One Jew's Views

Liner Notes, One Jew's Views by Yochanan Sebastian Winston, Ph.D. This is the music of a Fourth Generation Klezmer. Not that I come from a long line of musicians. My late father was an architect, his father owned a dry goods store before the Depression wiped him out and his father was a farmer in Lithuania. No, I am the first one in my family's memory to pursue a life in music. But I will never forget the first time I heard the real deal, the First Generation players like Dave Tarras and the Naftule Brandwein Orchestra on an old and scratchy Folkways record. They brought the music over. Klezmer. The real deal. The stuff they played in the old country for goyische and yiddische weddings alike. They brought it over and the sounds of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and later, Benny Goodman and Count Basie cross pollinated with it and created something new. Families danced to this stuff in Brooklyn and in the Catskills. The bands learned mambos and listened to comedians at Grossinger's and the Concorde and ate at all-you-can-eat buffets. And the music changed. Second Generation Klezmer music was what they played at bar mitzvahs in Long Island. It was a new music. And soon a new king from Memphis, Tennessee reigned in the music world. Kids didn't want to listen to the Andrews Sisters, didn't want to go to camp during the summer anymore, didn't want to take mambo and tap lessons. OK, OK, I'll study to become a bar mitzvah and then that's it!!!!! A deal was struck. If the kid had a bar mitzvah, the parents would spring for a rock and roll band (later a DJ) for the party. So, Jewish music languished except in a few isolated communities. But in those communities, Jewish music continued to develop. In Brooklyn, there were the Lubavitchers and musicians like Mordechai ben David who wrote in a new style of rock and roll that used holy texts from the Torah and the Siddur. There was The Singing Rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach (zl) who was out on college campuses pleading for the youth to return to Torah-true Judaism. And the Israelis, when they weren't being shot at or bombed by their Arab neighbors were sponsoring song festivals and writing marvelous new tunes. And there were men and women in this country like Henry Sapoznik and Hankus Netsky who went back to the old recordings, studied with the old timers and revived and resucitated an old music that many had presumed was dead. There was a new generation of Jewish music. These are the Third Generation Klezmers who remain active and working. And there is us. In New York alone, there are too many to count. Giants like Andy Statman and David Krakauer. Forward thinking artists like those who have surrounded John Zorn and his band Massada. Observant Jews like the Sephardic Santana, the Chassidic Hendrix Yossi Piamenta. I align myself with these colleagues since we all have certain things in common. A Fourth Generation Klezmer usually comes from a different musical tradition than Klezmer music, has studied the history of Jewish music and has melded several different influences together to form a post-Modernist creation. In the final analysis, the absorption of traditional Klezmer music allows it's influence to appear without regard to historical performance practice; for a Fourth Generation Klezmer, it is no longer material to replicate how it was played, but instead, what it means now. But, this is just one Jew's view... Notes on the music: Yerushalayim Shel Zahav was composed by Naomi Shemer in 1967. The song was originally submitted to an Israeli song festival competition but failed to win any prizes. With the outbreak of the Six Day War a few months later and the subsequent recapture of Jerusalem by Israeli troops, the song became an unofficial national anthem expressing the Jewish people's centuries-long love affair with the beloved capital. This arrangement is mostly original with an introductory bass line taken from John Coltrane's Equinox. The harmony was completely rewritten and adapted in collaboration with Tommy Gannon and a new section was composed for the piano solo. E