RE: Women in klezmer piece, as promised

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

Most of those bands are listed on the KlezmerShack. Some, such as Mikveh,
do not have recordings (yet). In general, we try to note how to reach the
band directly, as well as what as available. You can start to browse at

http://www.klezmershack.com/contacts/klezbands.html

ari

At 12:26 PM 2/8/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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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