Real Music & Real Estate . . .

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.
—-
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.”
—-
1 of 2 posts for 2/24/10.  Please see the post below too.

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.
—-
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 . . .
—
Readers’ advisory: This post is made up.  Fiction. Based on the fact Oakwood Club is closing and is for sale.
—
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.”

—
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?

—
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.
—
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 miss eviction court. Hopefully, the feds will let landlords evict again. Supposed to be Sept. 3, now — the date to reopen the evictions courts nationwide.  We’ll see.

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 $125 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.

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.
—-
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.
—-
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.  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.

—-
“To Kugel,” this post,  first appeared in the Washtenaw (Ann Arbor, Mich.) Jewish News, Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010.
—-
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.
—-
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.

Musicians probably get more ego satisfaction in one evening than most people do in a year.

When I don’t have a weekend gig, I drift around the house like a guy in rehab.  Where are my cigs?  My booze?  Where’s my heroin?  Do you want to see a movie? No, I want to make a movie.  A concert? Man, I’d rather be playing.

Music is different than the more solitary arts, like writing and painting.  When I’m on stage, the audience thinks I’ve got the answer.

Music is laying on of hands.  You ever try laying on of hands one-on-one, like with writing and painting?  It’s hard.  The best way to do laying on of hands is in large crowds, like the evangelical preachers do.

Street festivals, family parties, concerts . . . all mass feel-good sessions.  Humans like hubbub. Noise is life. Deaf people like music.

In writing and painting, you’re in the library.  Shush.

There is no minor league for writers and painters unless you count academia. 

There is a Triple A league for musicians.  Beyonce can’t be in every concert hall, night club and private party at once.  I’ve subbed for Beyonce.

Who spiked my heroin?
—-
2 of 2 posts for 12/30/09

I sometimes get rent envelopes with flakes of floor varnish inside.  Tenants also occasionally send dead bugs.  Sometimes they send poems.  The most common enclosure is a Post-It stating “the bank has screwed up my bank account again,” and that’s why there’s only half a month’s rent.

One tenant sent me a padded mailer stamped FRAGILE.

I held that package at arm’s length, pulled the ripcord, and thought about the Unabomber.

Tick tock.  There was a watch inside.  It was a chromatic watch; the face had C-C#-D-D# instead of numbers.

The tenant wrote he really appreciated his apartment and said his dad owned the Chromatic Watch Company.  I could also get a watch with Circle of 4ths or Circle of 5ths if I wanted.

I dropped off two Yiddishe Cup CDs at the tenant’s door as a thank-you.

I used to give all the tenants gifts. It was a hassle and expensive.  I gave everybody a box of Malley’s chocolates at Christmas.  We would make sure the tenant was home; we didn’t just put the candy by the door; somebody might steal it.

I gave up on it.  The candy man routine was costing me about $1,000/year.  Very few people were thanking me.

Also, I used to take the building managers to Miller’s Dining Room for dinner.  Then Miller’s burned down.

We tried an Italian place after that. It wasn’t the same.  Miller’s was the gentile response to Corky & Lenny’s deli.  The seasoned waitresses at Miller’s circulated with huge platters of sticky buns, corn sticks and muffins.  No pickles. My building managers — who were all older than me then — really like the small-town Ohio vibe.  The favorite main dish was chicken a la king.

I would thank the managers on behalf of my family, including my dad, who was usually in Florida that time of year.

Maybe I should do those dinners again.

I probably won’t.  Now I’m older than most of the managers.  The younger custodians like the cold cash.

Miller’s was fun.  The young people would have liked the sticky buns.
—-
1 of 2 posts for 12/23/09.  Please see the post below too.

 Most artists prefer to practice and wait for the phone to ring.

When I started out in klez, a Cleveland Irish musician, Dermot Somerville, told me: “You need to remind people you’re alive at least every six months.”

I do — X 26. As you know.

Yiddishe Cup is one of the most popular klezmer bands, because:

(1.) We’re good.

(2.) We promote ourselves.

I learned item #2 , and the chutzpah to say item #1, from my dad, who was not a WASP-modest George “Poppy” Bush kind of guy. My father said if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody will.  When my father was at the hospital dying of leukemia, he told the doctor, “I own this place.”  My dad owned a Cleveland Clinic municipal bond.

I used to be shy.  So was my father.  He took a Dale Carnegie course on public speaking.   In my twenties, I was still shy; I heard a West Side hardware store owner say “jew down,” and it took me 20 minutes to sputter, “Bob, you know I’m Jewish.”  (My family spent about $500 a month in that store. I figured Bob would be open to my viewpoint.)

Bob didn’t know “jew down” had anything to do with real Jews.  He apologized.  He was a decent guy.
—-
2 of 2 posts for 12/23/09

I liked KlezKamp, the klezmer convention, because it wasn’t just Mahjong Jews.  (Mahjong Jews don’t camp and, for that matter, can’t imagine camping.)

KlezKamp, in its first years, was in a ratty old Catskills hotel.  Going there was like camping indoors. Many bathrooms had plungers.  Heat was erratic.  The halls smelled of disinfectant.

Most of the male campers looked like they had just crawled out of sleeping bags.  They looked like Abbie Hoffman or Eugene Levy.  No other choices.  These guys were professors, shrinks, music students and Jewish hippie farmers from New England.

Four-hundred twenty-five people, total — half of whom were musicians.  Twenty clarinet players in one room.  We had to audition.  Sid Beckerman, musician and clarinet arbiter, had rachmones (pity) on us.  Everybody sounded “nice” to Sid.  I wound up in mid-level.

I took clarinet classes, and also heard a professor named Brown, from Brown, talk about Brown’s, the resort.  I heard Leon Schwartz, a legendary violinist, reminisce about gypsies.  He said the gypsies in his Bukovina village had had it worse than the Jews.  “The Jews had the stores,” he said.

I went to KlezKamp for more than a decade.

At first I couldn’t get my wife, Alice, to go.  We had young kids.

One year I took the two oldest kids and went without her.  I spent a lot of time in the game room and swimming pool that year.  That chlorine vat/pool was slightly bigger than a half dollar.  You had to coat yourself with skin conditioner or get a rash.  Thankfully, several lesbian musicians helped me with the babysitting.

The kids and I went to New York City afterward.  My daughter,
then 5, made me carry her everywhere.  We weren’t going too far.  We went to Popeye’s on Times Square for dinner.

When we returned home to Cleveland, my wife said at the doorway, “The kids look anemic!”

But we had beans and rice and lemonade at Popeye’s, Alice.  (The kids hadn’t been too crazy about the borscht and herring at KlezKamp.)

Alice never trusted me with food vis-a -vis the kids.

So the following year she came with us.  All five of us.  Alice was a folk dancer and exercise nut; however, Jews at klezmer conventions think exercise is something in an etude book.  Alice found an indoor tennis court which was so dusty the balls turned black after one set.  It was like playing in a parking garage.  We went skiing on Christmas.  I thought the slopes would be empty.  No, a lot of Asians and Jews from New York City were there.

We sneaked over to The Pines resort for ice skating.  That place was a staging area for the Mahjong Jew takeover of the world.  We had a good time.  There were interesting trivia games in the lobby.   I’ve got nothing against middle-class Jews.  I am one 51 weeks out of the year.

My family kept going back to KlezKamp.  Every Christmas.  Ikh khulem fun a vaysn nitl.  (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.)  And every year Alice would complain: “I can’t believe we’re going to KlezKamp again!”

Finally, after 12 years, the brainwashing was complete; the kids knew more Yiddish than just oy vey (woe is me) and farklempt (choked up); and Alice could have, by then, taught the dance classes.  And I had met all the old klez guys: Max Epstein, Felix Fibich, Danny Rubenstein, Velvel “Billy” Pasternak . . .

Attention must be paid.  Mas . . . Paul Pincus, Leon Schwartz, Ray Musiker, Ben Bazyler, Sid Beckerman, German “That’s Herman in Russian” Goldenshteyn, Howie Leess, Elaine Hoffman Watts.

The majority are now dead.

I had paid my dues — family-rate.

And I was through auditioning.

KlezKamp’s 25th encampment is next week.  Did you know Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader, Daniel Ducoff, was at the first KlezKamp, 1985?  Less than 100 people were there.  They planned to take over the (klezmer) world, and they did.

Great Yiddishe Cup non-gigs:

The Shrine to American Music, Vermillion, North Dakota
New York Mills (Minn.) Regional Cultural Center
Southern Cross International Music Festival, Brisbane, Australia
Austin (Tex.) JCC, Israel Independence Day celebration
Klezmer Festival, Fuerth, Germany
Jewish Music Festival, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

All of them were close calls.

Maybe we came in second.

Second stinks.  For example, when 30 clarinetists audition for the Kansas City Symphony, 29 clarinetists get to add “finalist” to their resumes.

Australia . . . That would have looked good in our obits.

Nobody — anywhere — does what Yiddishe Cup does: play wacky klezmer comedy.

We get around.  We’ve  been to Texas three times, Florida four times, Missouri nine times.

We’ve played abroad twice. The first time was New York City. That’s a foreign country.  The Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts.  The Jews in New York understood our Catskills parodies better than we did.

The second time abroad . . . Windsor, Canada.   (Quiz:  What foreign country would you reach first if you drove due south from Detroit?  The answer: Canada.  Windsor is south of Detroit.)

For our Australian non-gig, I dealt with a contemporary composer/professor, Ralph.  His children knew most of Yiddishe Cup’s funny lyrics.

I wondered if Yiddishe Cup’s synthesizer would work with the electrical system in Australia.  And should I purchase the airplane tickets, or have Ralph do it?  He might route us through Greenland.  The bigger question:  Would Ralph’s university have the money to bring us over?

Ralph didn’t have the money.

Chanukah in Jackson Hole, WY. That was the subject line of an email I recently got. I almost spammed it.

In the email’s text, a Wyoming rabbi asked Yiddishe Cup about doing a three-day Chanukah bash at three ski hotels.  I immediately called the rabbi, gave him a fair price, and he didn’t hang up.  In fact, he was enthusiastic.

I told the Yiddishe Cup musicians the Wyoming gig was 49 percent likely.

Our singer said, “Forty-nine percent?  That means you think it’s not going to happen.”

“Correct.”

Forty-nine percent is the street corner where optimism meets realism.

We didn’t get the gig. The rabbi hired another band, he wrote me.  I wonder who.

I just Googled the Wyoming event . . .

. . . The Ruby Harris band.  I’ve vaguely heard of Ruby Harris.  I think Ruby is a singer from San Francisco.

I understand. A California band is cheaper to fly to Wyoming than a Cleveland band.

News flash: Ruby is a guy — a violinist from the Midwest!  I went to his Web site.  Chicago.  That’s around the block from Cleveland!  Why him and not us?  He plays klez and blues.  So do we!  “Yiddishe Blues” is a tune on our latest album.

Check out the black diamond ski trails, Ruby.

Break a leg.

. . . Deep breath. Rewrite:

Happy Chanukah.
—-
1 of 2 posts for 12/9/09.  Please see the post below too.

We sprayed a tenant’s suite for cockroaches, and it didn’t work.  The tenant wrote a letter demanding we do it again, and if we didn’t, she would put her rent in escrow.  She worked at a law office.

We sprayed again.  Then we sprayed the whole building.  About a thousand dollars’ worth of spray.

She still had bugs.  So she called the city building department, which sent out its newest, most gung-ho inspector, who decided we needed to point the chimney and plane the boiler-room door in the basement, and fix up everything in between.

Then she complained again.

So we brought in our cockroach “bomber” guy, who zapped her apartment, including a direct hit on her coffee maker. A dozen cockroaches scampered out.  She had gotten a used coffee maker from her boyfriend.

That roach-infested coffee maker set me back $2,000.

I planned not to renew her lease, but she told me she was not renewing her lease before I could tell her I was not renewing her lease.

That bugged me.  Her boyfriend annoyed me too.  As did her 20-pound bond, legal stationery.  She wasn’t even a lawyer.

On move-out day, she and her boyfriend put the mattress and air conditioner on the treelawn.  I had to move the items to the dumpster.  Mattress moving is seriocomic wrestling; A/C pick up is clean and jerk.  And I didn’t deduct anything from her deposit.

She was OK.  Her only major negative: that she had dropped a dime (X 20,000) on me.

—-
Treelawn, two paragraphs above, is Cleveland talk for the grass strip between the street and the sidewalk.  Odder:  Akronites — Akron, Ohio, residents — call the treelawn the devil strip.
—-
2 of 2 posts for 12/9/09

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.
—-
1 of 2 posts for 12/2/09.  Please see the next post too.

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.
—
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 isn’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.
—
2 of 2 posts for 11/25/09