Re: Is this Jewish Music?????

[Owen Davidson <owend...>]

Thank you for the only use of the adjective "fraught," in an unhyphenated,
unmodified form, that I think I have ever read.  The word admits to this usage:
being identical in etymology to "freight," it means "full of."  Our customary
usage is to append an indication of the contents: a bill of lading as it were.
To use "fraught" in an unmodifed form is to allow for whatever unexamined and
uncatalogued contents might exist.  To say, in other words, that there was
content of various kind, whose nature and significance is left to the reader to
discover.  A useful term, I daresay.

Owen


Klezcorner (at) aol(dot)com wrote:

> SPINNING BLUES INTO GOLD
>
> The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records
>
> By Nadine Cohodas
>
> St. Martin's. 358 pp. $25.95
>
> In the late 1950s, R&B singer Etta James got some career advice from another
>
> African American musician. "If you wanna be a big star, get on Chess," the
>
> Moonglows' Bobby Lester told her. "The Chess brothers are some smart Jews
>
> who
>
> know how to sell records." Luckily for us, James soon did just that, joining
>
> a talent roster that already included blues titans Muddy Waters and Howlin'
>
> Wolf as well as bedrock-and-rollers Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Unlike a
>
> number of her label-mates, however, in later years she didn't think she'd
>
> been rooked.
>
> The fraught relationship between black performers and the white, mostly
>
> Jewish entrepreneurs (Sun Records honcho Sam Phillips was the only gentile
>
> in
>
> the bunch) who put their music across at the dawn of the rock era is the
>
> central theme of Nadine Cohodas's dual biography of Leonard and Phil Chess
>
> and the celebrated Chicago-based label they founded. Most previous accounts
>
> have told this story from the musicians' point of view--which is usually
>
> embittered, and in all too many cases for good reason. While Cohodas doesn't
>
> go to the other extreme of portraying her subjects as saintly, her intent
>
> clearly is to restore some balance to the picture, at least as far as the
>
> Chess brothers are concerned.
>
> In her view, what happened in the Chess studios during the label's golden
>
> years was the result of an alliance between two groups of outsiders,
>
> similarly excluded from the WASP mainstream. Born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz in
>
> Poland, Leonard and Phil Chess were brought to America as children. In
>
> Chicago, they bumped up against another sort of exodus--the massive
>
> migration
>
> to Northern cities of Southern blacks escaping Jim Crow. Once the brothers
>
> moved up from running a liquor store to owning a bar in the city's "black
>
> belt" just as Chicago blues was being born, older brother Leonard--always
>
> the
>
> duo's dominant half--spotted money to be made in recording the entertainers
>
> his joint featured, and became a partner in and salesman for tiny Aristocrat
>
> Records before taking the label over and giving it his and Phil's name.
>
> Cohodas, whose previous books have dealt with racial issues in politics
>
> rather than the music world, isn't an exciting writer. When it comes to
>
> evoking cultural momentousness, descriptions on the level of "[Chuck] Berry
>
> hit his stride again with the witty 'Roll Over Beethoven,' a song about
>
> change in the music world" fall a bit flat. Yet her sobersided prose is also
>
> appealingly free of rock writing's usual vice, sentimentality. This period
>
> has been gushed over so often in hyperbolic, romanticized terms that it's
>
> refreshing to read a straightforward account of how rock-the-business got
>
> its
>
> start, full of often fascinating detail about topics ranging from how the
>
> music was recorded to how payola worked. Among other things, Cohodas's
>
> research has disposed of several minor myths long ensconced in Chess lore,
>
> including a scurrilous story about the brothers using Muddy Waters as a
>
> handyman--a tale whose promulgation we owe to the Rolling Stones' Keith
>
> Richards, although why anyone would consider Richards a reliable guide to
>
> what day of the week it is, much less the history of the blues, is a
>
> mystery.
>
> Cohodas has turned up several of the outrageously unfair publishing deals
>
> that were common practice at the time, but is unable to confirm--or
>
> conclusively refute--the allegations of some Chess stars that they were
>
> cheated on royalties and the like, mostly because the financial records
>
> don't
>
> exist.
>
> As to the larger question of exploitation, "the truth," she observes,
>
> probably rightly, "is in some amorphous middle ground. . . . Race was an
>
> element in the conflict, not because of Leonard and Phil's behavior toward
>
> their musicians but because of what it meant to be black in the mid-fifties,
>
> particularly for a migrant from the South in Chicago." However, there's no
>
> question that the Chess brothers' dealings with their talent pool were
>
> paternalistic in a way that, however benign, may strike modern readers as
>
> unpalatable, particularly when Cohodas quotes Phil's reply to a remark that
>
> he and Leonard treated the performers like their children: "Well, they
>
> wanted
>
> to be."
>
> One flaw in "Spinning Blues Into Gold" is that the musicians themselves
>
> remain such dim figures, no mean trick with personalities as outsize as
>
> Berry
>
> and Diddley. There's really only one vivid character in the book, and that's
>
> Leonard Chess; even brother Phil remains a cipher. Still, the book's rich
>
> portrait of Leonard--driven enough to suffer his first heart attack at 39,
>
> streetwise enough to give a newly hired publicist an expertly guided tour of
>
> black Chicago, and skinflint enough to make it a red-letter day when he
>
> bought an engineer at his studio a cup of coffee--more than makes up for
>
> this
>
> failing. One story Cohodas tells could probably serve as his epitaph. When
>
> heart trouble landed him in the hospital again not long before his death at
>
> 52, a relative urged him to retire; after all, he'd already made plenty of
>
> money. Here's what Leonard answered: "It's not the money. It's the game."
>
> Tom Carson is "Screen" columnist for Esquire.
>

--
Owen Davidson
Amherst  Mass
The Wholesale Klezmer Band

The Angel that presided oer my birth
Said Little creature formd of Joy & Mirth
Go Love without the help of any King on Earth

Wm. Blake


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