wall st. journal excerpt

[Bert Stratton <yiddcup...>]

Nat Hentoff effusively praises Lerner's and Wall's album in yesterday's
Wall St. Journal . For Hentoff it appears the album's appeal is part
nostalgia (he relates some of the Socialist lyrics to his boyhood in
Boston) and part discovery that Yiddish poetry is actually being put to
music.   About half the article, which is lengthy, is about Yiddish poetry.
He quotes verse from Miransky and Reisen.  The headline is "The Lilting
Melodies of Yiddish."  Below is an excerpt. --Bert Stratton

 I was so deeply drawn into this fusion of music, poetry and memory that I
>keep playing this cycle of lieder entirely new to me and yet quickly
>familiar. Curious as to how all this came together, I called the
>originators.
>
>Mr. Wall, formerly lead vocalist for a Toronto rhythm-and-blues band, the
>Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, needed a gig and joined the Flying Bulgar Klezmer
>band. But he had to learn Yiddish, and found an affinity for the language.
>"It's a beautiful language," he told me, "full of poetry. Yiddish has a
>particular lilt. Certain melodies just flow out of it."
>
>Mr. Wall was so taken with cantorial music -- the roots of Yiddish blues --
>that he also studied cantorial singing. And he discovered Yiddish poetry
>that is "not all about the shtetl or the theater or comedy. For better or
>worse, it's serious."
>
>Ms. Lerner, a specialist in improvisation, both in jazz and avant-garde
>classical music, is also versed in musicology. But a time came when she
>began to think of exploring Jewish music too. "It's in my blood," she told
>me. But like Mr. Wall, she had to study the language, because the only
>Yiddish she had heard as a child was when her parents didn't want her to
>understand what they were saying.

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