Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Goys and many highly assimilated Jews think Yiddishe Cup plays primarily for Orthodox Jews.  Not true.  We play mostly for non-Orthodox Jews.

But we do play the occasional Orthodox Jewish gig.

Some of these gigs go NYC-style, fast-talking, cell-phones-beeping-everywhere frenetic.  You’re in Israel but without the jet lag.

We play mostly OrthoRock tunes at Orthodox affairs.  OrthoRock isn’t klezmer.  It’s rock with liturgical lyrics.  A classic OrthoRock tune is “Moshiach” (Messiah).  Another is “Chazak” (Strength).  These two tunes — plus a hundred others, some of which are popular only for a month or so– are the standard OJ (Orthodox Jewish) repertoire.  Yiddishe Cup doesn’t learn the new tunes frequently enough.  (We don’t get many OJ gigs either.)

The Orthodox families who hire Yiddishe Cup are typically left-wing Orthodox.  Left-wing, here, means on the liberal end of ritual observance.  The client might request, for instance, American rock and roll toward the end of the party.

Yiddishe Cup’s most right-wing gig was for the get (divorce decree) rabbi.  We played a Purim tish (table gathering) at his house.  All black hats and beards.  The rabbi’s drosh (speech on a liturgical text) was in Yiddish.

My Conservative rabbi, when he heard about the get gig, couldn’t believe I’d been in the get rabbi’s house.  He had never been in there.

Yiddishe Cup knows the rabbis the rabbis don’t.

Cleveland is large enough that Jewish denominations typically don’t party and pray together.  If you want a mishmash of Jews in the same room, go to a smaller town, like Akron, Ohio.   In Akron, the Orthodox and non-Orthodox will mix it up.  It’s a matter of survival.  Small numbers.  You’ll see every kind of Jew but Jews for Jesus at an Akron Jewish gathering.

Musicians, take note: Don’t play “Hava Nagila” at an Orthodox simcha (celebration). Too goyish.   Nevertheless, at one Orthodox wedding, the mom’s sister repeatedly requested “Hava Nagila.”  I said no.  Then some yeshiva buchers (students) from New York asked me for the song.  I said, “Are you trying to embarrass the band?”

“No, we heard you’re a klezmer band and we’d like to hear it.”

The mom didn’t want it.  Again, the mom’s sister said play it.  Again, the buchers said play it.  The mom finally relented.  We played it.

The buchers danced with ruach (spirit) to the tune.  “Hava Nagila” is originally a Hasidic nign (wordless melody) from Hungary.  It’s a great tune.
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1 of 2 posts for 12/2/09.  Please see the next post too.

“Making it” in the band biz means flying.  Success is walking through the airport with a saxophone case slung over your shoulder.

My next-door neighbor still talks about running into Yiddishe Cup on a flight back from Texas. Did he think I just played power mower?

On one of Yiddishe Cup’s first flights — Southwest to Chicago — I paid our accordion player to serenade us in the waiting area.  That was back when Southwest was offbeat.  Then our violinist joined in.  Nobody clapped and nobody booed.  Everybody was in shock.  A Hungarian czardas at 9 a.m. was crazier than Southwest wanted to be.

We rent drums, a keyboard, and sound equipment when we fly.  Everything else, we carry on board.  The instruments fit into the overhead bin.  Even the tenor sax.  You need a sleek SKB-style sax case.

Try to get in the first boarding group with Southwest.  You’ll have the overhead bins all to yourself.

You don’t need to buy an extra seat unless you’re a cello player.

At cocktail parties, I’m often asked, “Who pays for your Yiddishe Cup road trips?”

The client pays. Yiddishe Cup is not a high school glee club!

We are not  in a rock and roll fantasy camp.  We are in a klezmer fantasy camp.  We think  most of the world knows and loves klezmer music.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/2/09

Downtown Detroit has a lot of detour signs.  Just when you think you’re heading back to Ohio, you’re not.  You’re on your way to Detroit Metro airport and points west.

Don’t play for peanuts in Detroit.  You’ll feel like a fool if you’re lost and underpaid at two in the morning.

In Yiddishe Cup’s van, each musician has an assigned role. Our drummer is in charge of windshield fluid levels.  He’s big on that.  Our dance leader supplies the bottled water. Our keyboard player loads the van; he knows the secret order of the gear.  We like to watch.

Van life smells.  It reeks of six guys in a metal container, topped with a cherry-scented spray, courtesy of the van rental company.

One Yiddishe Cup musician plays his iPod so loudly there is aural seepage.  Not everybody is into Bob Dylan’s basement tapes.  The icing: scents from Krispy Kremes and Cinnabuns.  Our driver eats that stuff like he’s on death row.

The bandleader’s job is to monitor the musicians’ word output.  Everyone has a certain quota of words for the day, and after he has used that, he should shut up and read, according to the van guard.

Luckily, nobody in Yiddishe Cup is a motor mouth.  Really, nobody wants to hear about your stock portfolio, your computer, your illness, your day-job boss, for too long.  Only exceed your word quota for safety reasons, like if the driver might fall asleep from drowsiness.

That, unfortunately, is a possibility. You know how boring it is to drive I-71 to Columbus, or the Ohio Turnpike to Detroit?

Little known fact: you can get lox and bagel at milepost 100 on the Ohio Turnpike.

Don’t.

Yiddishe Cup’s worst milepost ever: 213, on I-71 near Medina, Ohio.  We had a flat tire and waited for a tow truck at 3 a.m.  Our drummer kept repeating, “Here comes a truck with lights on top.”

I said, “Most trucks have lights.”

The tow truck was a heavy-duty model — especially equipped for jacking up vans — and it arrived very late.

I had a lot of time to replay our night’s gig, a Columbus bat mitzvah.  After the hora, the mom had said, “It wasn’t a freylekhs!”  [Hora.] And I had said, “It wasn’t Latin music!”  Apparently, she had wanted to be lifted in a chair, and I had cut the music before.  I wasn’t clairvoyant.

Bat mitzvah moms don’t always goes up on chairs.  Maybe half the time.
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1 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

Terry wanted to sell Notre Dame paraphernalia from an empty store I had across from St. James Church.  He had just come back from South Bend, Ind., with a carload of merchandise.  [Terry wasn't his real name.]

He sang in two church choirs, knew the bishop, and knew the town’s development director, Kelly.  He knew the mayor too, FitzGerald.   And probably knew the former building director, Fitzgerald.

Terry wanted the rent lowered.

I couldn’t figure out if he had any money.

He kept talking choirs.  He sang in two — St. Ignatius and St. Malachi.  That wasn’t money.

I told him my building manager sang in a choir too — a Ukrainian one. “Call the manager to see the inside of the store,” I said. “He lives in an apartment right above the store.”

“You own the apartments above too?” Terry said.  “I’m looking for a place.”

That was a bad.  Maybe Terry’s car trunk had all his worldly possessions, plus the Notre Dame gear.

I told him I had a vacancy upstairs. “Too bad about Notre Dame’s final twenty-two seconds against Michigan,” I said.

He didn’t want to talk football.  I couldn’t blame him . . . Michigan and Notre Dame.

Terry didn’t rent — the store or the apartment.

I’ve only had a couple commercial tenants who also lived in the building.  I had a photographer who lived in the basement of his shop.  That was free living quarters. The photographer installed a dishwasher, stall shower and kitchen.   He was down there for decades, and the city never looked.  That photographer should have had a bumpsticker: “Thank God I’m a Morlock.”  (In the 1980s, ethnic bumperstickers were a fad in Cleveland. “Thank God I’m Slovenian” was the most popular, I think.  “Thank God I’m Jewish” was special order.)

I had a barber who lived over her store.  She paid extra.  Her store had a window sign: “Fighter Chick Parking Only.”  She was a lesbian Puerto Rican cage fighter who got along with everybody.  (She’s still there, but doesn’t live in the apartment.)

I had a Chinese tenant who lived beneath his meditation and “healing arts” studio.  He lasted 10 years.  (He didn’t live under the store all those years.  Only after his divorce.)   If you develop a following, you can make it in a business like healing.  Yoga is another field like that.  Charisma-driven.  I have a yoga store that seems to be doing well.  The owner is very outgoing.

I had a tenant who re-sold children’s toys.  She left me a basement of orphaned Fisher-Price kids.  A whole basement: the kids, plus broken schoolhouses, gas stations and school buses.  Also, Little Tykes picnic tables and Big Wheels.  I wish she had left a Fisher-Price dump truck.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/25/09

When the police call me at 2 a.m., I can often guess the script: A drunk has fallen through a storefront window.

A lot of people are coming out of West Side bars at 2 a.m., and some of them are falling through windows.

I’ve rented to bars.  That state liquor license — that’s gold.  It’s the mojo for a working-class guy trying to enter the middle class.  A bar can change its name and ownership, but it’ll always be a bar.

Unless it’s knocked down.

I razed a bar.  The Stop-N-Go. The city replaced it with a shopping center.  Was I against eminent domain?  No.  The Stop-N-Go was a hole, and we got paid a good price.  Our politically connected eminent-domain lawyer raised the bar on bar razing.

The only real loss, civically speaking, was  the city lost a bar with a secluded back-door entrance.  Patrons slinked behind a shoe warehouse to get to the bar’s rear door.  Nobody could see you go in the bar.  Mailmen in uniform especially liked that.

When I went in the Stop-N-Go, particularly on a sunny day, it’d be like entering a fun house; I’d trip and stumble. I couldn’t see anything except a couple lit cigarettes.  For guidance I tracked the owner’s voice, which usually said, “It’s dead around here, Stratton.”  That was the standard greeting, even when it wasn’t dead.  All commercial tenants like to say it’s dead.

A man at the bar was reading the Sporting News.

I heard a guy say, “Anything about softball in there?”

“Yeah, the Indians.  They hit the soft ball.”

We hired a mailman from the bar to do odd jobs at the building.  Like sweep the common-area hallway.  This building was formerly an office building, and some of the apartments above — converted from offices — were very asymmetrical: kitchens bigger than living rooms, bedrooms the size of foot lockers.  One tenant, who slept in a coffin, owned a heavy metal record store.  His coffin was in his living room.

Miss Sniadowska, another tenant, had a narrow foot path between mountains of brittle magazines and newspapers.  Ladies Home Journals and Cleveland Presses.  Volunteers from the city’s office on aging helped her groom the trail.

When my family sold that building, a lawyer made $12,000 in one minute.  Our lawyer phoned his friend, the mayor, and the mayor accepted our new price, which was $36,000 higher than our previous price.  The mayor — who was using developer’s money anyhow — was fine with that.  Our lawyer took his standard one-third cut: $12,000 — one-third of the $36,000 increase.

That developer — the guy knocking down our building — was a Jew who liked opera.  Just another Jewish music-loving landlord.  That’s a sizeable subset.  Another Cleveland Jewish developer is a violinist.  These guys need something more than burst steam pipes and triple-net leases to keep their sanity, I guess.  (Triple-net is when a store pays a portion of the building owner’s taxes, insurance, and maintenance expenses, in addition to the monthly rent,)

Even better for the landlord: when a storeowner pays a percentage of his cash receipts to the landlord.

We hit that jackpot once. We were renting to a Faflik shoestore.  Maybe it was called Faklik Store #688.   Fafliks were everywhere.

Faflik typically leased in shopping malls, where percentage leases are common, but we weren’t a shopping center; we were a 1920s Main Street building with no triple-net leases and, furthermore, a building that was about to be knocked down.  The Stop-N-Go bar was right next to Faflik.   And right next to Stop-N-Go was the Specialty Kitchen, owned by a Greek or Lebanese, depending on the year.  The gyro platter was the only constant.

Every three months, we’d get a check from Faflik/Wohl Shoe Co. of St. Louis.  It was free money.  A percentage of the store’s cash register sales.  Just a couple bucks but, still, it was like a gift.  It was like B.B. King getting a royalty check for a record he didn’t remember making.

When I was growing up, saying “Jewish music” was like  “Jewish cars.”   Didn’t mean a thing.

On second thought, “Jewish cars” did mean something.  It meant, for example, the Boat — an Olds 98 owned by my friend Mark’s father.  The Boat had electric windows and was oceanic.  (Mark was richer than the rest of us, I think.  He lived by Cedar and Green roads, and his doorbell lit up.)

Years later, a West Side gentile called those humongous Detroit rides “Jew boats.”   So maybe there were Jewish cars.

Re: Jewish music . . .

I learned about that at the house of another high school friend, Shelly Gordon.  His parents knew Israeli and Yiddish music, cold.   Shelly was rarely home.  I was an adult when I got interested in Jewish music, and Shelly had already moved to Israel.  (His parents were such impassioned Zionists most of the family wound up in Israel.)

Shelly’s parents were Labor Zionists (Poale Zion).  They seemed to know every classic Israeli tune and how to dance and/or sing it.  And the  Gordon family  attended a Yiddish camp in Michigan.  (Farband/Jewish National Workers Alliance.)

The parents didn’t know sports, which was odd because Shelly turned into a star athlete.  He played tennis for Ohio State and became a tennis pro in Israel.  Shelly did that for more than 30 years.  (Still at it.)  He never took a private tennis lesson.

Shelly didn’t care about Jewish music; he cared about the Browns, Buckeyes and Indians.  In Israel he logs on — to this day — at about 3 a.m. to catch Cleveland sports scores on the Internet.  He has a yarmulke that reads “Cleveland Cavaliers.”

When I went to Jerusalem in 2006, I played The Wall.  Shelly.  At the Israel Tennis Center, Shelly was like Moshiach (Messiah); he had the highest seniority and everybody deferred to him.  He had even beaten Andy Ram, a Wimbledon doubles champion.  “Andy was 12 at the time,” Shelly pointed out.

Shelly’s dad, Sanford (the man who knew all the Hebrew tunes),  never played tennis.  In fact Mr. Gordon was so oblivious to sports he didn’t even sign Shelly up for Little League.  Mr. Gordon was not an immigrant or DP (Displaced Person); he was a NASA scientist and full-time Zionist.  Baseball meant nothing to Israelis, thus, it meant nothing to Mr. Gordon.

Shelly went to a Zionist camp in Michigan.  (Habonim Camp/The Builders.)

On the flipside: My parents played tennis; didn’t collect Jewish song books;  didn’t send me to any kind of  camp; and my dad managed a Little League team.  So I wound up playing klezmer music.

When Mrs. Gordon died last month, her body was flown from Israel to Cleveland, to Mt. Olive Cemetery.  A twist on shipping an American Jewish corpse to Mt. Olive, Jerusalem.  Mrs. Gordon wanted to be buried next to her late husband.

At Mrs. Gordon’s funeral, I had time to kill because the mourners, following Orthodox tradition, shoveled mounds and mounds of dirt into the grave.  Took a half hour.   I noticed Mr. Gordon’s tombstone said on the back side: “A kind and gentle man loved by all.”  In his case, true.

Mr. Gordon was eydl (polite/refined).  Also, a rocket scientist and excellent balloon twister.  His wife, Beatrice, had gone to college and social work school after raising children.  She wasn’t idle.

When my kids were little, I took them to the Gordons often.  (The Gordon grandchildren were in Israel.  That worked out well for my family.)  I called Mr. and Mrs. Gordon “Beasan” behind their backs.  It was a contraction of Beatrice and Sanford, as in: “Let’s go to Beasan’s for pizza and some magic tricks.”

What a pair.
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1 of 2 posts for 11/11/09.  Please see the post below too.

Nobody in my neighborhood knew about private tennis lessons.  Music lessons, yes. Tennis, no.

Exception: my father, Toby.  When I was in high school, Toby got me about 10 tennis lessons at a gentile country club, and suddenly I was one of the best players on my high school team.  Yes, we still got clobbered by Shaker Heights and University School, but in our division, the Lake Erie League, we were above average.

That goyish club now will accept anybody, and not just for drop-in tennis lessons.  Show them the money.

One of my mega-rich buddies says two Cleveland country clubs still don’t want Jews.  Yiddishe Cup plays those clubs.  Well, once.  We got treated fine there.  The upper crust treats help and dogs best.

We get hassled the most at a Jewish club: “Use the kitchen door,” says Kim the Kurva (Whore), the manager.  Kim (not her real name) doesn’t want musicians near her front door, messing up the view or her valet parking.

Kim’s view might disappear soon.  That Jewish club is considering closing and merging with a nearby gentile club.

“Hine Ma Tov” (How Good It is) at the Mistletoe Dance.  Yiddishe Cup on the bandstand.  We’re ready.
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2 of 2 posts for 11/11/09.

1. NOT THERE

Wolf Krakowski, a singer from Massachusetts, used to skewer Jewish musicians on the Internet for performing in Germany.  One of Wolf’s most memorable lines was “Nobody looks good in brown lipstick.”  (Meaning, don’t kiss German tush.)

One American klezmer — who played in Germany a couple times – thought Wolf was stiff-necked. The musician wrote back to Wolf: “I’m a vegetarian and don’t wear leather.  I am not evil. I don’t eat
meat . . .”

No sale.  Wolf wrote, “Heaven forfend that any unpleasantness intrude upon your pursuit of the deutschmarks.”

Wolf dropped off the Jewish-Music Web forum shortly after that.  Nobody took his place.  Impossible.

Few, if any, American klezmers are as hard-line on Germany as Wolf.  (Wolf was born in a Displaced Persons camp and has valid reasons for his position.)

The postwar generation in Germany is an appreciative, knowledgeable audience, according to many American klezmers. Just about every German town has a klezmer band.  Nearly every American band wants to play there.

Yiddishe Cup would go to Germany.

Nobody has asked.

Got sort of asked.  A festival in Fuerth, Germany, wrote me several emails about how they were looking forward to Yiddishe Cup’s appearance at the Fuerth Klezmer Festival. Then the committee switched leaders, or something, and I didn’t hear from the organizers for a long time.  I emailed.  Nothing.  I phoned.  I got a man on the line and said, “Do . . .  you . . . speak . . . English?”

He said, “I’ll give it a try.”  Easy-breezy, with a British-tinged German accent.  His only stilted  line was his last one: “We will not be needing you.”  I heard that as “Ve vill not be needing you, Mr. Yiddishe Cup.”  Sounded like Kissinger or Colonel Klink.   Kissinger.  Kissinger was born in Fuerth.

Germany could use some Mickey Katz parodies.

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2. KISS ME, I’M BALKAN

I want to introduce Yiddishe Cup in a foreign language.  “Nuestro keyboardist es Alan Douglass …”  That would be in Buenos Aires, say.

Der Rhythmus der Tradition.  Der Beat der jungen Generation.  Aus der Reihe KulturSpiegel.

That German is real.  Yiddishe Cup is on a just-released Sony Germany compilation CD, Balkan Basics World Tour II.

[The rhythm of tradition.  The beat of the young generation.  From the Culture Mirror series.]

Yiddishe Cup doesn’t generally play Balkan music.  No problem, the other bands on the CD do.  Taraf de Haidouks, Boban Markovic, Balkan Beat Box.

Yiddishe Cup’s contribution is Mehkuteneste Mayne (My Dear In-law) — straight-ahead klez.  We’re right after Tsu Der Kretshme (To the Tavern) by Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars.

London, a founder of the Klezmatics, is one of the top players in world music — and one of the coolest.   He wears a Jim Brown yarmulke; shades; a billowy, flowery shirt; and yet somehow doesn’t look like a 51-year-old Jewish guy at a Woodstock party.

I’ve seen London a few times at KlezKamp. He’s ingenious, making new music with pros and amateurs alike.  He organizes multi-generational bands: teenagers pound drums, senior citizens skvitch (screech) on violins, and assorted pros hold it all together.  London directs this KlezKamp ensemble with his hairy, Cro-Klezmer Man mien.  That’s side one of London.

Side two is Frank London as New York Jewish intellectual.  In a Pittsburgh newspaper, he used semiotic and qua to discuss an upcoming Klezmatics concert.

That wasn’t just postmodern.  That was Post-Gazette.

London calling . . .

Yiddishe Cup, and others, is on Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH.

Yesterday Yiddishe Cup was an Ohio klezmer band.  Today Yiddishe Cup is an Ohio klezmer band, but add irresistibly au courant.  Other tunes on the Balkan Basics project are “Sex Bomb,” “Rod Serling’s Trip to Bulgaria” and “Are You Gypsified?”  (By Globeal.Kryner, Mastika, and Taraf de Haiduks, respectively.)

Yiddishe Cup wants this Balkan hubbub to last longer than 10 seconds.  The Challah Fame in Cleveland is hastily organizing a one-day symposium, “Jewish Cultural Ventriloquism,” featuring these four lecturers:

Frank London, trumpet
“The Visceral, Semiotic Link Between Klezmer Music and Yiddish”

Bert Stratton, clarinet
“Supple, Labile Ethnicity: Kiss Me, I’m Balkan (ne Klezmer, ne Jewish)”

Walter Zev Feldman, tsimbl
“Repurposing the Bagel Shmeer: Klezmer as JIF (Jewish Instrumental Folk Music)”

Steven Greenman, violin
“How About Those Steelers?”
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Hear clips from the CD Balkan Basics World Tour II, direct from the Treffpunkt Musikshop.

The phone number at AAA Window Shade Co. was 221-3700.  The proprietor, Joe Villoni, started there at 13, and was 87 when he pulled the last shade down.  Seventy-four years: same job, same location.

He quit in 2003 because nobody was buying window shades anymore.  Everybody was into $5 mini-blinds at Home Depot.  My father,Toby, and I had kept Joe’s rent low because Joe never asked for anything.

The store’s wood floor had a grooved path circumnavigating the huge window shade—making machine. That apparatus, and possibly the whole store, belonged in the Henry Ford Museum.

I always liked Joe — and the other old-guy tenants.  I was just a baby, a pisher (pisser/youngster), to these guys.  Another old tenant, Jim English, gave me a metal Phillies cigar box full of screws.  I appreciated the cigar box more than the screws. I was in my twenties and collected anything older than myself.

An old custodian, Jeanne Saunders, left me several novel manuscripts when she died. She had one lung, a great disposition, and a tough life; she should have written her life story and gone easier on the long, lanky cowboys and gladiators.

Another old custodian, Mary Kubichar, produced a concert for Yiddishe Cup.  It was at the Beck Center for the Performing Arts on the West Side.  That was the first — and last — West Side Yiddishe Cup concert.  (West Side means “not a lot of Jews.”)

Mary was from western P.A.  (You need to say each letter: P. A.)  She never married.  After retiring from Higbee’s department store, she became a super volunteer at her church and the Beck arts center.  So when she told the arts center to hire Yiddishe Cup, they owed her.  The concert turned into an appreciation party for Mary. (She died the next year.) Even the publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer showed up.  It was a very big deal.  We played a couple Slovak pieces for Mary.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/28/09.  Please see post below too.

I knew a building inspector who could smell rats.  That’s what he claimed.   He didn’t have to see the droppings.

I knew a custodian who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My dubious talent is figuring if a tenant has skipped out or not.

First, the tenant hasn’t paid his rent. That’s a given.  I knock loudly on the tenant’s door.  No answer.

I yell “maintenance” a couple times, and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and I step into the apartment.

A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff.  TVs too.  Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out.

Some small items stay behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills.  Usually enough to fill three or four garbage bags.

The stove: cooked.

The refrigerator: always missing a couple crucial shelves.  Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.

No socks, no tenant.  The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are jumbled on the closet floor. Decent stuff too.  Skippers are usually too anti-social to take items to Goodwill.

I found a tux left behind.  The guy was 6-4.  I had the pant legs shortened.  (He wasn’t a skipper.  He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. So would most people, I bet.  It’s like staring at a car crash.  Most of my building managers like trashed apts.  (Some managers make extra money on the cleanups.)  One manager would gleefully phone me with on-the-scene reporting: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

The rat hole tour isn’t for everybody. One young manager passed on a good show.  “I’m creeped out,” she said, standing in the apartment corridor, while I went into the suite.

What’s to be creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts?

Afterward, I sometimes phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone.  I say, “You out yet?” No lectures about housekeeping.  

Nobody likes to be criticized on his cleaning skills. And he might come back for his DJ magazines — and me.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/28/09

1.   JEWISH FORK-LORE

Musician Mickey Katz called chocolate phosphates “Jew beers.”   He drank them at Solomon’s on E. 105^th Street.

I drank mine at Solomon’s at the Cedar Center shopping strip, where Solomon’s moved to.

For some Semitic semantic reason, goys occasionally called Cedar Center the Gaza Strip. Now it kind of is.  The north side of Cedar Center is concrete chunks and gravel heaps. A real estate developer knocked down the 1950s-era plaza and plans to redevelop.  Who knows when.

Solomon’s was my family’s deli of choice. My father, Toby, was a “deli Jew.”  In the Jewish world, that’s usually a putdown, meaning the person knows more about corned beef than Rashi.  Toby’s favorite food was a “good piece of rye bread.”

Toby, a phosphate fan, probably didn’t drink more than a dozen real beers his whole life.  He should have.  In his retirement, when he drank booze he smiled a lot more.  A bit shiker at one party, Toby teed off on a watermelon fruit bowl with a golf club. That stuck with me.  [Shiker is drunk.]

Toby grew up in a deli. His mother had a candy store/ deli at E. 118 Street and Kinsman Road. She sold it to her half-brother when he came over from the Old Country.  Something fishy about that deal — something involving the half-brother’s wife.   My grandmother went from candy store/deli owner to simply candy store owner.  Not a lateral move.

At the Gaza Strip, there was also Corky & Lenny’s. (Still around — four miles east.)   A couple small Jews hung out in the rear booth at Corky’s.  One was Harvey, who did collections for a major landlord.  (Major, to me, means more than 1,000 units.)  I knew Harvey from junior high.

He sued my mother.  My mother, for health reasons, moved from her Beachwood apartment after 27 years into an assisted living facility.  She had a couple months left on her lease.  Harvey, who represented the major landlord, went after her.  Harvey’s boss, by the way, loved my band.   So what.  My mother was collectable.

Freelance journalist David Sax just wrote a book about the decline of delis.  Here’s something for the second edition, David: Delis went downhill when they added TVs.  Now you have to watch the Browns while you eat.

I was deli-famous.  At Jack’s Deli on Green Road, I had a thank-you note up in the entrance.   My letter was about the terrific tray for my firstborn’s bris.  Fatherhood was about buying huge quantities of smoked fish.  What a blast.  (I ordered the exact same tray for my daughter’s naming.)

I complimented Jack’s Deli on its fish, which my Aunt Bernice, The Maven, also liked.   I mentioned “The Maven’s seal of approval” in my letter.  Bernice work for a food broker and knew food.

My letter was up for a couple years.

[Acknowledgment to Henry Sapoznik for "fork-lore" in this story's title.]

***

2.  ’DINES

The trend at mass-feed kiddushes (post-service temple chows) is toward Israeli foods: hummus, baba ganoush, Israeli salad.

When you privatize — and don’t invite the whole congregation — you typically add some fish.

All Jews like a good piece of fish: lox, smoked fish, herring, the occasional sardine.

My youngest son recently called  from Trader Joe’s in Ann Arbor, Mich., and said, “Don’t get excited, Dad, but do I want the sardines in oil or water?”

“Oil.”

I did get excited.  My college kid was finally getting into ’dines.

My mother had given me about eight cans of ’dines when I went off to college.  I ate them on Sunday evenings, when the dorm cafeteria was closed.  (This was back when sardine cans opened with a key, and the ’dines were Portuguese — not Moroccan like now.)  Surprisingly - to me at least - the guys in the dorm wouldn’t share my ’dines.  Pizza time.

I liked all kinds of ’dines.  Even the monster-size sardines in tomato sauce were OK.  Bones, no bones . . .  no matter.  Cajun sauce, soya oil, olive oil, mustard sauce . . .  all good.   Four ’dines in a can, two in a can . . . either way.

Anchovies?  Also, an excellent choice. Make sure you buy your anchovies in a bottle; they last longer than in cans.

Herring in wine sauce.   Beware.  Last month Heinen’s supermarket substituted Vita brand for Golden Herring.  That was lamentable.  Vita is too sugary.

At luncheons, the other Yiddishe Cup musicians don’t seem to appreciate the fish (i.e., the “dairy spread” in kosher parlance) as much as I do.  Yes, they like the lox.  Lox is apple pie.  But the other items (smoked fish excluded) get little play from the band.  You should see the mountains of herring left over.

When Yiddishe Cup strolls table to table, doing our klezmer-achi routine, the three most popular requests are “In A Gadda Da Vida,” “Freebird,” and “something from Fiddler on the Roof.”

Also popular: anything by Frank Sinatra, “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” Johnny Cash, and “Romania.”

At a Fairmount Temple bat mitzvah, the executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra requested “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot. Our violinist, Steve Ostrow, nailed it.  That was our finest moment.

At an Austrian wedding — where some guests wore lederhosen— we played “Edelweiss” three times.  That was our only “Austrian” song.  It was a totally gentile wedding.

Lederhosen is nothing. Jews from Scotland will sometimes wear kilts to weddings.  A kilt is like a tux to a Scot.

When we stroll, we try to steer the requests. For instance, we’ll tell the guests: “We specialize in everything.  How about Dylan or the Beatles?”

Our keyboard player, Alan Douglass, and our singer, Irwin Weinberger, know all the Beatles tunes. Yiddishe Cup once played Lennon’s obscure “Real Love” for a bridal dance.

A lot of baby boom musicians know Dylan, but not as well as Irwin does.  He does “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Tangled Up in Blue” with no cheat sheet.  The trick is stopping him after two verses, so we can hit more tables with “Sunrise, Sunset.”

***

The first time I saw a live band was at a bar mitzvah party at the Stardust Ballroom, Cleveland Heights.   Morry Seaman was the Jewish bandleader/saxophonist of the early 1960s. Maybe he was playing “Stardust” at the Stardust.

I wanted a tenor sax.  Forget the clarinet.

When Yiddishe Cup plays, we get stares from kids too. Some of these teens go to 40 bar mitzvahs a year and see 39 DJs and one live band, Yiddishe Cup.

I went to three bar mitzvahs.  My family lived on the wrong side of the tracks, with a bunch of Italyeyners (Italians) [pronounced Tah-LEH-ners].    The Yidn lived on the south side of the public park, and the Taleyners — plus my family and assorted other ethnics — lived on the north side.  ( “Assorted other ethnics” meant PIGS: Polish-Italian Greek Slovenians.)

Why my parents lived with the Taleyners is an accident of history: My parents’ realtor told them the house was in the Jewish elementary school district, but it was actually in the Taleyner district.  Oddly enough, my whole life has involved Taleyners — as if I grew up on Kinsman Road or Lower Manhattan.

My Kinsman Road was South Euclid, a Cleveland suburb.  I even got in a couple fist fights.  “Kike” and stuff like that.

The trouble with “kike” was I couldn’t figure out what to yell back.  My nadir was when I called a kid a “Big L,” for Lutheran.  He was not offended.

We even had a king — an ethnic kingpin — in our neighborhood: Yonkee.

Yonkee’s son said to me, “My father is the poker king.”

I was in grade school.  I didn’t know about poker.  Didn’t matter. Yonkee was the polka king.

Frankie Yankovic, the king of Slovenian-style polka, didn’t play many bar mitzvahs.

Sid Beckerman was a living legend of klez clarinet. I followed him around KlezKamp — the music conference — a lot.  And you know what, he talked to me.

Big deal?

It was.  Sid was paid staff.  I was “payer,” as in student/customer/ fawner.  Paid staff was hard to corner.  They had a lot of demands on their time.

Sid was different than many staffers.  Sid had no ego, according to Washington clarinetist Rodney Brooks, another student. “Sid was never a star,” Rodney explained.

Sid was “discovered” by klez revivalists, and made his first record at 70.   (He died in 2007 at 88.)

Sid had a handwritten tune book called “the sheets,” as in sheets of paper.  Sid’s unarmed guard of “the sheets” was pianist Pete Sokolow, who had transcribed the tunes for Sid.

The most popular tune in the collection was “SB7,” which stood for “Sid Beckerman tune #7.”  [Yiddishe Cup plays it on Klezmer Guy. We call it "40A" -- the page it's on in our book.  Dave Tarras recorded it as "Di Zilberne Chasene" (The Silver Wedding).  Don't know what page Tarras had it on.]

At KlezKamp I had a strategy for obtaining the sheets from Pete Sokolow.  First, I gave Pete an obscure 1938 magazine article about “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (By Me You Look Grand), hoping to get in Pete’s good graces.

Sokolow, stuffing the magazine article in his pocket, said, “The sheets?  What sheets?  I’m so busy now.  I’m working up an arrangement for fifteen people.  What did Sid say?”

I hadn’t thought of asking Sid.

So I went to Sid and offered him $20 for the sheets.   Sid said, “For what?  What transcriptions?”

Interestingly, all the clarinetists from D.C. knew the SB tunes. So I badgered Rodney from D.C. some more.  I hocked him.  He had learned most of his freylekhs (horas) from the sheets, he told me.

He admitted he had the sheets.  “You can xerox them,” he said.  “But don’t say you got them from me.  Somebody might take umbrage.”

A year later, the sheets came out commercially as the Klezmer Plus! Folio. Everybody could buy them.  Sokolow and Sid had just been protecting their investments.
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1 of 2 posts for 10/7/09.  Please see the post below too.
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Yiddishe Cup is at Fairmount Temple, Fri. Oct. 9, and Park Synagogue, Sat. Oct. 10, for Simchat Torah.  Cleveland.

I had a store tenant who sold gravestones and pistachios.  His main window sign read Porter Monuments and a smaller sign was Pistachios.

Not a good sign.  He went under.

I had a tenant, the India Food Emporium . . . Indian spices, Indian bread, Indian music.  Then came the Marlboros and malt liquor.  Went under.

You want a samosa with that 40?

I got a call from a prospective tenant for a headlight removal business.  Not a bad concept; headlights are tricky to remove.  The caller repeated, “Head lice.”  I was still OK with it.

Yiddishe Cup/Kiddush Cup/Klezmer Cup/Some Kind of Cup.  Nobody knows our band’s name.  All klezmer bands really have the same name: A Klezmer Band.

Sometimes clients hire us after they’ve attended a fun out-of-town wedding with a klezmer band.  I ask, “What band?”  They say, “A klezmer band.”

There is only one klez band with a name: the Klezmatics.

Yiddishe Cup probably stole a gig from the Klezmatics.  An East Coast college promoter booked us because she thought she had heard us on the radio.  What radio show was she talking about?  She couldn’t remember.  We’ve been on Cleveland and Cincinnati public radio.  My guess is she heard the Klezmatics on NPR, googled klezmer, and somehow came up with Yiddishe Cup.  So she hired us: A Klezmer Band.
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2 of 2 posts for 10/7/09

My real estate job is pretty easy physically. I just boss custodians and repairmen around  and do paperwork: pay taxes, pay cockroach killers, and argue about security deposit refunds.  The only physical part is climbing the stairs and going on roofs.  None of my buildings has elevators.

Playing the clarinet . . . that can injure you.  You know where?  The right thumb.  The right thumb holds a disproportionate weight when you’re standing.

I had a pain in my right thumb that lasted 18 months.  The pain took a long leisurely trip through my body. Went from my thumb to my shoulders to my neck.

Physical therapists love musicians, particularly violinists, flutists, pianists and clarinetists.

I drove to Cincinnati to see a specialist for clarinet pain.  Then I did Alexander Technique, and every other technique short of amputation.

Some clarinet players use a neck strap. I do.  At KlezKamp, the music conference, I met a clarinetist who wore a neck strap.  He said, “The pain eventually goes away.”  That was my mantra for more than a year.

The clarinet is the agony stick.  Musicians call it that.  Not simply because the clarinet can be painful to play, but because it’s difficult.  The fingerings are harder than the sax, and a clarinet has the “break,” the awkward leap from A to B in the middle register.  The clarinet squeaks.  And the clarinet’s register key raises the note a twelfth, not an octave.  This is extremely odd physics.  The clarinet’s sound doesn’t typically come out the bell, like on a sax.

You mic a sax by clipping a mic on the bell, but on a clarinet you surround the clarinet with mics like on Wagon Train.  I had a mic rig for my clarinet that was so complex and heavy — and cost more than my axe — I  gave up on it.  Plus, it was hurting my thumb.

I asked a sax player in a big band if he played clarinet.  He said, “I have a clarinet.”
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1 of 2 posts for 9/30/09.  Please see the post below too.
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A version of this post will appear in the upcoming (Dec. 2009) issue of The Clarinet, the magazine of the International Clarinet Association, www.clarinet.org.
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Apparently some people don’t know there is a comments section to this blog.  Click on the “comments” link  below the “Tell A Friend” link. If there are few, or no, comments, go to the end of the “Sanctuary” post — two down from here. There are a lot of comments there.

Arvids Jansons.  I got a desk when he left.

Argero Vassileros.   Nickname: Argie.

Michael Bielemuk.  The Professor.  He had three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Maria Malfundido.  (Not her real name but close enough.)  A kleptomaniac.  She stole light bulbs from the hall so we glued the bulbs into the sockets.

Zenon Chaikovsky.  Building manager and Ukrainian musician.

Saram Carmichael.  A black transvestite who solicited customers from her second floor window.  The johns waited at the bus stop outside her window.  What is a Saram?

Stan Hershfield.  One of the few Jews on the West Side.  He was raised in an orphanage and loved the word bubkes (beans), as in: “Stratton, I have bubkes so don’t hondle me about the rent.”  [Hondle is haggle.]  When Hershfield painted the wood floor in his kitchen, he beamed, “Only the best, Stratton, Benjamin Moore!”

Malfalda Bedrossian.  She was never late with her rent.  Put that on her tombstone.

Chris Andrews.  He made up for his regular name by sleeping in a coffin.

Merjeme Haxhiraj.  An Albanian who talked me down $10 on her rent every year.

John “Chip” Stephens.  A Chet Baker-like figure — in looks, music and name.  He played jazz piano all day and was so good he landed a tenure track job at a university in Missouri.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/30/09

Some Jews don’t like choirs in temple. Some can’t stand guitars.  Some can’t stand temple.

I have a friend who is down on “temple Jews,” meaning people who actively participate in synagogue life.  They’re too conventional, possibly.

I’m a temple Jew — at least on occasion.

My family belonged to Silver’s Temple, named after Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver.  The temple’s official name was The Temple.

“Which temple do you belong to?”

“The.”

“The Temple” morphed into  “The Temple - Tifereth Israel ” after the rabbi and his son — also a rabbi — died.   My family didn’t fit in there, in the 1960s, because many of the members were a lot richer, mostly from Shaker Heights.  One Shaker kid arrived in a  station wagon driven by a chauffeur in a shiny-visor cap.

My youngest son went through religious high school at The Temple.  The place had mellowed by then. Nobody cared anymore if you weren’t a descendant of the Deutsche Yehudim,  Cleveland’s original German Jewish settlers.

When my parents left Silver’s, they went to a more middle-class temple in the ‘burbs.  My mom taught macramé there.  Volunteered in the sisterhood gift shop.  Collected  “donor points,” to reduce her ticket price to the annual temple dance.

Yiddishe Cup has played some of these parties.  Not so many lately, because few people want to dance at temples.  They’d rather stay home and watch people dance.

My parents joined this heymish (homey) suburban synagogue after I was confirmed, so I didn’t much care what they did.

(Heymish, the word, should be banned, starting now. Too heymish.)

On the High Holidays, I sometimes went with my parents to the heymish temple, or I’d go to Hillel at Case Western Reserve. After Rosh Hashanah services, I’d eat at Tommy’s restaurant with my 20-something friends.

Years ago a woman told me, “I joined Fairmount Temple because I like the music there.”   She had another reason: Brith Emeth didn’t even have money to carpet, she said.   She liked Fairmount Temple’s bent toward classic Reform music.  That stuck with me: joining a temple for the music.

I go to my synagogue because, among other reasons, I like the music and the rabbi — who likes my band.  Yiddishe Cup is scheduled to play my shul’s (synagogue’s) holiday celebrations until roughly 5800.  (We’re at 5770 now.)

I played a different shul’s holiday gig, where the rabbi left early to attend a rock concert.  The rabbi told me the band’s name.  Famous.  I wasn’t impressed.  I was peeved.  The rabbi was walking out on Yiddishe Cup.

It’s impossible to be a rabbi.

My synagogue uses a choir once in a while. I like the choir.  Took me a while.  Some Jews think a choir is super-goyish.  Not true.  In Europe there were synagogue choirs as far back as the 1500s.

Some temples have rock bands.  I’ve subbed in one.  The congregants really enjoy that groove.

I can see picking a shul for the music.  Why not.

My father, Toby, said he didn’t want an obituary. He thought that might tip off the IRS to his change in status.

Nevertheless, when Toby died, an editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked to write something. The editor was a friend of the family.  My mother said no.  The writer persisted, because years prior Toby had found the editor a moonlighting job.  The editor had written the in-house newsletter for the key company where my dad had worked.

No again, my mother said.

Toby wound up in the Cleveland Jewish News. That was OK.  Not too many IRS agents read that.

It wouldn’t have mattered; my dad lived his entire adult life under an alias: Stratton.

He had gotten “Stratton” out of a phone book. His birth name was Soltzberg.

How had he felt about all that?

Fine, he often told me.

I had my doubts. (His two brothers stayed Soltzbergs while Toby rode off to become Stratton of Judea.)

His only regret, which was momentary, he claimed, was when his then 21-year-old daughter dated a sheygets (gentile boy) from Parma who had no college degree.  Back then Toby said, “If I hadn’t changed my name, this wouldn’t be going on!”

He picked “Stratton” in a waiting room, waiting for a job interview.  He got the job and changed his name. 1941.

Sounded like BS to me.  I thought Toby might have been embarrassed and insecure about his Jewishness.  A lot of Jews back then jumped to the U.S.S. Wasp.

I’ve read  half the Jews in the U.S. changed their names. [Commentary August 1952. "Name-Changing — And What It Gets You." J. Alvin Kugelmass.]   Some of the impetus was anti-Semitism and some was a desire to “pass.”  (I’m not blaming anybody.  Different times back then.)

When I was right out of college, I told my dad I was going to change my name to Soltzberg.  He went nuts.  “You’re looking for trouble!  Don’t do it!”

Decades later I did a lecture on Mickey Katz at the International Association of Yiddish Clubs convention; I was wearing a “Stratton” nametag, and a very old man approached me, asking, “You related to Toby Stratton?”

“He was my father.”

“I left town in 1941,” the man said, his eyes focused on my nametag.  “It was there, right there in my apartment, when he talked about changing his name.  He had gotten turned down by three chemical companies.  He was one of  the smartest guys I ever met.  He changed his name and got a job right then.”

Solid info.

For years a Soltzberg uncle had told me Toby had jumped ship because my mother had wanted to “pass.”

I liked the right-in-my-apartment story better.
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1 of 2 posts for 9/16/09.  Please see post below too.

I rent to musicians.  I used to give them a break. Like one musician didn’t leave his forwarding address for his security deposit, and I mailed it to him anyhow.  He specialized in electronic music.  I put “please forward” on the envelope.  I never got a thank you.  He should have sent an email thank-you at least.  He messed it up for the next guitar picker.

I had an older blues guy who screwed me out of a couple months’ rent.  A guy in his fifties ought to know that “12-month lease” means 12 months, not six months.

Youngsters — say, 22-to-30 year olds — can’t envision what 12 months means.  They think that’s forever.  I felt that way when I was in my twenties.  These young tenants try to weasel out of their leases.  They say they need to move home to help Grandpa, who broke his hip.  They need to help him drink beer and watch the Three Stooges!  These kids are moving out for one main reason: to shack up with their girl/boyfriend to save on rent.
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2 of 2 posts for 9/16/09

Everybody needs a mentor. Trouble is I’ve only found semi-mentors.

For music, I’ve basically taught myself.  My clarinet teacher showed me the notes and fingerings but he couldn’t improvise.  And he never recommended music to listen to.   He thought clarinet was like typing.

That was OK with me. I liked typing.  I practiced a lot.  My mother had me sign a contract not to practice more than an hour a day.  And I could not throw my clarinet when I hit a wrong note, particularly at my sister.

Here’s the secret to superior musicianship: Lock yourself in a room for years and hope you were born with a good ear.

That’s why pop musicians sometimes disdain singers.  They just sing.  They don’t play anything.  Many of them never locked themselves in rooms to practice.

***

Vis-a-vis my band, we’ve had some mentors:

(1.) Greg Selker, who reacquainted Cleveland with klezmer in the early 1980s.  Greg learned about klezmer from Hankus Netsky at the New England Conservatory in Boston.  Greg gave me lessons in 1987.

(2.) Jack Saul (1923-2009), a Jewish record collector.  You couldn’t find a seat in his house unless he moved a ton of records for you.

Every time Jack played a record he’d clean it with Windex.  No scratches.  Smooth-h-h.

He didn’t throw anything out — since day one.  He even had a John McGraw baseball card.

A couple years ago I sold my baseball cards — for a few grand — and he said, “Why’d you do that?”  I wasn’t looking at them and my kids didn’t want them.  My kids didn’t know who Harmon Killebrew was. “Why’d you do that?” Jack repeated, semi-stunned.

The Cleveland Jewish music scene was synonymous with Jack Saul. The Kleveland Klezmorim musicians went to Jack’s house in the early 1980s to record 78s.  Those 78s were pristine.  When Boston public radio did a radio show in 2000 about clarinetist/parodist Mickey Katz, they came to Jack for clean recordings.

Jack never let a record out of his house.  You had to sit there for an hour or two, and have him dub the records onto tape.

The first time I went there, in 1988, I recorded cuts from Music For Happy Occasions, Paul Pincus; Jay Chernow and his Hi-Hat Ensemble; Dukes of Freilachland, Max Epstein; Jewish Wedding Dances, Sam Musiker; Twisting the Freilachs; and Casamiento Judio, Sam Lieberman — a freaking klezmer musician from Latin America!

***

Several months after Jack died, Nathan Tinanoff, the founder of the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University, went into Jack’s basement and came out with 4,000 Jewish LPs in one day.  And he didn’t even get to the 78s.  By comparison, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., had 3,000 records, which the center eventually  turned over to Florida Atlantic University.

Jack Saul liked Yiddishe Cup a lot.  (He also liked Steven Greenman, Lori Cahan-Simon, Cantor Kathyrn Wolfe Sebo — all Cleveland Jewish musicians.)  At one community meeting, he said, “We’ve got talent in this town.  We don’t have to always run to New York for entertainers.”

That meant a lot to us locals.  Go Tribe.