Women in klezmer piece, as promised

[George Robinson <GRComm...>]

Khaverim --

Well, after Seth's generous buildup, I'm almost nervous about posting
this article (which originally ran in a magazine supplement to Jewish
Week, here in the -- currently -- frozen Apple). 
        For anyone who was interviewed and didn't make it into the story, my
apologies. By the way, this article makes no claims to be comprehensive
-- I couldn't get every women-led band into it if I tried. Wish I could
have. 
        Needless to say, I couldn't have done this piece with help from many
listmembers, for which belated thanks. Finally, I didn't get the Lox &
Vodka CD when it first came out, so I've never reviewed it; Caron was
kind enough to send me a copy while I was working on the story, and it
is a delightful record, highly recommended.

Without further ado,
George Robinson
Author of Essential Judaism, published in hardcover by Pocket Books,
March 2000



By George Robinson
There were a thousand women, and they were standing up and dancing to
klezmer.
 The place was the Michigan Womyn's Festival, the most successful of the
many all-women's music events that are held all summer across the U.S.
Isle of Klezbos was playing on the "night stage," the primo venue at the
festival, "the culmination of the whole event," says Eve Sicular, the
band's leader and drummer. " People told me later about how this was
unlike any experience they had there. I couldn't see all this," she
recalls, "but the horn players could. And it was thrilling."
Women have been a part of Jewish music since Miriam and her Israelite
sisters took up their tambourines to celebrate the miraculous
destruction of Pharoah and his troops. The loving Jewish mother
murmuring a Yiddish lullaby to her drowsing child is one of the great
cliches of our folklore, likewise dark-eyed Sephardic beauties singing
romanceros in Ladino to their far-off beaus.
 But klezmer? Jewish women with clarinets? A shayne maydele beating
drums?
 Well, not in the old country, whatever Molly Picon may have done in
Yidl Mitn Fidl.
 But, as they say, that was then and this is now.  Jewish women have
been an integral part of the klezmer revival that has been going on
since the ?70s. And now, they have stepped to front of the bandstand,
carrying their sisters in other Jewish musical traditions along with
them into the spotlight.
 Actually, there is some historical precedent for women in klezmer.
Henry Sapoznik, a pivotal figure in the klezmer revival and author of
the new book, "Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World" (Simon
and Schuster) noted in a e-mail last week, "A. Z. Idelsohn mentions that
women were active in European klezmer bands in Europe before the 16th
century. By the turn of the [20th] century the piano made instrumental
music an acceptable undertaking for women, so we see the first women
klezmer pianists like Dora Cherniavsky with Cherniavsky's
Hasidic-American Jazz Band and Sylvia Schwartz playing with her fiddler
father, Abe."
 However, Sapoznik adds, "It's not until recently that women have taken
an active part in
klezmer front lines."
 Just ask Elaine Hoffman Watts, the drummer for KlezMs. and a
third-generation klezmer, daughter of the famed xylophonist Jacob
Hoffman, and the first woman to graduate with a degree in percussion
from the prestigious Curtis Institute.
 Remembering her struggles in the 1950s, she said "They didn't use women
musicians. They had girl singers, but not a girl instrumentalist. It was
their club, their thing. I wasn't a part of the club. I played when it
was my father's job, when he was the leader. Otherwise they did not use
me because I was woman."
 But all that has changed. Watts plays drums with an all-woman band,
whose leader is her daughter Susan Sandler,  and at 67 is having the
time of her life.
 For the first time in the history of the form, numerous important
predominantly male  klezmer bands are being led by women (as opposed to
being fronted by female vocalists), and  these klezmerot are
instrumentalists first and foremost.
 Some of the bands have been around a while, like the Wholesale Klezmer
Band (out of Western Mass.), led by clarinetist/composer Sherry Mayrent,
Chicago's Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, led by guitarist Lori Lippitz,
and D.C.'s Lox and Vodka, led by accordionist Caron Dale. Others are of
more recent vintage like the New York-based Metropolitan Klezmer, whose
leader is drummer Eve Sicular.
 Another sign of changing times on the klezmer scene is the
proliferation of bands whose members are all or nearly all women. If you
want proof, look no further than Philadelphia, where the InterGalactic
Jewish Music Festival will feature an entire day of all-women bands on
November 14 at the International House Folklife Center in West Philly.
 Benjamin Laden, who is the festival's director, says that the decision
to do a program of women in Jewish music was an organic one. "There is a
natural flow to this festival where ideas and band combinations kind of
bubble to the surface due to a combination of my curating, logistics (a
biggie), and of course funding. This year this concert was a natural."
 The bill will include KlezMs., Mikveh and Judith Cohen, an
ethnomusicologist who performs a wide range of diaspora Jewish music in
a duet with her 13-year-old daughter, Tamar
Ilana Cohen Adams.
 Mikveh is a fascinating test case for the all-woman klezmer band.
Essentially, the aggregation is the first "supergroup" of New Klez, a
spectacularly talented quintet drawing from the top Jewish music groups
working today. Led by clarinetist Margot Leverett (an original
Klezmatic, now a member of Kapelye), the band's personnel includes
Alicia Svigals on fiddle (Klezmatics), Lauren Brody on accordion
(ex-Kapelye), singer Adrienne Cooper (Kapelye and just about every major
Yiddish vocal collections released in the past decade) and one ringer,
jazz bassist Nicki Parrott, whose resume includes stints with Clark
Terry, the late Doc Cheatham and the women's big band DIVA.
 Asked about the band's origins and message, Margot Leverett is blunt.
 "For me it was wanting to play with the very best musicians, and they
happen to be women. I find it very satisfying to work with men. We are
all working in successful other bands with men. But there's something we
need to say that we can't say in other bands. We have a unique message
in a female band, to focus on the experiences of Jewish women in our
music. That's a message that other bands aren't able to cover."
 Cooper adds, "What we represent is a moving from that decorous
one-girl-per-band thing to a front line of women. We don't exactly
understand the effect on the audience but it seems to boggle their minds
to see a front line of women in a band. We're not setting out to do
?women's music' but what it means is there's something that radiates to
the audience as female energy, interaction between women players on
stage. Something's happening."
 For many of the women involved in klezmer and other improvisational
contemporary Jewish musics, what's happening is that women's voices are
being heard. Simply put, vocal music expresses a highly specific
viewpoint (if it's any good at all), and for too long, the viewpoint of
51% of the Jewish world was as ghettoized within the Jewish music
community as Jewish music is marginalized in the rest of the music
world.
 Basya Schechter, the leader of Pharoah's Daughter, a highly acclaimed
Brooklyn band that plays a heady mix of Middle Eastern, Hasidic and
folk-rock, tinged with a klezmer beat, grew up in the Orthodox community
of Boro Park. Growing up, she seldom heard popular music, let alone
women's music. Her own growing success seems entirely logical to
Schechter, a Jewish equivalent of what has happened in the pop world.
 "Women singer-songwriters are getting so much attention in the regular
music world,"she says. "I think that's that's the historical paradigm.
Men have begun most of the waves but at some point [other] people have
their viewpoint and want some balance."
 Schechter is writing about how it feels to "leave the fold," and more
precisely, how that feels as a young Jewish-American woman in the ?90s.
 Talking about the next Pharoah's Daughter recording, which should be
released in the spring, she says, "It's about my emotional relationship
with the past.  I think my approach is very feminine, very emotional.
And I haven't seen that many men who left the fold who are musicians."
 For instrumentalists, however, the situation is a bit different.
 "We do a lot of vocal music from a female perspective but instrumental
music has no gender," says Mikveh's Leverett. "There is no difference in
playing based on gender. If you were blindfolded you could not tell the
gender of an instrumentalist from a recording."
 On the other hand, there is not question that for many women, the
environment found in a predominately female band is different. Susan
Sandler says, "Women relate to women in a different way than women and
men relate to each other. I think there's a lot less -- there's not so
much of that ?oh, you're cute -- you're not cute.' It's more like being
with your sisters. Playing with men, I'm more reticent to take the lead
-- I don't want to be too ?pushy,' etc. With women I don't care. I don't
hold back."
 Leverett would agree.
 "Our generation is much more comfortable playing with women than the
generation before. But there is tension. When we get into a band that's
all women we have our own space. Need to get into a place where we can
speak our minds freely. That's how we feel about being in Mikveh."
 Sandler, too, finds the male musicians of New Klez to be generally
supportive, but says that her mother's contemporaries are "still the
same chauvinist pigs they were 40 and 50 years ago."
 On the other hand, Eve Sicular attributes her active career in Jewish
music -- she leads Metropolitan Klezmer, and two all-women bands, Isle
of Klezbos and Ana and the Tevkas, -- to her connection to veteran
klezmer sax player Howie Leess.
 Leess told her, "I'd love to [work with you ] and I love to see a woman
run a business."
 Sicular says, "He was so enthusiastic.It was so encouraging.He has old
school good politics from the heart and he'd seen so much of the music
business."
 And Leverett is a protégé of Leess's occasional partner, Sid Beckerman,
a great second-generation klezmer clarinetist.
 "Sid learned this music from his father [the legendary Shloymke
Beckerman], his kids didn't want to do it, so he passed it on to me
instead. Sid was like a father to me and his wife is like a second
mother, they were just like family. And they are still very supportive."

 Well, as one woman musician says, "Men are all different, too."
 Ultimately, for many of these women, winning acceptance as musicians --
and Jewish musicians -- is more important than being perceived as
"female musicians."
 Caron Dale, leader of Lox and Vodka, is emphatic.
 "I'm a Jewish musician," she asserts. "The gender is not the issue. I'm
a musician who performs Jewish music and someone who is proud to be a
Jew. I'm thrilled and honored to perform Jewish music."
 And they would all agree with Leverett's assessment of klezmer and its
musical relatives.
"Its great music. Music essentially has no gender and it has no
religion. It's just great music and I love it and that's why I want to
play it. This music tells the truth for me."

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