Schmaltz, Spuckbeutels, etc.

[Huppert23 <Huppert23...>]

As a long-time lurker, I will take someone's recent suggestion and introduce 
myself. I am Joshua Huppert, a violinist from Chicago and a member of Chicago 
Klezmer Ensemble. I am brilliant but humorless, honest to a fault and 
incredibly good-looking.

This stuff about the Klezmatics in Cleveland got my attention first because, 
strangely enough, we played in Cleveland just a few days earlier, on Bastille 
day. We played a concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We had more than 500 
people  on a Wednesday night, and I think tickets were something like $12 a 
pop, so it seemed like a success to me and to the organizers. Maybe some 
people grumbled on the way out, of course I wouldn't know, but I did not hear 
anyone asking for Rumania, Rumania.

I may be wrong, and I'm sure someone will tell me if I am, but my guess is 
that our audience did not come with such narrow expectations as did the 
Klezmatics audience a few nights later. We were playing in a very nice 
concert hall as part of a series of world-music concerts. I suppose the 
series has a mailing list, maybe a subscriber list, of people who come with 
open ears to hear something new.

As others have pointed out here, the way the show is promoted and advertised 
affects the audience and its expectations. If you want to sell tickets by 
bringing in lots of people who don't much like to listen to music, but who 
will come to a Jewish event just because they are Jewish, then you will get a 
closed-minded, impatient audience. If you want an audience of music lovers 
who will appreciate the music on its own merits, you have to 
1) sacrifice the easy draw of the other crowd, and
2) overcome the reputation that all the 'pandering, schmaltzy' bands have 
given to Jewish music.

I have to say, I think the Klezmatics are very entertaining. I can see why 
they  might not try so hard, though. I know they play in Europe a lot, and 
the audiences there are so much more receptive and enthusiastic that a band 
could get spoiled.
We got back from Europe about a week before the Cleveland concert, and we had 
gotten used to 2 or 3  encores, followed by standing ovation. It's a shock 
when we got back to the good ol' USA, where people are racing out the door 
before the applause is done. Not because they are rude, or unhappy, I think, 
it's just what they do. I think if I played in Europe as often as Klezmatics 
do, I would lose patience with American audiences.

To those who say that klezmer groups should change their acts and 'pander,' I 
say that this business of what "klezmer" music is has gotten awfully mixed 
up. The Yiddish theater songs, the Israeli music, that stuff was always 
around, before the klezmer revival. As far as I know, that stuff was never 
called klezmer music. The  klezmer revival movement was an alternative to, 
maybe a reaction against the schmaltz. The good news was that Jewish music 
was not just "bei mir" and "Hava Nagila," but that there was real Jewish folk 
music that was just as cool, as exotic, as exciting, as musical, and as 
varied as any other kind of folk or ethnic music. So a few people started 
playing the old East European Jewish instrumental folk music, and they called 
it klezmer music.

Now there are lots of klezmer bands, and they play the Yiddish theater songs 
and the Israeli music. Or maybe they play jazz or or rock or broadway 
musicals, or whatever they are into, and because they are Jewish they call it 
klezmer. I know some people who want to dump the word "klezmer' altogether, 
they say that the meaning has been strectched so much it's better to quit 
using it. I'm not sure what words to use or not use, but I think we need to 
find a way to distinguish between the completely different kinds of Jewish 
music so that audiences can figure out that we're not really all the same 
band, and each person can tell what they like and what they don't. There's 
something out there for everyone, they just don't know what to call it.

Josh

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