<\/p>\n
Backstage, August 1969, at a major music festival:<\/strong> The h<\/span><\/span>armonica player<\/span><\/span> carried a leather pouch the size of a travel first-aid kit.\u00a0 She called the set-up a Kentucky saxophone.\u00a0 It contained shot glasses and whiskey.<\/p>\n Three days of peace and 12-bar blues.<\/p>\n The Ann Arbor Seltzer Festival.<\/p>\n I’m losing it . . .\u00a0 the Ann Arbor Blues Festival.<\/p>\n “Got My Mojo Working.”\u00a0 How many times can you listen to that?\u00a0 A lot. The festival was three days of\u00a0just blues.\u00a0 Big Mama Thornton was the booze-packing harp player.<\/p>\n We \u2014 the student organizers of the festival \u2014<\/strong><\/span> allowed black customers in for free.\u00a0 Not many took us up on the offer.\u00a0 This was the festival of Black Music for White People.\u00a0 Four of the five organizers were Jewish. The event was produced by the University of Michigan’s student activities center and Canterbury House, the\u00a0 local Hillel for Episcopalians.<\/p>\n We were up against the Atlantic City Pop Festival that weekend:\u00a0 Janis Joplin, Santana,\u00a0 Jefferson Airplane.<\/p>\n We didn’t care about pop music. We were blues freaks.\u00a0 Old<\/em>, black <\/em>and blues<\/em> \u2014 those were our watchwords.\u00a0\u00a0 Embodied by Muddy Waters, James Cotton, \u00a0Son House, Big Mama Thornton.<\/p>\n There had been gate-crashing at the Newport Jazz Festival earlier in the summer, and a mini riot at a festival in California.\u00a0 The University of Michigan president suggested we hold our event in the football stadium.\u00a0 What, on Tartan Turf?<\/p>\n We wound up in a grassy field by <\/strong><\/span>North Campus.\u00a0 About 15,000 people showed up.<\/p>\n Pianist Otis Spann, the master, played boogie woogie.\u00a0 I never did talk to him, even though I was backstage a lot.\u00a0 What was I going to say?\u00a0\u00a0 The man was <\/em>old, and I was too shy to talk to anybody over 21.<\/p>\n I first heard the “changes” on Otis Spann’s piano playing.\u00a0\u00a0 The “chord changes” \u2014 the I\/ IV\/V chord progression of the blues. \u00a0I was a single-note player (clarinet\/sax) who knew very little about chords (multiple notes played at the same time) until Spann’s music spelled it out for me.<\/p>\n “Spann’s Boogie,” the tune, was simple.\u00a0 It was like skeletonized jazz.\u00a0 I couldn’t miss the left-hand boogie woogie arpeggios (runs) and chords.<\/p>\n I aspired to be like Spann and the other old guys: <\/strong><\/span>authentic musicians who answered yes to “Do you gots<\/em> the feeling?”<\/p>\n Let me hear<\/em> you, do you gots<\/em> the feeling?<\/p>\n That exhortation auto-repeated at the festival about every 15 minutes with the college bell tower.<\/p>\n Spann had the feeling.\u00a0 He was 39.<\/p>\n He died the next year.<\/p>\n My response to that <\/em>\u2014 worked out over the next several decades \u2014 was to learn the Jewish blues (klezmer) and slug seltzer.\u00a0 Took me way past 40. \u00a0 Klezmer and seltzer: both are\u00a0fizzy and both cut right through the glop.\u00a0\u00a0 Seltzer, oh boy.<\/p>\n As Alan Sherman said:<\/strong><\/span> At a bar mitzvah bar, if you ask for “two cents plain” or seltzer,\u00a0 you’ll get nowhere.\u00a0 Ask for club soda. Backstage, August 1969, at a major music festival: The harmonica player carried a leather pouch the size of a travel first-aid kit.\u00a0 She called the set-up a Kentucky saxophone.\u00a0 It contained shot glasses and whiskey. Three days of peace and 12-bar blues. The Ann Arbor Seltzer Festival. I’m losing it . . .\u00a0 the Ann […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598","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=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9196,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/9196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n“Bring me one scotch and soda.
\nThen you’ll take back the scotch, boy.
\nAnd leave the 2 cents plain.”<\/p>\n
\n—-<\/span>
\n1 of 2 posts for 8\/12\/09.\u00a0 Please see post below too.<\/span>
\n—-
\n<\/span>Yiddishe Cup\u00a0 plays the West Virginia Jewish Reunion 7 p.m. Sat., Aug. 16, Charleston, W. Va. <\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"