Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

THE BUDDY HOLLY
KLEZMER BAND

by Bert Stratton

This is KlezFiction . . .

I dream about klezmer music and Buddy Holly. I want to be Buddy Holly, but I have to settle  for Klezmer Guy.

Animal voices — the sound of cats and fleas.  Significant to my music?  I need to find out.

There are no rules for good music, only examples of it.

Yiddishe Cup’s Meshugeneh Mambo is a terrific record.  Klezperanto –- another good choice. (By the group Klezperanto.)

The wrong song in the wrong place can be the right song.

Hope You Like Klezmer, a coffee table book,  has more than 100 color photos of klezmer musicians.  Some tied up, some with instruments in odd places.  I’m in a bathtub with reeds, like Moses.

Half-ended melodies are fun.

I’m here.  Hineni.  Take it or leave it.

Please, don’t go!

Fine, go.

I want to play medium-sized halls — 1,500-seat venues — this summer with my band: the Buddy Holly Klezmer Band.

—
Check out “Renting the American Dream” in the latest City Journal.  It’s not fiction.  Read the comments too.

—
Yiddishe Cup plays Wiley Middle Scho0ol lawn, University Heights, Ohio, 7:30 p.m. Thurs. July 25.  Indoors if raining.  Free ice cream.

Here’s a vid from the 2009 Wiley show:

3 comments

1 Ken G { 07.10.13 at 10:06 am }

The ideas expressed here – they’re so deep I can’t fathom them. Deeper than the ocean.

2 Marc { 07.10.13 at 3:13 pm }

[re “Renting the American Dream” essay in City Journal]

I know what you mean by landed gentry. When I was a kid my family on my father’s side had been in Rhode Island for 50 years. I felt like an immigrant. But 50 years later it’s like they came over on the Mayflower.

3 Dave R. { 10.03.13 at 9:10 pm }

As for a wish to be Buddy Holly some of what’s needed is an A chord, a D chord and an E chord on a guitar (with an F thrown in on Peggy Sue.) I imagine they go well on clarinet using the root notes.

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