ski theme.  These clients might not like ear-splitting DJ music.  These clients might not relish watching their kids perform simulated sex to rap.  In other words, these clients are out-of-it professors, aeronautical engineers and musicians.

Musicians — as clients — love to hire other musicians.  The problem is many musicians are broke.  Luckily, some are married to doctors.  We get these gigs.  We always eat well there.  That’s a big thing with musician clients — making sure the musicians eat well.

Hadassah sponsors Simchapalooza, a bar mitzvah fair, every year, where bar mitzvah moms go to the I-271 Marriott to check out DJs, balloon twisters, video guys and caterers.

I had a booth one year.  I shouldn’t have.   A herring-reeking klemzer guy up against Giant Inflatables.  I lost.

The Bar Mitzvah King — DJ Terry Macklin — had about three tables at Simchapalooza.  He was full-service: invitations, catering, canned music and photo booths.  Everything except haftorah tutoring.

Macklin drove a Jag.

Then Terry got kind of old, so younger guys encroached on his coolness turf.  Rock the House is the DJ company now.  They aren’t black like Macklin, but they’re working on it.

There was another DJ, Joey Gentile, who advertised “Mitzvah services” in the Cleveland Jewish News.  I sent that ad to Moment — the national Jewish mag — for its spice box humor section, where Moment regularly reprints media and signage faux pas, like “Easter Challah $3.99 Special.”  Moment adds a wry caption, such as, “So that’s what they ate at the Last Supper.”

My Joey Gentile mitzvah ad didn’t make it into Moment.   It should have, with the caption, “A gentile mitzvah.  No bar?  Not likely.”

A New York salesman from the Bar Mitzvah Guide phoned me to buy an ad in his slick glossy, which his company distributed throughout the Midwest.  The Bar Mitzvah Guide carried ads for everything from bottle dancers to personalized chocolate bars.  The salesman called me way too often.   Finally, I said, “I’ll place an ad, but I bet you won’t take it.”

He said, “Try me.”

I said, “I want the text to read ‘Yiddishe Cup. If the other ads here aren’t your bag, we are.’”

He took the ad.

We didn’t get any gigs.
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Yiddishe Cup is at Nighttown, Cleveland Hts.,  7 p.m. Sun., Feb. 28. $15.

Last month, when Oakwood Club, a Cleveland Heights yekkie (German Jewish) country club, went under, the powers-that-be (charitable foundations, city government, the club’s board of trustees) came to Yiddishe Cup for ideas to reinvent the place.  The machers were considering a Jewish theme park.

Yiddishe Cup said no thanks.  We weren’t going to participate in a Yiddishland Epcot.  Not our thing.  We won’t even play Fiddler on the Roof unless the audience begs.  And they do.  (And we play it.)

The Oakwood Club machers begged Yiddishe Cup to take a second look at the theme park idea.  We did.

The Yiddishland theme vied with the steering committee’s Plan B, called “Oakwood Park, an Oasis for People and Wildlife.”  That plan was just a front for owls, hawks, woodpeckers, songbirds, foxes, flying squirrels and dragonflies.  The old golf course would become a meadow.

Songbirds don’t pay the bills.

A Friday night klezmer shabbat would work.  It would feature a very lite, ecumenical Yiddishe Cup. Yiddishe Cup has a piece — “Friday Night Service-able” — with no words, like a jazz mass.

We’ve done the number a few times.  It’s basically a D-minor drone with a lot of modal improvising on top.  The composition is 45 minutes to an hour.  We’ve had a few listeners/worshippers “fall out,” or faint.

A Yiddishe Cup klezmer shabbat would draw visitors from Columbus, Pittsburgh and Detroit.  And they would want to stay over.  So we would put them up at Oakwood. We would find space.

Beat this: For $450 per person, the out-of-towner gets a Friday night klezmer shabbat (with brisket and fries), the hotel room, and a Saturday morning round-robin tennis tournament with kiddush (sanctification/vino) and coconut bars. Followed by a nap, followed by golf and swimming.

Need an extra day? Take a hike on the Tribute to Reform Rabbis exercise trail.

Sunday afternoon would be Jewish wedding central, featuring the house band, the one and only . . .
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Readers’ advisory: This post is made up.  Fiction. Based on the fact Oakwood Club is closing and is for sale.
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1 of 2 posts for 2/10/10.  Please see the post below too.

When my wife’s computer started whirring and stinking up the house, I told her not to worry.  It would correct itself.

It crashed.  No biggie.   She got a new computer.

Then my violinist’s computer crashed.   It was a laptop he carried on every trip.  It was like a Strad to him.  A Stradivarius.  Three days after the crash, he was back online.  No big deal.

My computer crashed.

Big deal. I went nuts.

My real estate data disappeared.  I lost five years of checkbook data.

My computer repairman was dead; he was killed in a freak bicycle accident.  And my back-up computer guy was in medical school — in Hungary.  I couldn’t even write a check, and I didn’t know my bank balance.

I called Quickbooks and got a technician from the Pacific time zone.  Pacific Coast people, they seem smart on the phone. The tech person found the problem — after three hours of phone jabber — and fixed it for $172.  I would have paid triple that.

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:  “Triggers for broken-heart syndrome seem as varied as the number of people affected . . . Being overwhelmed by new software at work, seeing a poultry barn burn down, or losing money at a casino all have brought the condition on, doctors say.” The article’s headline was “Hearts Can Actually Break.”

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2 of 2 posts for 2/10/10

Concertgoers sometimes ask if I know Harvey Pekar, the American Splendor comic book writer.  Particularly at out of town gigs.

I know him.

Harvey and I had a mutual-aid relationship for years.  This “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” trope was Harvey’s modus operandi.  He wrote some nice things about my band, and I helped him out — not the least of which was fixing him up between his second and third wives.  This was right before Joyce, his present wife.

Harvey’s casual girlfriend was driving him crazy.  “She’s like a Third World country making impossible demands on an industrial nation,” Harvey said.  “She eats all my food, borrows my money, doesn’t lock her doors, or even get a car title.  One thing about Lark [Harvey's second wife], she was competent.”

I told Harvey I had a fix-up for him with a rabid left-winger.  He said, “Tell her I passed out leaflets for Henry Wallace when I was a kid!”

And he added, “Tell her I’m not a schleppy file clerk.  I’ve got some things on the line.  Oui wants some of my comics, and a guy in L.A. wants to make a movie maybe.”   The L.A. director was Jonathan Demme.  That movie didn’t happen.

For an anti-social guy, Harvey sure didn’t like being alone.  He said his second wife’s exit had totally blindsided him.  “There was no real sign of the doom coming on,” he said.  “But maybe it was my fault — her leaving.  I’m high-strung and emotional.  I didn’t see it. Yeah, she yelled a bit, but compared to my first wife — who was constantly hysterical — it was nothing.  I don’t run around.  I’m an old-fashioned guy.”

Harvey hit it off with a nurse, a friend of my wife. One point for the Strattons.

***

Harvey grew up on cantoral music. During the klez revival boom (1990s), he heard recordings of the legendary klez clarinetist Naftule Brandwein.  That made an impression on Harvey, but didn’t completely knock him out.  For Harvey, truly innovative music lay between Ayler and Zorn — far-out, improvisational mastur . . . mastership.  Brandwein wasn’t a jazz guy.

Harvey sold me a couple Jewish “sides” (LPs), and I told him what I knew about klezmer.  He also did some reading and listening, and pretty soon was fairly knowledgeable about klez.  He wrote about my band in the Boston Herald.  That piece was about klezmer in general; my band was mentioned in passing, as in Yiddishe Cup is “socially motivated.”

That meant Yiddishe Cup played a lot of parties.  I still use the quote in my band’s PR because of the “Boston.”  Boston used to be the Jerusalem of klezmer.  Now the Jerusalem moves around.  It’s in Cleveland today.

Before Harvey became famous — before the movie American Splendor came out — I went to his house with all my Pekar comic books.  He signed issue #1, which I put in a glassine bag.

I still have a lot of his comics, unopened.  I used to take handfuls of Harvey’s comics on trips out of town, to show off Cleveland.

Where is my Harvey Pekar bobblehead doll?

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Check out our new video clip “Going Tin,” live from The Ark, Ann Arbor, Mich.  It’s the Klezmer Guy blog in 2-D.  Rated alluring.
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See Yiddishe Cup:
Sat. Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m.  Purim, Park Synagogue, Cleveland Hts.  Family-oriented.
Sun. Feb 28, 7 p.m.  Nighttown, Cleveland Hts.  Downbeat named Nighttown one of the top 100 jazz clubs in the world.

Clarinet players are sometimes a bit behind the times. If you subscribe to The Clarinet magazine, you’ll see.  There are a lot of photos.

Toodles in ‘12. Benny Goodman for President.

Many clarinetists, myself included, mimic Goodman.  He’s the latest thing.  We stand ram-rod straight, wear suits, and have facial muscles twisted tighter than model airplane propellers.

U.S. military band clarinetists are a subspecies of clarinet antediluvians.  They are all sergeants for some reason.  These soldiers aren’t shimmying under any barbed wire fences for you.  They’re busy practicing, trying to get into The Clarinet magazine.

Clarinetists gather annually at Clarinetfest, Clarinetopia and Clarabell.  (The last one is made up.)  At these conventions, the workshop leaders are called clinicians.  They come from SMU, KSU and OSU.  Has to have an S in it.  The clinicians teach college students how to become clinicians.

When I was a clinician at the Ohio Music Educators Association conference, I was a bit light in the bio department. No “B.M. from SMU,” no “soloed with the Wyoming Symphony,” no “studied with Hans WorseThan Most.”

I wrote I was the clarinetist and leader of Yiddishe Cup.

***

Not every clarinet player looks like an insurance agent.  There’s Don Byron, the black guy with dreadlocks, and Paquito D’Rivera, the Cubano humano. Plus there are at least a dozen curly-haired Jewish clarinetists who look like Larry Fine from the Three Stooges.  The principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra, Franklin Cohen, is a Larry Fine impersonator.  Me too.

A black acquaintance, who ran into me in a restaurant, said, “Hi, Frank.”  I corrected him, and the black man blushed, sort of.

I played two surprise birthday parties for Frank Cohen.  Those were scary affairs because at least eight clarinet players were at each gig.  Some of the clarinetists played “Happy Birthday” in a clarinet choir, which is similar to a vocal chorus, except it’s all clarinets: big, medium and little clarinets.

I, too, own a small clarinet — a C clarinet.  The C is more piercing than the standard Bb horn, which is my main axe. (Bb is what everybody is familiar with.) There are also Eb clarinets, which are smaller than Cs.  And even more obscure key clarinets.

The thing I never understood about music: Why all the different keys?  Just get rid of some of them. Pare down.

Sid Beckerman, the legendary klez clarinetist, said, “To you, D minor is a key.  To me, it’s a living.”  D minor is the key of choice for klezmer clarinetists.

And what’s with transposing? If a clarinetist plays with a pianist or guitarist, the clarinet player has to play different notes than the ones written on the page.

I’m pretty good at it.  When I see a written “C,” I can play “D” on the clarinet.  It took me a while.  It’s like a Swede learning Danish.

Here’s what is impossible: transposing quickly on the alto sax.  When you see “C,” you play “A,” the relative minor.  If the tune is incredibly slow, like a waltz, it’s doable.

Transposition keeps the riff-raff and dabblers off the bandstand.  Just like in Judaism, where the prayer book goes backwards and the rabbi skips chunks of prayers and jumps around in the book without telling you.  Just to make it hard.

I do my own “forcible entry and detainers.”

That means evictions.

First, I serve the deadbeat tenant an eviction notice.  Technically, that is a three-day notice.

Then I go to the court, and for $85 fill out another piece of paper, called a “forcible entry.” On the form, under the “second cause of action,” I write: “Tenant owes back rent.”  I used to write novellas: “Blah, blah, wherefore plaintiff prays for damages and the cost of this action . . .” A waste of time.  The tenant is broke; you’re not going to get anything by writing more.

I occasionally lose a case — usually on oddball stuff.   Like when an AIDS victim claimed I didn’t rent to him because of his illness.  I didn’t know he had AIDS.  We settled for $620.  I was fine with that.  You know what a real discrimination case can cost?  Five-thousand dollars, for starters.

Another AIDS victim wanted to move from the fourth floor to the first.  I didn’t want that; the guy was always late with his rent, and I would have to repaint his old suite and his new one.  He got a lawyer who said I was discriminating.  I said, “Can I help you with that couch?”  The tenant moved to the first floor and died a couple months later.

Lawyers say past rent is “recoverable.”  Yes, the rent is recoverable, but try to recover money from somebody who’s broke.  Not recoverable.

The courts have determined that accepting late rent “effectively waives strict compliance with the rental terms.”

Strict compliance?  Who’s into strict compliance? I accept late rent payments.  I don’t say to tenants, “Oh, it’s the eighth of the month, I can’t accept your rent.”

I sometimes hire a lawyer for legal complications — matters beyond the workaday.  For instance, the city wanted to ban basement dwellings because the mayor thought below-ground suites were a throwback to the dark ages when custodians lived underground and stoked coal-fired boilers.

My lawyer brought a stenographer to the city hearing.  The city guys were impressed with that. Also, a group of ethnic, babushka landladies — who owned basement rental units too — were there.  Afterward, they thanked me for stymying the city’s effort.

Quasi-legal advice:

1. Do not discriminate against people with kids.   Federal law prohibits it.

2. Do discriminate on age — on the young side — if you want.  But be consistent.  For example, you can prohibit adults under a certain age, say 22, from your apartments. That means 18-to-21 year olds can’t live in your buildings. That reduces the partying and potatoes stuck in the toilet drains.

3. When you try to evict a party animal, you need to quote verbatim from the Ohio Revised Code, Section 5321.05 (A) (8).  That’s the part that ends “conduct yourself in a manner that will not disturb your neighbor’s peaceful enjoyment of the premises.”  You have to use that exact language.

Peaceful enjoyment.  That’s the goal.
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Yiddishe Cup is at The Ark, Ann Arbor, Mich. this Sat. (8 p.m., 1/23).

A lot of bands wear all black.

Yiddishe Cup doesn’t do that.  Too East Coast.

In Toronto I saw the Flying Bulgars in what looked like clown suits.

Yiddishe Cup is somewhere between the Flying Bulgars and black.

We have five looks:

1. The tux with colorful hand-sewn lapels.  The downside to this is everybody knows we’re shnorring at the hors d’oeuvres table at weddings.  All-black tuxes would make us invisible.

2. Blue undertaker suit.  Keeps the focus off us and on the bridal couple or bat mitzvah girl.

3. Solid-colored shirt with colorful tie.  This is our middle-school art teacher look. Works well at laidback bar mitzvahs.

4. Hawaiian-style shirt.  A professional costume designer made these shirts.  They wash well and dry quickly.  A real show-biz shirt.  When we played 13 gigs in six days in Florida, the quick-dry feature came in handy.

Yes, Florida in January . . . I wish Yiddishe Cup would land another run like that. But the mega-condo booker in Florida won’t re-book us.

Was it our lyrics?

You judge. Yiddishe Cup’s “Tumbalalaika”:

What can grow, grow without rain?
“This,” says our singer, grabbing his crotch.

What can burn, burn for many years?
“Not love,” our singer says. “Hardly. Try hemorrhoids.”

A comedian, Stu, was our last booker in Florida.  I should have known he was bad news because his email address was Suntanstu@ and his Web site had photos of him with Engelbert Humperdinck.

Stu’s idea of a joke was not paying for our sound (speakers, mics) and backline (instrumental rental) after I bought airplane tickets to his showcase in Florida.

One final Yiddishe Cup look:

5. T-shirt with the Yiddishe Cup logo. We wear these when we play summer park gigs.

Our singer, Irwin Weinberger, wears the Yiddishe Cup T-shirt around town too. The rest of us don’t wear our shirts much off stage.  Do you see LeBron in the grocery store in a Cavs jersey?

At KlezKamp I saw a Klezmer Conservatory Band musician in a Montreal Jazz Festival T-shirt.  That was cool, synergistically speaking; KCB had played Montreal.

I wear T-shirts from the Concert of Colors (Detroit) and CityFolk (Dayton, Ohio).  Yiddishe Cup played those festivals.

I saw Klamberg, the Klezmatics’ singer, in a Klezmatics T-shirt at KlezKamp.  (Correction: Sklamberg.)

On second thought, maybe Irwin Weinberger is cool.
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1 of 2 posts for 1/13/10.  Please see the next post too.

My father told me that when he graduated college in 1938, he wanted a job — any job.

I, on the other hand, wanted “meaningful work” when I graduated in 1973.  “Meaningful work” was a popular term then.  I first heard it from Lawrence Kasdan, the Big Chill director.

I tried being a bricklayer.  A “brickie.”  I got a joiner, mortar and mason’s trowel.  I knew another Jewish bricklayer, who talked up the profession.

My father said incredulously, “You want to work with your hands?”

Just a thought, Dad. I learned a bit about roofs, radiators and hot water tanks.

Whenever my father had tools in his hand — which was rare — he was often loud and profane.

It’s not innate — Jews swearing with tools.  I know a couple Jewish car mechanics and Jewish fix-it guys.  It’s all about how you were raised.  My dad gave me arithmetic workbooks in elementary school.  For fun, I plotted graphs.  In high school I got fast on the abacus.

If you want a number, see me.  Here’s one: the rent on apt. 1 at 1409 Marlowe Avenue was $80 in 1965.  Now it’s $525.  The rent has approximately kept pace with inflation. Eighty dollars in 1965 is $540 now.
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2 of 2 posts for 1/13/10

Yiddishe Cup’s biggest fan is Lea Grossman.

She got us a gig at The Ark, the premier acoustic music club in the Midwest.  She kugel-ed The Ark’s program director.  She delivered a noodle kugel to his office in Ann Arbor, Mich.  He liked it and he hired us.  (Hopefully our music had something to do with the booking too.)

I had been avoiding Ann Arbor.  I had attended college there during the hippie era and hadn’t learned much.  There had been a quasi-ban on book learning.  The foreign language requirement had been oppressive, according to protestors, and the Psych teaching assistants led T-Groups and gave everyone A’s in protest of grading.  Until I signed up. Then it went to pass/fail.

When my kids started looking at colleges, I told them Michigan was a swamp.  Too big, too impersonal.

I even rooted for Ohio State over Michigan.  I harbored some serious animosity toward the Blue. I told Michigan to stop sending me alumni mail.  But for $75 I hedged and sent a donation every year.  You never knew.

Thanks to Yiddishe Cup super-fan Lea Grossman, I wound up back at Michigan big-time.  Lea is 60-something but gets around like a coed, and she promoted our band to everybody and helped put signs on every phone pole.  The woman can dance, party and cook.  She knows every Jewish dance, and has sung “Tumbalalaika” on stage with Yiddishe Cup at The Ark.

Lea lived near North Campus in a university-affiliated retirement community.  It was like a dorm for seniors — real seniors.  North Campus — the last time I had been there — had been a music school, a smattering of grad student housing, and one undergraduate dorm.  It had been the end of the earth.  You had to take a bus to get there.  (Still do.)  The dorm was called Bursley, as in “brrr, it’s cold.”

For Yiddishe Cup’s first Ark appearance, I picked January.  Not too many rational Clevelanders scheduled weddings in January, so we had an opening.

Ann Arbor’s weather was just like Cleveland’s.  Bad.  And we got a huge crowd at the club.  That was weird.  The difference between Cleveland and Ann Arbor was Michigan had a puffy coat brigade. The worse the weather, the more the puffy coaters came out.  It was almost an Upper Midwest can-do chic — like something from the Progressive Era — a bunch of irregular Jews in irregular puffy coats.

On our first Ark gig, my youngest son stayed in the North Campus dorm, Bursley.  He was in eleventh grade.  (He also played drums on the gig.)

He liked the school and wound up at Michigan.

So I returned to the swamp– to see my son, and play gigs.  (My other kids went to small liberal arts colleges.)

I couldn’t get the Michigan Daily to write up Yiddishe Cup.  Ever.  I tried. The reporters wouldn’t return calls.  Maybe they weren’t too crazy about talking to a middle-aged klezmer guy.

When I had been a Daily reporter, I had enjoyed the John Lennon and Miles Davis assignments but not the local-angle profiles, like when I wrote up the Discount Records clerk who played sax.  (That sax player, Steve Mackay, was good, and cut some records with the Stooges later.)

Lea didn’t know who to kugel at the Daily; the Daily reporters were always rotating in and out.  They missed a good dish.  Lea moved to New Jersey a year ago.

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“To Kugel,” this post,  first appeared in the Washtenaw (Ann Arbor, Mich.) Jewish News, Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010.
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Check out the new video clip “Driving Mr. Klezmer,” live from The Challah Fame Cafe. The Klezmer Guy blog exits the loch (your computer).  Klezmer Guy walks and talks.  Rated scary.
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Yiddishe Cup plays The Ark, Ann Arbor, Mich., 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 23.   Guests include Hawaiian guitarist Gerald Ross, comedian Seymour Posner, and members of the soul/klez band Groove Spoon.

Every year I tell my insurance man, “I can’t complain.”

He won’t accept that. He breaks me down.  He starts by telling me horror stories from his other customers, like the jeweler who had 30 jewelry stores and is now down to two, or the real estate investor who wanted to put 50 percent down on a shopping strip center but the bank wouldn’t give him a mortgage even with 50 percent down.

Eventually, I sing for the insurance man: “Jerry, my expenses are up and my income is down!”

But I try to remember what the hardware store guy once told me: “You can’t complain, Stratton.  You’ve had some good years.”  (The hardware guy could complain.  Home Depot was a mile away.)

I complain for the insurance guy. This Noh drama has been running for decades.  The insurance guy sold insurance to my father.  The insurance guy’s father sold insurance to my father’s father.  Not true — but close: The insurance man’s father sold insurance to my brother-in-law’s father.

My rates hadn’t gone up much.  I asked my insurance guy why.  He said, “Because you’ve been a good boy.” I hadn’t started too many fires.

My last fire was 14 years ago.  An elderly tenant put a cigar butt in an upholstered chair, then forgot about the butt.  That destroyed the unit but not the building.

I didn’t let the smoker move back. He was a nice old guy but I was afraid he’d re-light.

My buildings have been hit by lightning — a couple chimneys.  Several cars have rammed into the buildings.  Boilers have cracked.  Water mains have burst.

Fire is the worst by far.  You get religion real fast when you’re standing in an apartment that looks like a burnt marshmallow.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/30/09.  Please see the post below too.