RE: What Is Jewish Music? (revisited!)

[Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky <reyzl...>]

I can only get to this list in drips and drabs these weeks.  Just cleaned 
out 400 messages in my mailbox and thought I would respond to just a few 
messages.  I just want to make my final comment on the thread I started and 
then I gotta get to my other work.


Skip Heller wrote:

>If a Jewish person designs and builds something to willfully make a Jewish 
cultual >expression, it's Jewish music.  After that, it's who likes it, not 
if it's "Jewish >enough" for the style police.  But the key is the intent 
to express Jewishness.

I guess you refer to me when you were speaking of the "style police" since 
I am the one who generated the latter half of the thread.  So be it.

>If a Jewish person designs and builds something to willfully make a Jewish 
cultual >expression, it's Jewish music.

Your statement would be true if that was always the case, otherwise that 
"if" is a big assumption to make.

I am sorry Skip, as a Jewish folklorist, I have watched these guys.   For 
some, their goal is advancing American and not Jewish music.   They have 
little real Jewish consciousness.   Others certainly don't expect to make a 
lot of money doing doinas, but they appreciate the value of a fad when they 
see one.  They figure that being a big fish in a little pond is better than 
being a little fish in a big pond, since that big pond is so overcrowded 
and so highly commercialized.   The requirements for making this music seem 
to be very loose and very, very few in the audiences have familiarity with 
the fine points in the music to complain, or at least complain effectively. 
 This means that you can play a special role in introducing new music to an 
audience.  Such a role is always very gratifying, even heroic - something 
that American non-Jewish music doesn't offer today.  If anything most 
American music today sounds very derivative and most people feel as if 
everything has already been done.   I think that this is one reason for the 
deep interest in world music which klezmer and Yiddish have now become part 
of.   It is klezmer's inclusion in this sexy music category that promises 
these musicians the kind of attention that straight American jazz or rock 
does not.   Going klezmer is a strange, seemingly antithetical mix of 
exotic, and for the Jewish musicians, proprietary at the same time.

One certainly doesn't have to make "Jewish" music for Jews to like your 
music.   Jews don't restrict themselves only to Jewish music.  So that is 
not the real issue.  If anything, a great many of them are not so 
comfortable if it's "too Jewish".  The issue is do you want to make "Jewish 
music" or not?   Putting in 5-10% of some Jewish melody doesn't make it 
Jewish music, but it may however reflect the musicians high level of 
assimilation and low level of Jewish consciousness.   I have watched 
musicians and I can tell you that those musicians who want to create Jewish 
music (e.g., Michael Alpert, Hankus, Jeff Warshauer, Judy Bresler, etc.) 
they and their music sound very different from the music of the guys I am 
talking about here.   Since you live on the West Coast where there is 
little of the real thing, I can understand why you made the comments you 
made (please don't reduce this comment to East Coast prejudice - I have 
heard this very remark/complaint from native West Coasters for many years.) 
 But for us who grew up with it all around us, things are not as relative 
as you make them out to be.

You earlier wrote:

>As for the varying degrees of klezmer-ness one hears in the various 
musical
>projects of people who combine this specific music with other musics, I 
can
>only say that klezmer purity is meaningless unto itself.

I don't think that "purity" is going to be that useful a ruler here, but 
"distinctiveness" is certainly possible, even though some of the stuff we 
hear sounds like general "Eastern European" to the untrained ear.

>What matters is
>whether the resulting music is any good or not as music that communicates
>itself.  Masada is obviously built on Jewish motives, but it's not exactly 
a
>klezmer band.  Zorn's msuic for that group feels Jewish to me.  And I'm
>right.  Just as if it doesn't feel Jewish to you, you're right.  And you 
can
>cast your vote by buying or not buying records or concert tickets.

So you take the wishy-washy "everything is relative" approach.   I would 
bet you any money that if you were to first listen to Zorn's music 
blindfolded, without the explanatory intro and identification, you and most 
others wouldn't think it's Jewish music.   But, since the overwhelming 
"coolness" of the label, hype, and the buzz around him has made sure to 
mold your and a lot of other people's opinions, you buy it.   To me it's 
hype.  Now I must tell you that I have heard very little Zorn in my life 
(had tickets twice but didn't get there), but when I sat and listened to 
him at the Radical Jewish Festival two years ago, I didn't get it at all. 
 I guess it's me.  I did heard a little bit of something of his on Seth 
Rogovoy's radio program once and found the music very moving.   Was it 
Jewish?   Unfortunately, I didn't hear enough of it to get an opinion.  I 
guess it was "Zorn" and that "Zorn" is a legitimate musical category.  The 
fact is that a lot of music moves me intensely, literally almost always 
captures my soul, i.e., anything with whistles and fifes, especially Andean 
and Irish music, and anything by composer Ennio Morricone (Cinema 
Paradisio) - way more than klezmer music ever can. (Notice that I didn't 
say Yiddish music.)  But just because certain music moves me, doesn't mean 
that I would call it Jewish.

You could see some of the people I am talking in the film "Sabbath in 
Paradise" by a German director Claudia Heuermann.  It's a film about 
klezmer musicians and how they relate to their Jewish identity or how their 
music's relation's to Judaism.  I am not at all recommending this film as a 
film, (she had no idea what she was doing in the film), but the parts about 
the highly assimilated free jazz musicians she captured very well.  The 
problem is that to them, this minimalism is "really big".  If such a little 
bit is enough for you, then you got it.  (The audience at the Ashkenaz 
Festival certainly laughed watching them.)  But for us old Crown Heights 
kids who find ourselves anywhere between a centrist and a normative Jewish 
position on the Jewish scale, this really is not enough.  If one has a 
lifelong intimacy with Jewish/Yiddish music because you grew up in the 
Yiddish community which created and breathed it, and furthermore, have 
rather heavy musicological training in the field, you have more than earned 
the right to pass judgements on what you hear.

Skip, I have personally, professionally, familialy, and communally 
dedicated the last 28 years of my life to the preservation and continuation 
of Eastern European Jewish culture and language and this is the filter 
through which I judge these things.  If you want to call this the "style 
police", you certainly have the right to do so.  But at least understand my 
perspective.

I am sorry if this is long and maybe even unclear in certain parts, but I 
wanted to have my say on this thread and then finish with it before any 
more time passes.   Gotta go.


Reyzl



---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+