RE: Women in klezmer piece, as promised

[Stahl, Sheryl <SFStahl...>]

I'm interested in buying CD's from some of the groups you mentioned. I
searched a couple of online vendors but did not see them.  Does anyone know
were to get works by:
        KlezMs
        Lox and Vodka
        Metropolitan Klezmer
        Mikveh
        Judish Cohen
        Pharoah's Daughter
        Isle of Klezbos
        Ana and the Tevkas
(The others, we already have)

Thanks
Sheryl Stahl

> ----------
> From:         George Robinson[SMTP:GRComm (at) concentric(dot)net]
> Reply To:     jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
> Sent:         Tuesday, February 08, 2000 11:15 AM
> To:   World music from a Jewish slant
> Subject:      Women in klezmer piece, as promised
> 
> 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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