Should I Blow My Own Klezmer Harmonica, So To Speak

[jerrywm <jerrywm...>]

Hello Jewish Music and World Music Subscribers:

I would like to shre with you the following article which appeared in the 
Sun--Baltimore's major newspaper.

Should I blow my own horn?

Jerry Lapides 


Headline: Unorthodox Klezmer
Subhead: Jerry Lapides of Fells Point plays traditional Jewish folk music 
with a decidedly nontraditional instrument and feel.

Carl Schoettler
SUN STAFF

Jerry Lapides plays a few bars of the old klezmer wedding 
dance "Frailach Fun Der Chuppa," "happiness of 
the nuptial canopy," his harmonica infusing the festive 
song with an undertone of nostalgic sadness.

While he plays, Lapides has the faintly ethereal quality of 
Marc Chagall's Vitebsk fiddlers. And the "Frailach" 
has the sound and feel of the wedding music from "Fiddler 
on the Roof."

Klezmer was the folk music of the East European shtetl Chagall 
painted and Shalom Aleichem chronicled, the small-town Jewish 
communities lost in the furnace of the Nazi Holocaust. But the 
music lives. Klezmer has been making a vigorous comeback over 
the last two decades as more and more people in America, Europe 
and Israel explore their Jewish roots.

Lapides is one Baltimore musician who has found a living heritage 
with klezmer. He plays with the Baltimore Klezmer Orchestra, 
a nonprofit band affiliated with the Baltimore Hebrew University 
-- "they announce me as one of the only klezmer harmonica 
players in the world." He took third place this fall in 
a Jewish song-writing contest, and he has played a couple of 
concerts in Israel.

"What makes me feel good about the revival of klezmer 
music," Lapides says, "is that it's a living heritage 
of the Holocaust, not just a museum of the horrors of the Holocaust. 
It's a creative endeavor giving life to a culture that was 
attempted to be destroyed."

And klezmer keeps Lapides very busy, indeed. He has just come 
back from a klezmer "camp" in the old and endangered 
Catskills Borscht Belt, a gathering that attracted hundreds of 
people, Jews and non-Jews, from around the world.

Lapides could easily be cast in "Fiddler." A Hebrew 
University teacher even told him once "you look like a Hasid, 
you talk like a Hasid and you walk like a Hasid."

Perhaps. But in his little house on Eden Street he definitely 
has a post-beatnik, post-hippie look. He's wearing hiking 
boots, black corduroy pants, a plaid flannel shirt, a fleece-lined 
vest, whitish whiskers and big eyeglasses, but his cap Tevye 
the milkman could have worn.

 He's 70 and he's been knocking about the Baltimore 
scenesince Martick's Lower Tyson Street Cafe was a beat generation 
hangout and No Fish Today was a way station on the road to the 
post-modern millennium. "But I don't think I was a character then, like I 
am now," Lapides says. "I'm a Fells Point character. 
Ask anyone in Fells Point. Fells Point is my shtetl."


Looks the part

Looking like a Hasid is not so bad for a klezmer musician. 
Klezmer pretty much started in about the 18th century with the 
rise of Hasidism, a folk-based reaction to the ascetic rigidity 
of traditional rabbinic leaders. Hasidism's founder, the 
Baal Shem Tov, of Blessed Name, encouraged Jews to express their 
piety through the ecstatic fervor of music and dance.

The earliest klezmer bands consisted of a couple fiddlers 
and a bass, or in those days a viola da gamba, and maybe a drum. 
Clarinet, trumpet and flute soon followed. The harmonica is strictly 
non-traditional.

The Baltimore Klezmer Orchestra plays with an American touch. 
Led by Ed Berman, "a magnificent clarinet player," 
it's eclectic enough to include a banjo and, of course, Lapides 
on harmonica. He doubles as a singer. The 10 musicians, all volunteers, 
play about once a month at such places as the university, the 
Jewish Community Center, synagogues, nursing homes and Jewish 
festivals. And they've played Artscape and the Baltimore 
Museum of Art.

"We play one tune that has a Charleston sound," 
Lapides says. "Some have a Dixieland sound. So I'm not 
a purist, personally. You have klezmer orchestras today that 
have jazz and blues sounds mixed in."

 As a matter of fact, Lapides played mostly blues until he 
answered a newspaper ad when the orchestra started. "While I admire the 
standard blues and they're in my blood," he says, "I feel it's more 
authentic 
to integrate them with my own thoughts and experience. So I've 
written stuff like `Science Don't Do Me No Good Blues' 
and `Bagel Blues.' "

 The ambiguity in hovering between klezmer and the blues isn't 
lost on him. It's sort of a life theme. "I used to write 
poems as a kid, and I took a poem and gave it a gospel and Jewish 
sound. That's called `Alienation.' That's how I felt 
living in a non-Jewish neighborhood as a kid."

 Lapides is a retired social worker who worked 26 years for 
the Baltimore County Department of Social Service and four years 
for Springfield State Hospital. He has a bachelor's degree 
in psychology from the University of Maryland.

"Most of my experience was with disabled adults, mentally 
and physically. I used to call myself a poor man's psychiatrist."

He sings a sample of his "Bagel Blues" in a pleasant 
baritone: No more bagel blues. No more bagel blues.
I just turned off ... I just turned off the daily news.
Today when I ate my breakfast I didn't feel the bagel blues.
I enjoyed them all the usual way when I turned off, turned off, 
the daily news.

"There's a lot more," he chortles a slightly 
askew laugh. "I can't recall it all."No matter, Sylvia Schildt, his 
translator, who is founder 
and president of Yiddish of Greater Baltimore, has translated 
"Bagel Blues" into Yiddish, and Lapides is hoping to 
introduce it into the klezmer repertoire.


 Singing backup

 He noodles another klezmer tune on his harmonica. His dog 
Angelo -- Angie -- joins in with a soft tenor warrph. Lapides 
has a repertoire of maybe 50 klezmer songs, mostly traditional.

He says he met a good klezmer harmonica player when he visited 
Israel. Lapides played concerts at Beer Sheba, the big town in 
the Negev desert, and at Yerucham nearby, where his sister, Myrna 
Braverman lives."They were heavily attended by Russian Jews, who really 
dig on Yiddish," he says. "Just as in Baltimore many 
in our audiences at Hebrew University are Russian Jews. Probably 
many from the same area. So there is a linkage between the Russians 
of Israel and the Russians of Baltimore."

 At the Israeli concerts, he performed his prize-winning song 
"My Father's Tune," which won third at the Charlotte 
Yiddish Institute, in North Carolina, one of the repositories 
of Yiddish culture in America. He sings a little of the English 
version.

 When I was a little boy,

 My Father gave this song to play.

Though I didn't know all he knew,

The more I played it, the more I grew.

I play it when I'm happy --

I play it when I'm sad.

 And it still brings the memory

Of my blessed dad ...


His father, Solomon Morris "Sam" Lapides, a cutter 
at the old Lebow clothing company, died when Lapides was about 
11. His mother, Doris, moved him, his sister, Myrna and his brother, 
Julian, from Park Heights Avenue to Mount and McHenry streets, 
where she opened a grocery. Her family had deep roots in the 
now long-dispersed Southwest Baltimore Jewish community. Lapides' 
great-grandfather helped found the Moses Montefiore Congregation 
on Smallwood Street.

His father listened regularly to the Metropolitan Opera radio 
broadcast, but he had a strong interest in cantorial music. Lapides 
shares the interest: His earliest musical training was with Benjamin 
Grobani, cantor at Oheb Shalom synagogue for nearly 40 years.

"In Israel, I performed an old cantorial piece by Yossele 
Rosenblatt," Lapides says. Rosenblatt was one of the great 
cantors of the 20th century. You can hear his voice in the first 
talking movie, Al Jolson's "The Jazz Singer."

Lapides was also inspired as a kid by Larry Adler, whom he saw 
playing at the Hippodrome. About a dozen years older than Lapides, 
Baltimore-born Adler, the world's leading concert harmonica 
virtuoso, was playing the Hipp when he was 9 or 10.

 But Lapides only began playing serious harmonica about 20 
years ago. He has played virtually every joint in Fells Point, 
from sitting in at the Cat's Eye Pub to the blues jam at 
the Full Moon Saloon. He has played standards with the late and 
much-lamented El Duke-O, a more or less legendary pianist, and 
he improvised with the brilliant jazz guitarist, Paul Wingo, 
at Bertha's.

And he reckons he's not very religious."I guess, if you mean by religious 
orthodox in practice and theology, I would say no. But I feel the fervor, 
I guess 
like Larry Adler, of my culture."

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To view this story on the web go to
http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/editorial/story.cgi?storyid=1000000229745

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