My booth was sandwiched between a puppeteer, a classical pianist, and a \u201cmentalist\u201d — a guy who bent spoons. I was with the self-represented artists. The booths that got the most traffic were manned by talent agencies. For instance, if\u00a0 a presenter wanted to hire the Klezmatics or the Klezmer Conservatory Band, the presenter would find the talent-agency booth that repped, say, klez, Irish music, jazz and dance.<\/p>\n
This, just in . . . there are too many artists. At one Midwest Arts Conference, a portion of the exhibit hall was devoted specifically to \u201cNew Music.\u201d I saw bookers hanging out there. I was getting no action; nobody was hanging out at my booth. And I even gave out candy! I said to the convention administrator, \u201cYiddishe Cup does new music.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cKlezmer isn\u2019t new music!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe do nude<\/em> music,\u201d I said. I was giddy, having done nothing for two days. Still, she wouldn\u2019t let Yiddishe Cup in to the special section.<\/p>\n One time, in Pittsburgh, I got sick of the whole conference schtick and went home a day early. I left a bunch of flyers at my booth. A couple weeks later I got a call from the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts. We played NYC. Note that. We got that gig without me being at the booth. Lesson?<\/p>\n Kansas City: a Beloit College student ran up to my booth and declared his love of klezmer — klezmer in general, not necessarily Yiddishe Cup. We got that gig. Our first airplane outing. We flew to Midway, rented a van, and drove up to Beloit to play for student bodies in the college chapel.<\/p>\n By the<\/strong><\/span> way, right after we landed at Midway, we\u00a0 ate at Pepe’s, a Mexican restaurant on Cicero Avenue. I still pass that place somewhat regularly, because my daughter, Lucy, lives in Chicago. The restaurant isn’t\u00a0Pepe’s anymore. But it’s still Mexican. I digress.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup plays nude music. I used to sell klezmer. I traveled to arts booking conferences in Chicago, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh. The conferences were trade shows. I hung up a Yiddishe Cup banner in a booth and smiled at people I didn’t want to smile at. The people I smiled at were bookers, also known as presenters. They represented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klezmer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29651"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29668,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29651\/revisions\/29668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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