<\/p>\n
A banda<\/em> clarinetist in<\/strong><\/span> Sinaloa, Mexico, lent me his axe. I played horribly because of that clarinet’s craggy reed; I’ve seen better reeds in a fourth grader’s case. I played a Meron\/Israeli nign <\/em>(wordless melody). The Mexican listeners clapped. They could have whistled.<\/p>\n That was my sole south-of-the-border performance. (My family was on a hiking trip in northern Mexico, where we stumbled upon a horse auction with <\/em>oompah banda<\/em>.)<\/p>\n A Cleveland woman announced her Central American wedding — a Jewish ceremony in San Salvador.\u00a0 I told the bride’s mother to hire Yiddishe Cup.\u00a0 “I’m sure the groom’s family can afford it,” I said, “or they wouldn’t still be down there.”\u00a0 The mom agreed to the “afford it” part, but not the band.\u00a0 The mom burned a CD of horas from my wife’s collection and took that.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup plays<\/strong><\/span> Latin music fairly well. We have cornered the Latin Jewish doctor market in Cleveland — a market that fits comfortably into the backseat of a Camry.\u00a0 We did a gig for a Mexican Jewish doctor who headed the Cleveland Clinic evil eye center (Cole Eye Institute).\u00a0 That was one salsa-dik<\/em> party.\u00a0 Latin Jews party second only to Russian Jews.<\/p>\n We played a Cleveland Ecuadorian wedding where I explained the chair-lifting tradition to the groom’s gentile parents.\u00a0 I said in Spanish: “You will see people seated in chairs in the wind.”<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n In Dallas, when Yiddishe Cup musicians visited the grassy knoll,\u00a0 I stopped at the neighborhood taco shop to update myself on Mexican drinks.<\/p>\n The taco shop had <\/strong><\/span>orange, carrot, horchata<\/em>, mango, guava and Sidral apple drinks.\u00a0 They also had bottled Mexican Coke. The clerk explained Mexican Coke is sweeter than American Coca-Cola.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup’s ultimate hip-spanic thrill was an outdoor concert in El Paso, Texas, where we played “La Bamba” for 2,500 predominately Mexican-American listeners.\u00a0 For\u00a0Jewish flavor we added\u00a0Hebrew lyrics from Psalm 133 (“Hine Ma Tov” \/ Behold how good ). \u00a0We borrowed that idea from a Kansas City band, Guns ‘n’ Charoses.<\/p>\n From the bandstand, we could see the Rio Grande. \u00a0 We played “Meshugeneh Mambo.”\u00a0 We said gracias<\/em> a lot.<\/p>\n So<\/em> close to Latin America.<\/p>\n Cinco de Mayo.\u00a0 Hoy. <\/em>(Pronounced “oy.”) <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A banda clarinetist in Sinaloa, Mexico, lent me his axe. I played horribly because of that clarinet’s craggy reed; I’ve seen better reeds in a fourth grader’s case. I played a Meron\/Israeli nign (wordless melody). The Mexican listeners clapped. They could have whistled. That was my sole south-of-the-border performance. (My family was on a hiking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klezmer","category-on-the-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8964,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions\/8964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n—-<\/em><\/span>
\n1 of 2 posts for 5\/5\/10. <\/em>See the next post too, please.<\/span><\/p>\n