Jazz, Jews & Nazis - Part 2

There was an underground jazz scene of sorts during the war in Berlin. One of the founders of the listening club known as the Berlin Hot Club was Francis Wolff, who later co-founded Blue Note Records in New York. This group would get together and listen to jazz records that had made their way to Germany. As Hans Bluthner, a member of the Berlin Hot Club and an important Jazz historian of this time, wrote, “I always said that had it not been for jazz, I would have died during the war. It gave me so much happiness and hope. It proved to me that I was not a German but a member of humanity.”

 And despite the love some Nazis did have for the music, one musician who was part of the Berlin Hot Club stated, “I am absolutely sure there were no Nazis in the Berlin Hot Club. We always said that anybody who liked jazz could never be a Nazi.’”

 This sort of sentiment reminds me of my friend, the legendary writer Nat Hentoff and his thoughts on jazz. To him, it was the perfect representation of what democracy at its best could be. Think about it: each band member gets a chance to be in the spotlight with his or her solo, but that solo will only sound good if the band plays well and helps that solo sound good. Then, after that soloist’s chance in the spotlight, the help the next soloist sound good! A beautiful sentiment, Nat said that, “The essence of freedom is jazz, it is constitutional democracy when it works, complete collective participation. And it swings.”

 Or, as Wynton Marsalis put it, “Jazz music is the perfect metaphor for democracy. We improvise, which is our individual rights and freedoms; We swing, which means we are responsible to nurture the common good, with everyone in fine balance; And we play the blues, which means no matter how bad things get, we remain optimistic while still mindful of problems.”

 Which makes the following feel contradictory and hard for me to fathom:

1.     The Luftwaffe pilots who liked getting the order to bomb London because the closer they were to London the closer they were to jazz radio which they could listen while bombing.

2.     The French resistance members who loved jazz and, as members of the resistance were fighting against the concept that some blood is better than others; however, some of these resistance members wouldn’t applaud for white musicians. As written about in the 1943 edition of Jazz Hot: “If in America prejudice exists, even when it comes to music, against the blacks, the contrary prejudice seems to exist in France. Americans do not seem to be aware that jazz owes everything to the blacks; here the situation is the reverse. This is ridiculous. The public falls in love with the first Negro who comes over and who can bang on the top of a box, while only admitting the value and talent of white musicians with great reluctance. Certain members of the Hot Club withhold applause for players like Hubert Rostaing, who can compete very well with blacks. Our musicians have made great progress. . . That same year, Asmussen reopened the great Danish jazz debate by taking a public Crow Jim stand: ‘Jazz is stagnating in this country because white people will never be able to master a music which blacks have in their blood when they are born.’”

It’s also hard for me to fathom stories like that of trumpeter Arthur Briggs, who was known as the “Louis Armstrong of France.” The African-American Briggs moved to Europe after becoming disillusioned with the the racism he felt in America (remember it wasn’t Hitler who snubbed Jesse Owens; FDR did.) After gaining Europe notoriety, in 1940 he was captured and sent to the Nazi prison camp St. Denis, where he was forced to lead their orchestra and perform at the pleasure of his captors.

 As we passed the former sites of Auschwitz's gas chambers and entered the former site of the camp's crematorium, we all began to sing the haunting melody of “Ani Maamin." One of the most powerful moments over my entire life, the song was composed by Rabbi Shaul Yedidya Elazar on a cattle car heading to the Treblinka death camp, and was sung by many Jews on their way to gas chambers at various camps throughout World War II - including this one.

Even so, the song’s lyrics are hopeful and speak to the eternal hope and perseverance of the Jewish people. The song includes the following words, which were even scratched onto an Auschwitz wall: “I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining/I believe in love even when I don’t feel it/I believe in God even when He is silent.“

In my eternal exploration of defining Jewish music, I often say that while many people think sad songs in minor keys represent a Jewish sound, that can't be so because that same sound is the sound of many cultures. To me, I've long-felt that if there is an actual Jewish move in music, it’s not songs in minor keys; it’s songs in minor keys that end in major keys. Songs like "Summertime" or "Ose Shalom," songs that from sad to happy. From Oy to Joy. While "Ani Maamin" also goes from a minor key to a major key, the function of this sad song providing hope in the darkest of times is representative of Jewish Music as well. The music, like the message of the Jewish religion, and the message and feeling of jazz as well, is a hopeful one; it's life-affirming always - no matter how dark life might be. I'm reminded of what iconic jazz saxophonist Johnny Griffin once said, “Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.”

 As we finished singing the song, nearly all of us in tears, our tour guide explained that the camp now functions as both a memorial and a warning. Sadly, I’ve felt that warning a whole lot lately.

 Here’s to never forgetting our past, to better days ahead, and to remaining hopeful throughout.

Jazz, Jews & Nazis - Part 1

Thanks to the incredible pianist and performer Hershey Felder, I had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz in late 2022 alongside my wife Stephanie, Hershey and a group of talented young artists.

            One of the first things our tour guide showed us was where the camp's prisoner orchestra was forced to perform - right inside the entrance to the camp just following the "arbeit macht frei" ("work makes you free") sign. The tour guide then asked the group what kind of music we thought an orchestra at Auschwitz would play. Most people replied with some variation on the word "sad," which we quickly learned was not true. In fact, the role of music in the camp was very similar to the absolutely false "arbeit macht frei" sign; it was a weapon of sorts. Instead of playing sad music for the newly arrived prisoners, the orchestra would actually play very happy music - music you might hear at a circus or a carnival, for example. Similar to the  "arbeit macht frei" sign, this happy sounding music was meant to provide the prisoners a sense of false hope, to make selection easier for the Nazis by using the music to create a false sense of calm during and to “drown out the screams of the dying.”

            I’ve long-been fascinated by both the Holocaust and the treatment of music, especially jazz music, during that time; immediately after discovering that our tour guide for the day was not only the head of the Auschwitz Museum but also a classical pianist, I peppered him with questions about the treatment of jazz music in the camp.

            He told me that despite the Nazi government’s official take on jazz and the laws against the music (Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles referred to the music as "Americano nigger kike jungle music"), many of the Nazi guards actually loved jazz music and performing it, and upon discovering prisoners who could play jazz, would force those who could into having jazz jam sessions. While I couldn’t agree more with the following Wynton Marsalis statement on jazz (“Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all…“) I can't help but wonder how a prisoner would handle a jam session knowing that they could outplay their guard, and how a guard might treat that better-playing prisoner.

            Hershey shared a story with us about a survivor he met who credited his survival in Auschwitz to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue.” How so? There was a Nazi guard who loved the piece and knew of this particular prisoner’s familiarity with it. So he made the prisoner sing it to him every day - and that’s why he survived.

            It's easy to forget that Germany was an arts-forward democracy in the 1920's and the same rise in popularity that jazz music experienced at that time in America was also experienced in Germany.

That said, Hitler and his henchmen saw jazz as a threat to everything they believed, one that had to be stopped. As Stella Coomes wrote in "Jazz Banned: How Jazz Music Shaped Nazi Germany:”

            The term ‘negermusik’ was coined, and while the linguistic origins may be obvious, the term was loaded with cultural implication: blacks were associated with exaggerated sexuality and were deemed to be “morally and aesthetically inferior to high German culture.” Extremists even believed that blacks and Jews were using jazz music as part of a larger attack on German society. Blacks were thought to be using the “sexual ingredient” of jazz music naively without any planning or purpose, as they were not considered to have the brain capacity to properly strategize. The Jews, who were thought to have more brain capacity but use it for evil, were then blamed for taking that ingredient and arranging it to systematically target and seduce German women and girls as part of a larger plot.

            Here’s a list of some of the laws Nazi’s put in place regarding jazz music:

1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoire of light orchestras and dance bands.

2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;

3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so- called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;

4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German

people (so-called riffs);

5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called

cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.).

         Interestingly, at about the same time, Henry Ford had similar fears about Jazz being a Jewish plot to corrupt American society. As Ford wrote in volume three of his The International Jew series, “Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”

         His solution? Make the square dance the official dance of the United States. As Robyn Pennacchia wrote in Quartz, “To understand how square dancing became a state-mandated means of celebrating Americana, it’s necessary to go back to Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Vehicles. Ford hated jazz; he hated the Charleston. He also really hated Jewish people, and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world—a theory that might come as a surprise to the black people who actually did invent it.”

         And in terms of accomplishing that dream, he forced his workers to do it and, as Erin Marquis wrote in Jalopnik, “in order to bring his dream to life, Ford poured tons of money into square dancing and country music in general. In 1926, he published an instruction manual for aspiring square dancing instructors. He also required his employees to attend the square dancing events he created for them, funded fiddling contests and radio shows promoting “old time dancing music,” as well as the creation of square dancing clubs across the US—where modern, Western-style square dancing as we know it now was really created…Ford saw these dances as intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome. Along with his wife and their square dance instructor Benjamin Lovett, he campaigned to bring square dancing to the physical education classes of students across the country, believing it would teach children ‘social training, courtesy, good citizenship, along with rhythm.’ The schools agreed, and by 1928, almost half the schools in America were teaching square dancing and other forms of old-fashioned dancing to students.”

         As of today, the square dance is the official dance of 23 states.

         Anyway, back in Europe, despite all of their efforts, Hitler and his henchman were having a hard time clamping down on the popularity of jazz music and eventually decided to repurpose the music - much of which was composed by Jews - as propaganda. From Mike Erin’s “Swing Under The Nazis:”

         It was out of this idea that Joseph Goebbels created the Templin Orchestra. Later re-named ‘Charlie and his Orchestra,’ it consisted of the best jazz musicians in Europe, who played swing music as accompaniment for parody lyrics, which poked fun at Americans and their allies. They would perform covers of traditional popular music, usually with the first verse untouched but with subsequent lyrics re-written to act as blatant Nazi propaganda, assuring people that Germany was winning the war, and that Churchill was a “drunken megalomaniac who hid in the cellars at night to avoid German bombs.” The smash hit “Little Sir Echo,” for example, was performed with the following lyrics: “Poor Mr. Churchill, how do you do?/Hello... Hello.../Your famous convoys are not coming through/Hello.../German U boats are making you sore.../You’re a nice little fellow, but by now you should know/That you never can win this war.”25 After the British Prime Minister, the Jews, unsurprisingly, were a favorite target. Lyrics to covers such as “Makin’ Whoopee” blamed the Jews for the war, singing of “Another war, another profit/Another Jewish business trick.” Interestingly enough, the music was not meant for the German public, as it still employed rhythms and musical techniques which were condemned by the Nazi party. Rather, it was meant to target the Allied war effort, sending political messages and spreading Nazi thought to a wider and perhaps unsuspecting audience by “polluting the airwaves.”

        The Nazis would hold dances where this repurposed Jewish-composed swing music would be played by bands like Charlie’s. A favorite of theirs to request was “Cootie Cootie,” which was a retitling of the Andrews Sisters’ hit called “Joseph Joseph” that had been banned because in addition to “Joseph” being Goebbels’ first name, the song had originally been based on a Yiddish song.

 STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 - COMING SOON…

Stories Make Music Even Greater

The chazzan has come! A heavy man in his late fifties, with thick glasses and a face made for a cigar, he looks, on the street, like the grocer’s assistant who will never have his own store. But now, in his black robes and high black skullcap, he looms over the congregation, and I stop snapping at God, for I am transfixed. The chazzan closes his eyes as the spirit comes. What he sings is partly written, largely improvised. He is a master of melisma—for each sacred syllable there are three, four, six notes that climb and entwine, throbbing in wait for the next spiraling cluster. The chazzan is a tenor, what they call in opera a dramatic tenor, but what drama in opera is comparable to this continual dialogue with God? This is not an aria; there are consequences for those who speak to Him with false notes. The voice is bold and clear, dark in color, but there is no heaviness. The chazzan soars effortlessly, pleading, demanding, refusing to allow God to forget for one moment that the Jews in this place have not forgotten Him, certainly not on this day, nor will they in all the days to come, so enough already! Or at least no more afflictions than last year. In the balcony, the women nod, and some moan, in agreement. The cry. The krechts (a catch in the voice, a sob, a cry summoning centuries of ghosts of Jews). The dynamics of the chazzan are stunning—a thunderstorm of fierce yearning that reverberates throughout the shul. And then, as if the universe had lost a beat, there is sudden silence—but no, there is a sound, a far distant sound, coming, my God, from deep inside the chazzan, an intimation of falsetto, a sadness so unbearably compressed that I wonder the chazzan does not explode. The room is swaying; the chazzan, eyes still closed, does explode—his soul, riding a triumphant vibrato, goes right through the roof. Years later, at a bar, between sets of the volcanic Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, I am telling a black nationalist and Mingus about Jewish blues, blues that are thousands of years old, blues with plenty of their own soul. Mingus is interested. He wants to hear some. But the other guy, he says blues are only one color, his. Mingus says words sure do get in the way of hearing. - Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy

One of the greatest thrills of my life so far has been knowing Nat Hentoff. Nat was a personal hero and one of the greatest music and social commentary writers of all time. He passed away in 2017 at the age of 91, surrounded by family and the music of Billie Holiday.

There are so many recordings that totally changed my life when I first heard them and, in many cases, it’s thanks to the way Nat wrote about them that I actually got to hear them in the first place (here's a list of the nearly 600 albums he wrote liner notes to). He had this wonderful, very enticing way of writing about music that just made me want to immediately run to the record store and listen to whatever it was that he was writing about. I loved reading his column in JazzTimes as a teenager and thought it was pretty cool that he included his home phone number at the bottom of each article.

Shortly after moving to New York in the fall of 2007, I got an internship at the Blue Note Jazz Club. One of my first tasks there was to transcribe a few interviews that Nat had recently conducted at the club. We’d often fax the completed transcriptions to Nat, but, occasionally, on my way home, I’d swing by his building on West 12th Street and leave the transcriptions with his doorman.

Eventually word got back to me that he liked my transcription style, so I decided to share a recent recording of mine (my very first) with him.

Nat and Joe

I was very nervous as I walked to his building to drop off my recording; at that point, I had only shared my music with maybe one or two other people in the whole jazz business and knew that sharing my music with Nat, the pinnacle of jazz criticism, was a risky move.

As soon as I walked out the door of his building after dropping off the recording, it occurred to me that so many musicians must do the same thing, so I decided that it couldn’t hurt to leave the doorman a few bucks to ensure that my recording was delivered. I thought it over as I paced, quite nervously, for a few minutes outside his building. I was so visibly nervous, in fact, that when I finally walked back into the building and reached my hand into my pocket, the doorman jumped, thinking, as he told me later, that I was reaching for a gun. He breathed a big sigh of relief, however, when all I pulled out was a few dollar bills. We laughed it off and the package was, thankfully, delivered.

I was shocked when, a few weeks later, I received a call from Nat. More shocking, however, was the content of his voicemail. He loved the album and said that he planned on eventually writing about it. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.

At that time, Nat was still very busy writing for the Village Voice, JazzTimes and the The Wall Street Journal, among others. Whenever I called him or he called me, he always seemed in a hurry. He didn’t waste time with small talk and “how are you’s?”. Instead, he’d call and, immediately upon my answering, would launch into why exactly he was calling. When the conversation was finished, he simply hung up. Very rarely was there a “bye.”

I was a naive 20-something with little experience being around people I idolized, and Nat’s hurried, no-nonsense way of speaking made me quite nervous. But as we got to know each other better, I began to find his way of communicating both charming and refreshing. Nat’s way of conversation felt, somehow, like a connection to a bygone New York, a city of old-school intellectuals with outsized personalities.

Sometimes, he’d pick up the phone, say, “I can’t talk now,” follow it with either “I’m on deadline,” “I’m trying to save the constitution,” or “I’m protecting your civil liberties,” and then abruptly hang up.

Over the next six or seven years, we spoke quite frequently (a few times a week at one point), and it stayed that way until shortly before his passing when his hearing made phone conversations difficult.

He told me amazing stories about:

• Duke Ellington, who, Nat said, sent him a Christmas card in March or April of the year he died because he wanted to make sure to get his Christmas greetings out before his passing (as it turned out, he died that May).

• Charles Mingus, who used to call him to play or whistle new compositions and melodies over the phone.

• Charlie Parker, who told him he loved country music for the stories.

• Earl Scruggs, who once saved him from a beating by some anti-semites down South who didn’t like Hentoff’s Jewish-looking beard.

• Malcom X, who used to phone his house as “Mr. X”.

• Bob Dylan, with whom Hentoff wrote for and about many times, told me “the real story” behind his conducting this famed 1966 interview with Dylan for Playboy. (I was always impressed by Dylan’s brilliant, improvisatory made-up answers; to hear Hentoff tell it, they were actually worked out before-hand. Dylan had originally conducted a totally straight interview with Hentoff; however, at the time, Playboy had a policy where writers had to show subjects their interviews before they went to print. Upon reviewing the initial interview, Dylan didn’t like the straight-laced one, and made Hentoff conduct another on the spot, which is this famous one).

• Fats Waller buying him his first steak dinner (with Nat gone, are first person Fats Waller stories now extinct?), and so many others.

He’d often tell me that he wished he could’ve introduced me to Willie “The Lion” Smith. He said that he thought the two of us would’ve gotten along nicely. I always got a kick out of that.

We didn’t really talk much about our shared Jewish heritage, but the understanding that we had this in common brought us closer together - and gave us interesting things to discuss. I remember Nat telling me about the moment he fell in love with jazz. He was walking down the street in his native Boston when he heard a sound coming from a record store that “just reached inside me and hit me like a chazzan swinging. I was so excited I yelled in pleasure…I rushed into the store. “What was that?” It was Artie Shaw’s “Nightmare,” which, years later, I found out that Artie had based on what was called a niggun, one of the melodies that Jewish chazzans [cantors] sang…And that made me realize that the only other music that had really hit me that hard was when I was even younger in an Orthodox synagogue and I heard the cantor, and they used to improvise very passionately…It was so powerful, so viscerally powerful…I knew the liturgy, but not that well - I had a feeling they sometimes argued with God. Like, “How come you’re doing this?” But whatever it was, that started what I look for in all music…what most moves me is what in Yiddish is called the krechts, the cry. And that’s what you have in all of jazz, one way or another. It makes you sit up and sometimes get up and shout.”

He shared with me how his hearing Ziggy Ellman’s “joyous, swinging, klezmer-like Yiddish trumpet solo” in Benny Goodman’s “And The Angels Sing” made him feel as if he had been welcomed into the jazz family. He told me too that, years later, he found out that Ziggy was imitating a cantor on his trumpet. (Not quite related, but this reminds me of a moment at a Herb Alpert concert in Cincinnati last year when Alpert took audience questions, and someone asked him about Stan Getz. Alpert shared that he once asked Getz what he was thinking about when he soloed. Getz told him that he was imagining that he was praying at the Western Wall.”)

Nat’s brilliant writing - and the Jewish stories he shared with me - made me, a then-young, hopeful jazz musician with barely any recordings and/or gigs, welcome in the jazz family, too.

As an example, here’s how he wrote about Sidney Bechet: And pounding out the beat, sending a blast of life through his long, straight horn, like the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, Bechet lifted these young Frenchmen as if he were a typhoon and hurled them into the music.

He loved to talk about Ornette Coleman’s experience listening to the music of renowned cantor Josef Rosenblatt for the first time and recommended Ben Ratliff’s book The Jazz Ear, which referenced that moment: “I started crying like a baby,” said Ornette. “[Rosenblatt] was crying, singing and praying all in the same breath. I said, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t find those notes … they don’t exist.’”

He elaborated on this, explaining that “the only other music that had really hit me that hard was when I was younger in an Orthodox synagogue was the cantor…It was so powerful, so viscerally powerful…I knew the liturgy, but not that well - I had a feeling they sometimes argued with God. Like, “How come you’re doing this?” But whatever it was, that started what I look for in all music…what most moves me is what in Yiddish is called the krechts, the cry. And that’s what you have in all of jazz, one way or another. It makes you sit up and sometimes get up and shout.”

Nat, who called himself a “Jewish Atheist” and was proud of the fact that the documentary about his life was called “The Pleasures of Being Out Of Step," grew up in a very anti-Semitic Boston, and his love of being “out of step” came from growing up in an Orthodox synagogue but having his doubts about the existence of God. As he wrote in “Boston Boy:”

Inside [the synagogue], the fathers, and some sons beside them, are davening, praying, rocking back and forth, chanting, a swaying mass of sighs, the words of the prayers passionately blurred as they rise in the air, for each Jew sounds his own sacred rhythms. But instead of confusion, the prayers intertwine the same unmistakable meaning: let Jews finally be allowed to breathe without apology. And after a time, it is as if there were only one huge being in that room, a giant Jew made up of many shaking heads, each an insistent part of the whole. I find my father, who, without a break in his chanting, opens a prayer book beside him and points to where everyone else is. I try—for once I really try—to follow the words rather than fake it. But I am seized with a compulsion to dare G-d, who must be here if He is anywhere on this day, to strike me dead if He exists. Here I am, I say inside my head, on the Day of Atonement in a shul, and I do not believe in you. Show yourself. Destroy me. But the davening went sighingly on, and I greatly resented His indifference.

And here he is describing one Yom Kippur:

Eating a huge salami sandwich very slowly, I sit in the middle of the morning on our porch, which overlooks Warren Street, around the corner from Howland. Warren Street is the main route to our shul, our synagogue, a block away. It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting, the day on which God marks down the fate of every Jew for the year ahead. Some of the Jews who look up at the slovenly, munching boy on the porch shake their heads in disgust. I stare at them, taking another bite. One old man, with a white beard almost as long as our rabbi’s, shakes his fist at me. Another old man spits. This despicable twelve-year-old atheist is waiting to be stoned. Hoping to be stoned. But not hit. I am, you see, protesting a stoning, or so I will say later that day when my father has discovered how his only son has spent the morning of the holiest day of the year disgracing himself and his father. By then, I am sick. Because of the sandwich. Because of the look on my father’s face. But I will not say so. My father also does not speak, for if he did, he would disown me. My mother? I do not remember remember my mother having been there, but, of course, she was. She was never anywhere else.

And his Bar Mitzvah:

In those days Rabbi Soloveitchik, I later found out, frequently spent Saturday mornings in various synagogues to observe for himself what manner of new men were coming coming into Judaism. This morning, he sat down in the front row, and as I began to chant, the rabbi, in his deep, resonant voice, started chanting along with me. “If you make a mistake,” my tutor had told me, “don’t go back. Only the Jews of the regular congregation will know you have made a mistake. The rest, the Jews who show up only for the holidays and bar mitzvahs, won’t know the difference—if you do not show anything on your face, and if you do not stop and go back.” Now, I was thinking desperately, everybody will know every mistake I make, because Rabbi Soloveitchik’s sonorously clear obbligato is making all too unmistakable every syllable I should be singing. At the end, utterly spent, I finally dared to look directly at Rabbi Soloveitchik. I could read neither approval nor disapproval in his face, but as he nodded gravely to me, there was a slight smile. The Jewish people had survived my bar mitzvah.

He attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, which, in his words, was cruel and "accepted students without discrimination, and it flunked them—Irish, Italian, Jewish, Protestant, black—with equal lack of discrimination.” His first job in journalism was working for Francis Sweeney and her paper, the Boston City Reporter, which sought to expose corruption and uncover anti-semitism; Sweeney went toe-to-toe with powerful anti-semities like Charles Coughlin, seeking to counteract his influence. A catholic herself, she was threatened with excommunication when she criticized a then-powerful cardinal for staying silent about Catholic anti-semitism. Coincidentally, three Massachusetts Rabbis did somehow vote to excommunicate Nat from Judaism in 1982 for his protesting Israel’s then-recent invasion of Lebanon. Here’s what he had to say about it in Boston Boy (which he told me was his favorite of all of his books):

I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court, that Bet Din. But rabbis these days have no power except over their own congregations, and that power can be removed, along with the rabbi, at the will of the congregation. Ah, but had this been a true court, and had the rabbis believed that each Jew, however Satanic, must be given due process, they would have summoned me to that motel room, and I would have come. And I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew, and a tradition I was strengthened in because I came to know certain jazz musicians at so early an age that they, not unwittingly, were my chief rabbis for many years. And in that motel room, I would be excommunicated nonetheless, for what could Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus mean to that court of assizes? But I would have been there, and I would have made my mark.

Frances Sweeney had a profound impact on Nat. In addition to teaching him about journalistic principles, she nurtured Nat’s sense of independence and his “pleasures of being out of step.” Boston Boy to her, and once remarked, “To this day, if I have an ethical problem, I sometimes think, ‘Now what would Frances Sweeney do in this case?’”

Nat and Quincy Jones

All of these experiences led Nat to be the great fighter and champion that he was. He told me about working on “The Sound Of Jazz,” a wonderful hour-long program on CBS in 1957 that featured, among others, Count Basie, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, and Billie Holiday. Regarding Holiday, he told me that some of the CBS executives didn’t like the idea of having a black woman who had been in jail on the show and asked him to remove her from the program. In response, Nat threatened to pull the entire program if she wouldn’t be allowed on.

Fortunately for us, they let her remain on the program, which turned out to be Holiday’s very last performance with Lester Young. YouTube “Fine and Dandy” to watch this powerful performance for yourself. (Nat told me that Holiday gave him a big kiss on the cheek afterward and that that kiss had been the greatest award he ever received.)

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is the story that made me feel welcomed into what became the Neranenah family and actually inspired me to take on the role of Executive Director of this organization nearly five years ago. I remember preparing to interview for this role one summer evening, trying to figure out my vision for the organization if I got the job. While I didn’t necessarily agree with how the festival had defined Jewish Music up until then (a Jew playing music), I didn’t yet have my definition for the term, but I kept coming back to this story - and others which didn’t involve Jewish performers or composers but were are so deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. And in that moment - as I contemplated these stories Nat had generously shared with me, I had my epiphany:

Jewish music is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, and Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw against the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art.

What’s interesting about the above is that none involves Jewish performers or composers, but all are deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. The stories are powerful, inspiring and Jewish, and it’s the story, I’m convinced, that makes the music Jewish. Jewish music is not only music composed by Jews and performed by Jews, but also music that has been influenced and expanded, in part, by Jews to make it uniquely American. These are stories that we can all identify with and celebrate together - for, after all, while this is a Jewish organization, music is for everyone and Neranenah embraces and reflects that.

I was lucky enough to experience Nat’s fighting side firsthand. Eventually, Nat did profile me in the Wall Street Journal, and it was interesting to watch how he fought for what he wanted. As he was preparing to write the piece, he’d often call and say that he was having a hard time getting in touch with his WSJ editor. After a month or so of this, Nat called to say that he wrote his editor a letter of resignation. However, he called a few days later with the news that his editor had finally called, basically begging him to come back. Nat agreed and began writing the piece on me. He turned it in and called me as soon as he had received his edits.

“They took out of the first paragraph,” he said. “We need that paragraph. It sets the mood for the entire piece.” He was angry. “Give me 10 minutes,” he said, abruptly hanging up the phone.

Ten minutes later my phone rang. “Okay. It’s back in, but I think this is my last piece for the Wall Street Journal.” And it was.

Nat was the first non-musician to be named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master - our country’s highest honor for a Jazz musician. A big fan of saxophonist Houston Person, he was shocked when I told him that Houston had not been named an NEA Jazz Master. I told him that, if he wanted, he could nominate Houston for the award. He jumped at the opportunity but asked me to facilitate his nomination and submit it online for him, which I was more than happy to do. He worked on a nomination letter for a week or so and then called to read it to me. His final sentence will always remain one of my very favorite sentences: "Houston Person is always as contemporary as an expression of love.” Whew…

I remember talking to Nat about a 2010 article he wrote in JazzTimes Magazine, discussing a book called “Jazz Jews” by Mike Gerber. Here’s a sample:

I knew Artie Shaw (birth name: Arshawsky), but never asked him about his childhood. What I found out in Jazz Jews is that, as a kid, he was often sharply wounded by anti-Semitism. That resonates with my having grown up in Boston, which was then the most anti-Semitic city in the country. In my Jewish ghetto, a boy alone at night ran the risk of being punished by invaders as a “Christ-killer.” I lost some teeth that way.

That’s when I became an outsider to the point back then that I didn’t go into certain Boston stores, because I figured they didn’t want to have anything to do with Jews. I’m still an outsider in my day job writing about civil liberties.

What I didn’t know when I used to talk to Artie Shaw is that he felt so marginalized growing up Jewish that, as Mike Gerber writes, “Those anti-Semitic episodes haunted Shaw to such an extent that having Anglicized his name … for years he avoided disclosing his Jewish roots to fellow musicians.”

Coming to New York, Artie Shaw had as one of his mentors Willie “The Lion” Smith, also mentor to Duke Ellington. Said Shaw during a National Public Radio interview, “Willie didn’t know I was Jewish. I didn’t tell him that.” The Lion, notes Gerber, was proud of his good student, Artie, all the more so when Sidney Bechet, who was particular about clarinet players, asked Willie about Shaw, adding that “this musicianer was a good bluesman.” Artie was being welcomed into the family of jazz. He certainly soon knew that he belonged there, not at all marginalized.

I’ll have more to say about Mike Gerber’s Jazz Jews in a future column. He also tells of Willie “The Lion” Smith getting bar mitzvahed at 13 at a Newark synagogue, and saying years later that “people can’t seem to realize I have a Jewish soul and belong to that faith.” That story is in my forthcoming book, At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene (University of California Press), due out in June. The Lion eventually became a chazzan for black Jews in a Harlem synagogue. I wish I’d known that in time to be a member of his congregation.

Towards the end of our conversation, Nat expressed regret over having been with both Artie Shaw and Willie “The Lion” Smith, and not being able to make this Jewish connection between the two of them. Our conversation led me on a hunt to find recordings of Willie “The Lion,” the cantor, and here’s a favorite that I found.

Nat’s work ethic was like nothing I’ve ever seen and will continue to inspire me throughout my life.

I remember calling to wish him a happy birthday on either his 89th or 90th birthday. He called me back the next day, apologizing that he hadn’t called me the day before. “For my birthday present,” he told me. “I just wanted a day alone to write.”

Another time, I was volunteering at one of the luncheons for the NEA Jazz Masters Awards and, after lunching with Billy Taylor, James Moody, Gerald Wilson, Roy Haynes and so many other NEA Jazz Masters, I walked Nat to his car. He told me that he felt like he had just attended a family reunion, but when I asked if I’d see him later that night at the big awards ceremony and concert, he said, “No. I’ve got to work.”

Around 2013, he started telling me about his health starting to worsen, but that didn’t seem to bother him as long as he could write. For the next year or so of phone calls, whenever I’d ask how he was doing, he’d simply say, “I'm still writing, and as long as I'm writing I'm okay.”

He never once complained to me until his vision started failing. It was heartbreaking to hear that this wonderful man who lived to write could barely read anymore. But he was determined to write for as long as he could. Even though he could barely read, he collaborated with his son Nick on articles in 2016, dictating his words to him; they even somehow managed to profile me again this past March, in what, I believe, turned out to be Nat’s final piece on Jazz.

I last saw him a few months before he passed when I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with him at his home. I brought along a copy of “Invitation to Openness,” Les McCann’s book of photography, and it was thrilling to watch him light up as he’d see the faces of so many of his old friends.

I’ll never forget the way Nat spoke about Jazz. To him, it was the perfect representation of what democracy at its best could be. Think about it: each band member gets a chance to be in the spotlight with his or her solo, but that solo will only sound good if the band plays well and helps that solo sound good. Then, after that soloist’s chance in the spotlight, the help the next soloist sound good! A beautiful sentiment, Nat said that, “The essence of freedom is jazz, it is constitutional democracy when it works, complete collective participation. And it swings.”

Having a champion in Nat Hentoff is something I will always treasure. I remember him calling all excited one day, just to tell me that, while listening to one of my albums, his neighbor, enjoying the music from the hallway, knocked on his door just to ask what he was listening to.

He’s even partly responsible for getting me into writing. When I told him that I was going to play at New Orleans' Preservation Hall, he encouraged me to document that experience in writing, which was a formative experience on its own.

Nat taught me so much about music, writing and life in general. His words, attitudes and teachings have influenced my music just as much as the music of my favorite pianists, and his work ethic was quite instructional and inspiring, too.

As I look back on the things he taught me, I will forever be impressed by his commitment to writing and his fighting for the things that most mattered to him. His examples of persistence and, above all, always being himself, is something I learned a whole lot from and will stay with me forever. As I said, he was a fighter and a champion, and he will always be my hero.

I often used to take notes of things he’d say after we hung up the phone. Looking back through my notes earlier today, I found one particularly poignant note that pretty much sums it all up. I don't remember the context, but that doesn't matter: “You only have one life,” he said. “Why do something that doesn't let you be you?” Amen.

Jewish American Heritage Month Through a Musical Lens

Reflecting on the fact that May is Jewish American Heritage Month, I am not only proud of the work Neranenah has done this season to share and celebrate Jewish contributions to American arts and culture, but I’m also very thankful for the opportunity to do so. Looking back on this past season, I’m filled with gratitude for how much joy and meaning the art itself has brought me and so many, and how much I have and continue to learn from it. There is no bottom to the well that is “Jewish contributions to music and the arts.” I’m reminded of a quote the legendary pianist Hank Jones shared with me a decade or so ago: “the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.” Indeed!

To me, the most special thing about American music is how each artist is encouraged to be themselves and to explore, discover and share that which makes them uniquely themselves. Unlike some European musics, for example, where the goal is to develop and attain a particular sound, the goal in American music is to find and share one’s unique voice which, in my opinion, began with Louis Armstrong and the creation of scat singing.

Many are aware of the important role the Karnofksys, a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in New Orleans, played in Armstrong’s early years. Armstrong worked for this religious Jewish family that spent evenings davening in their kitchen and singing Russian lullabies to their baby; he wrote that they “instilled in me singing from the heart.” Most, however, are unaware of the inspiration Armstrong drew from this family during that crucial moment in the recording studio: Armstrong shared with his friend Cab Calloway that the source of his scat singing came “from the Jews rockin’,” referring to the Karnofsky’s praying in their kitchen. However, Armstrong never spoke about this in public because he was worried that people would think he was making fun of Jews praying, which he wasn’t. So, the seemingly random syllables of scat weren’t so random after all. The inspiration behind this sound came from Lithuania and is just one example of the many sounds from foreign lands that inspired and/or became a crucial part of American music. 

Anyway, in American music, everyone has something special to bring to the table (whether they gain an audience is another story, but the only chance one has to succeed in American music is to be themselves!). I’m reminded of a treasured email I once received from one of my heroes and mentors, the recently departed jazz master Ahmad Jamal:

This is the day and age of concentration on developing technology only, at the expense of the loss of culture, discipline, development of the soul!!! People are not machines!!! Horowitz, Tatum, all were technical wonders but they had wonderful, soulful concepts, no matter how many thousands of notes they played!!! You can only play what you hear, discover, and hopefully be able to execute. Technique without soul is meaningless. We are not machines, we are distinct souls, everyone with their own fingerprint!! You will never find 2 fingerprints the same!! Everyone has something special and if we are Blessed we will discover it!!! Be yourself, immerse yourself in discovery by being in tune with the soul!!! Everything else will come: necessary technique, feeling, passion, depth, discipline, etc.

Similarly, with Jewish Music and/or Jewish Contributions to American Music, each perspective is welcome and adds something to the table.

When I first came on as Executive Director of this organization, I was worried about the fact that people were confused about the definition of Jewish Music, and that was a deterrent from attending. After many conversations and much research (asking 300 people to define Jewish music did yield 300 different answers!), I also realized that the confusion and range surrounding defining Jewish music is fascinating - and something that should be embraced.

I’m reminded of the time I interviewed Rolling Stone writer Alan Light. I asked him if there’s anything about Bob Dylan’s music that is Jewish - besides the fact that he happened to have been born Jewish. His answer: "Yes! He answers every question with a question!”

So, nearly five years later, I am still fascinated by each new and thoughtful definition of Jewish Music that I hear, and even a month after our truly incredible evening at the Alliance Theatre with the brilliant and hilarious Tony-Winning composer Jason Robert Brown (Parade, Bridges Of Madison County, Last Five Years and more), I am still fascinated by his answer to the question, which ties in beautifully to Jewish American Heritage Month (and brings to mind the answer Wynton Marsalis shared with me when I asked him about Jewish Music: “Jewish Music. Interesting. Not really a thing, but all over American Music.”):

The dumb trope is that Jewish music is just augmented seconds and it's sort of all that Middle Eastern stuff that all sounds like “Hava Nagila.” So I think when you talk about Jewish music, a lot of what comes into my mind is something different, which is American Jewish music, because I think that's different than European Jewish music. American Jewish music is inevitably tied into Tin Pan Alley. It's inevitably tied into that wave of immigration at the early part of the 20th century that brought us Gershwin and brought us Irving Berlin and brought us Harold Arlen and the people, you know the people. Jerome Kern, he was one.

So I think that really defines what we call Jewish music because it was so significant to the creation of American music and to what we call the Great American Songbook. So in a lot of ways, when you ask me what's Jewish music, I think it's the Great American Songbook, I think you had mentioned this afternoon, it's Cole Porter, who was maybe the least Jewish person on earth, and is on the record, is having said, "I write Jewish music," because he wanted to do what all the other composers were doing. That was very popular. All the Broadway shows were written by Jews. And he was like, "Well, then I'll just write songs in minor keys." And he was like, "There, that's Jewish music," which is pretty close.

So for me, it's very hard to separate Jewish music from American music. There is a thing that happens once rock and roll comes in in the '50s and the early '60s where it does sort of drift away from Tin Pan Alley convention and deliver something that's very different that's both sort of equally from Appalachian folk music and then also from African rhythm and blues and all of that stuff showing up in there. And I tend to think that the structures of Tin Pan Alley music, the structures of the Great American Songbook are sufficiently flexible to admit a lot of different influences into them. But there is a point at which what is recognizable as a song to Jerome Kern is not necessarily the same thing as what the Beatles did. And you can find it over the course of the nine years that the Beatles were working. By the end of it, they weren't writing Jerome Kern like songs anymore. They had sort of evolved into whatever that was. And now since hip hop has sort of become so ascendant, I think that's even gone from popular music in a very different way.

But I still have this image in my head that Jewish music is based in those tenets of those immigrants, the Russian immigrants who came over in Eastern European at the beginning of the 20th century and came to this country and what they created. So to the extent that you ask do I write that, I write in that tradition. That is what I learned. I would say I was trained, but of course I wasn't really trained to write songs other than when I listened to them and I was like, "I want to do something like that." What's the word when one takes it in? I assimilated is what I did. Oh, that's a good word for Jews. So, I assimilated all of that stuff and until I learned how to write something that felt like, "Oh yeah, that's a song."

But because what I write is always character-based, I'm always writing from who's singing this and where are they and what's going on, there are shows where my characters have to sing music that does not feel derived from American Jewish tradition. I think something like the Bridges of Madison County, it is the least Jewish show I will ever write. I say that and I'm actually writing a show about a Chinese opera troop, so that's wrong. But Bridges of Madison County, it was a deeply goyishe show. And so that probably did call up from me a real sense of how do I separate?

And I will say, without wanting to be too simplistic about it, that the gestural thing that I think of when I think of the difference between The Bridges of Madison County and my other work is that harmonically, it's just a lot less dense. It's a much more tonal, triadic. Even Francesca's music, which is very sort of Italian folk song-based, still comes from a different tradition than Irving Berlin. And so I think there is a distinction to be made between something like It All Fades Away, and even something that is a pop song in 13 which is sung by a Jewish character, that even that has within it what I will characterize, because I'm in a room full of people who know what I'm talking about when I talk about Jews, that there is a sort of neurotic, harmonic energy that is sort of essential to the way that I write for Jews that I don't even think about, but I think that is sort of in there. So if you ask me about Jewish music, it's deeply neurotic. That was the answer. I probably didn't need to come all the way to the piano to say that, but I did. So here we are….

I’m reminded of what Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen shared with me, answering the same question: 

Well, that's a good question. And in our conversation, I guess the question always is what's the Jewish part? Aside from the fact that my grandmother who hung with Emma Goldman and did all these quasi-anarchistic things and whatnot, was certainly anti-establishment in a lot of ways, but she loved art and even though she didn't like the music that I got to do when I got into music, she supported my right to do it. I mean, maybe that's the most Jewish thing: supporting artists as opposed to blatant content.

I mean, that being said, if you get a chance to listen to my version of "Hesitation Blues", which is borrowed heavily from Reverend Gary Davis's version, that starts, it goes A minor, E major, A minor E major, A minor, E major, A minor to C seven, and now it’s in C major!

So, reading the history of Reverend Davis, it's said that at some point he lived with a Jewish family somewhere in the Carolinas. I mean that kind of major/minor shift to me, I hear it. I'm not an expert on secular Jewish music by any stretch of the imagination, but I hear those kind of moves a lot. Maybe that's as good as it gets, I don't know.

And Michael Feinstein’s response to me asking about the major-minor shift:

Well, the major minor shift is folk music. It's not confined to Jewish music. Irving Caesar who wrote the lyrics to “Swanee,” “Tea For Two,”I Want to Be Happy”…Irving said that Jewish music is folk music and folk…all... I don't know if he said all folk music is music of lament or all music of lament is folk music. It must be all folk music is music of lament. It is all that minor modality. So, to say that it's Jewish or it's Romanian or it's Russian or it's wherever, it all has that in common as it does with African-American spirituals. So, it's hard to create a defining line. However, one could argue that the Jewish culture had a very different kind of music in the synagogue from Christian music. And in that sense, it's closer to popular music – that major-minor shift. So, in that sense, there's a throughline.

And the other thing that was told to me, and I don't remember by who sadly, was that in the early days of what we now refer to as Tin Pan Alley, music publishing was a field that Jews could get into without prejudice, which I'd heard for years. But the thing that I haven't heard was that a lot of young Jewish boys who sang in the synagogue choirs were recruited for the music publishing business because they would hire these young kids to go around to vaudeville houses and stand up in the audience and sing a song or to help plug a song. So, there was a direct connection with plucking kids out of the synagogue choirs and bringing them into the music business. So, there is an inherent Jewish connection in that sense. And if you look at the history of the Whitmarks and the publishers, there's a very definite Jewish connection. And of course, all ethnicities could get involved in the music business because you could be Black, you could be Irish, you could be Italian, whatever. If you could deliver the goods, you're in. So, in that sense, it was just about talent. It wasn't defined by other factors.

See? Every perspective has value!

I’m fascinated by how many searching, spiritual Jewish musicians I’ve spoken to who don't connect with Judaism at a young age and find through music what they feel like they were led to believe they would find through Judaism, but then years later come back to it and kind of realize it's the same thing. For many, music at its best and a synagogue service at its best makes one feel connected to the past; to many, the words at the service don’t even matter because its the melody that connects generations and can make one feel just like they’re standing next to their father, mother, grandfather or grandmother, for example. This is a deeply touching phenomena that Jason beautifully tied into theater, too:

We're doing Parade now in a theater called the Jacobs. And the Jacobs used to be called The Royale. And I went to The Royale on one afternoon in 1980 with my dad. We went to the TKTS booth in Duffy Square and we got tickets for a show called A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine. And because it was TKTS, we sat in the last two seats in the last row of the mezzanine. And we did 13 at that theater, too. And every time I would stand on stage at 13 to give notes to the kids, to do a little audience talk back afterwards, I would look up, and my dad had died the year before, and I could see exactly where we sat. And I was like, not only is that there for me, but everyone who's ever in this building has left their ghost here somewhere. And that's the stuff that matters so much to me. It's just because I'm a sentimental guy. So that matters enormously to me, which again, in the context of the evening, it does feel like I'm carrying on this thing of my people. And the American Jews who built those shows and who built those buildings, those are the people who I'm like, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to be. I belong there.”

Music That Changed Our World: Norman Granz & Chess Records

A year or so before being appointed Executive Director of our organization, which was then known as the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, I was working with one of my heroes I’ve been lucky to befriend and learn from - the great pianist Ramsey Lewis - on his autobiography, which was unfortunately never published. For nearly six months, we’d spend around 10 hours a week on the phone together. During the calls, I’d listen to Ramsey tell me about his life and get to ask him anything I wanted to; I’d record our calls, transcribe them, and put everything we spoke about into categories that would later become chapters. For a young, curious pianist who idolized Ramsey, it was a dream!

            I’ll never forget one day when we were on the phone and his other line rang. “It’s Redd,” he said. Isaac “Redd” Holt was the bassist in Ramsey’s first trio, the one that recorded the iconic hit of 1965, “The In Crowd.”

            “Be right back,” he said, putting the phone that we were on down on his table. He picked up the other phone and I was able to hear Ramsey’s enthusiastic greeting to Holt: “Itzak!”

            When we got back on our call, I asked him about that. “Oh,” he said, laughing. “Leonard Chess taught me that.”

            In 1928, Leonard Chess (born Lejzor Czyz), his brother Phil (born Fiszel Czyz), and their entire family immigrated to the United States from Poland where they settled in the south side of Chicago; most immigrant groups coming to America at that time identified with the WASPs, but the Jews identified with black culture and often lived in black neighborhoods, which were mostly segregated from the white population. After a series of different jobs, they eventually started what would become the legendary record label, Chess Records, in 1950.

            I remember thinking back to this conversation as I prepared for my interviews for this professional role. At the time, I was struggling to come up with my own vision for the organization. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ramsey’s conversation with Holt, as well as a few other conversations I’d had with my incredible African-American Jazz mentors (see this one with Les McCann, for example) - in which “the Jewish thing” seemed to bring us closer.

            Growing up as a totally obsessed jazz-fan, I was aware of the important relationship between Jews and African Americans in American Music, and also how many Jews on the business side of the music were responsible for turning me on to so many of the great African-American musicians I now idolized.

            For example, the mesmerizing way in which the late, great journalist Nat Hentoff wrote about these musicians made me want to listen to everyone he wrote about! It’s thanks to him that I discovered the music of greats like Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington. I thought back to my high school days where I’d spend entire afternoons browsing the Jazz section of the sadly now-defunct Tower Records. I constantly saw names like Norman Granz, Ira Gitler, Lester Koenig, Alfred Lion, Orrin Keepnews and George Wein on records I was purchasing.

I especially cherished the records with Granz’s name on them. Mostly live recordings from a concert series he ran that toured the entire country from 1944-1983 called “Jazz At The Philharmonic,” these shows featured musicians like Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Lester Young, Nat “King” Cole, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many more - all on the same concert! I recognized how rare it was for these concert recordings to exist and often felt like I was listening to a rare treasure. Granz earned a soft spot in my heart, not only for preserving these incredible moments in American music, but also for bringing Oscar Peterson, arguably my favorite pianist, to the United States from Canada for a debut U.S. appearance at Carnegie Hall during a “Jazz At The Philharmonic” concert where, soon after, his career took off. The recordings were produced by Granz and released on a few of his many record labels, Verve, Mercury, Clef and Pablo Records. He named Pablo for his great friend, Pablo Picasso.

            I later learned that Granz, who was born in Los Angeles in 1918 to first-generation Jewish-American parents from Moldova, wouldn’t let this touring group perform at any concert hall that was segregated (he’d often remove the “colored” signs himself and cancel the concert if the venue objected), and he’d often pay out-of-pocket for these musicians to be transported by limousine so that they could feel on-par with white, classical musicians, which they were. He once said, “I insisted that my musicians were to be treated with the same respect as Leonard Bernstein or Heifetz because they were just as good, both as men and musicians.”

            Oscar Peterson named his son Norman in honor of Granz and once said, “Black musicians couldn't stay in decent hotels until Norman came along.”

            There’s a famous story about Granz accompanying Ella Fitzgerald to a cab one night. The cab driver drew a gun and threatened to shoot Granz “if that n***** gets in the taxi.” Granz calmly got into the cab with Ella, and no shots were fired. 

            Another time, Granz caught a cop in Houston planting drugs on the toilet in Ella’s dressing room. As soon as Granz confronted him, the cop pulled out his gun and said, “I ought to shoot you.” Ella, Granz and a few others were arrested. Granz sued the Houston Police Department, and eventually the case was dropped.

            Perhaps more than anyone, Norman Granz is responsible for elevating jazz to the concert stage. As Celine Peterson, daughter of Oscar, told me, “Norman Granz was, simply put, the most important visionary in jazz music in the 20th century. His vision was more than presenting live music – it was presenting music that brought people of every generation, every race and every religion together. He wanted to give musicians the recognition that they deserve in an environment where both the artists and patrons felt safe in their seats. He dedicated his entire life to music, those who create it, and the idea that we should not be divided because of our skin colour. Norman was an often-unacknowledged champion of the Civil Rights Movement who would not let burning crosses or a gun being shoved in his abdomen stop him from demanding that his audiences would not be segregated. We all owe this man a thank-you and the promise that we will not let discrimination win. It is our responsibility to finish what he started.”

            And one night, as I wrestled with what my vision for the festival could be, these stories came to a sort of apex in my mind, and finally it hit me: my Jewish pride as a musician comes not from the fact that I happen to have been born Jewish and love music, but rather from knowing how we’ve worked with others to shape and create music that‘s hard to imagine living without.

            Jewish music, I realized, is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, and Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw against the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art.

            What’s interesting about the above is that none involves Jewish performers or composers, but all are deeply important to the music that’s shaped American culture. The stories are powerful, inspiring and Jewish, and it’s the story, I’m convinced, that makes the music Jewish. Jewish music is not only music composed by Jews and performed by Jews, but also music that has been influenced and expanded, in part, by Jews to make it uniquely American. These are stories that we can all identify with and celebrate together - for, after all, while this is a Jewish organization, music is for everyone and Neranenah must embrace and reflect that.

So, I presented my vision, got the job, and was on my way. As I prepared to implement my new vision by highlighting the music and the story of a Jewish-owned record label instead of a Jewish-born musician, one day I called Ramsey to ask him more about his experience on Chess Records. He told me two things:

            1. Leonard Chess would often bring him “gifts,” a mink coat for Ramsey’s wife, for example. However, Ramsey knew that whatever he was given wasn’t exactly a gift; the cost of whatever that item was was going to come out of something else.

            2. Without Chess, we may never have heard of Ramsey. They gave him an opportunity that no one else at the time was giving him. He felt much gratitude for them and gave them credit for the opportunity that gave him his career.

            And herein lies the beginnings of the complications with Chess Records - and much of the Jewish involvement in the dawn of the modern American record business.

            Leonard and Phil Chess started their record label for one reason: after a series of odd jobs, they opened a music venue on Chicago’s Southside called the Macomba Lounge. And it was here where they began hearing a new kind of music: delta blues.

            At the time, there were only a few major record labels, and they were not giving opportunities to African-American artists (at that time, African-American music was called “race music”; it was actually the Jewish Atlantic Records executive, Jerry Wexler, who eventually changed the term to “Rhythm and Blues”). So each night, the Chess Brothers would go to work and see a packed crowd loving the music of these unsigned African-American artists - and they saw a market for this unrecorded music. As Ben Sidran wrote in There Was A Fire: Jews, Music & The American Dream, “Over and again throughout the twentieth century we find examples of Jewish entrepreneurs hanging out at black bars and record shops to find out what music was being requested, and then going out and manufacturing it.”

            When the Chess Brothers started out on this journey, they, like the artists they were recording, were broke. They would literally travel the country and sell records from their car trunk! Echoing what Jerry Wexler wrote, “As a Jew, I didn’t think I identified with the underclass. I was the underclass.”

            The Chess Brothers often get a terrible rap these days. True, they did often pay advances instead of royalties, and when they did pay royalties, the rates were well below what many other major labels at the time were paying their artists, and yes - Leonard Chess sometimes credited popular disc jockey Alan Freed as co-writer on songs of Chess-artists (without their permission) that Freed didn’t co-write.

            As Ben Sidran wrote, “when the dust cleared, it seemed the Jews usually wound up holding the assets and the blacks were left holding the keys to a lot of Cadillacs. Hy Weiss himself said, “The Negro is responsible for a lotta white folk making a lotta money.”

            And when discussing the label these days, this is often where the story ends.

            However, Sidran continues: “But of course the white folks had invested all the money, at a time when there were virtually no returns; it was still a business, and if it had been a WASP business, people would still have had a lot of trouble getting paid. So, when Jewish record execs are criticized for not paying royalties to black artists—giving them advances instead—it should be recognized that they normally didn’t pay royalties to anybody, black or white, Jewish or gentile (it was a very democratic system this way).”

            Rich Cohen shared interesting insights in his book, “The Record Men:”

            To hear Marshall and Leonard and Phil tell it, the artists got quite a lot. For starters, it was only guys like Leonard who would record guys like Muddy and Wolf. And so they are now defamed for being the only white Americans willing to get into that particular game. And yes, Sinatra got a better deal, but a hit by Sinatra meant two million copies, whereas a hit by Little Walter meant thirty thousand copies. Leonard could not pay as well because Leonard’s artists did not sell nearly as many records. In the world of independents, all the margins were small. A single mistake could wreck a company. And since only one out of every six or seven releases made any noise, the hits had to pay for the duds. Sonny Boy Williamson might bitch if Leonard did not pay promptly when a record hit, but he never said a word when Leonard spent twenty grand on a Sonny Boy record that tanked. As for the matter of royalties, yes, money was deducted, which might, to an artist with a hit, make it seem like he wasn’t getting paid, but maybe he should’ve thought of that when he demanded cash to pay a gambling debt or buy a car. “They came in whenever they had a problem,” Phil Chess is quoted as saying in Spinning Blues into Gold. “If one had his wife having a baby in one hospital and his old lady in another, he would come to us to pay for the old lady so the wife wouldn’t find out. That was an advance on royalties. But he would forget.” In 1970, when Muddy, who never thought to buy insurance, wrecked his Cadillac and spent over two months in the hospital, Leonard paid the bill. When Muddy got loaded on whiskey in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and was arrested for driving drunk, Leonard paid the ticket. If such payoffs had been considered gifts, Chess would have gone out of business in the early fifties.

            What about Leonard sometimes crediting Alan Freed as the co-writer on a song he didn’t write? Obviously, the actual writer might take offense, but to Leonard it was smart business: give the most popular disc-jockey in the country a monetary interest in a record, he’ll play it more often, and everyone will make more money, including the artist.

            Despite the explanation of people like Sidran and Cohen, it’s important to point out - and to complicate things even further - that Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters sued Chess for non-payment of royalties - and won.

            I remember once telling this story to a group of mostly African-Americans. One older man could sense how uncomfortable - almost apologetic - I was speaking about the questionable business decisions of these Jewish record executives and interrupted me to make me feel more comfortable. “Listen,” he told me. “We all understand that it was a business.”

            Or, as Ben Sidran once shared with me, “We never used to know if the check was going to come at all. Now the twelve-cent check comes on a regular basis!”

            This is an incredibly complicated story that only gets more confusing and layered with each passing year as times continue to change. I’m not here to defend the Chess Brothers, but rather to provide as much context and background as possible into this important story of the shaping of modern music. We can argue about the business decisions of these executives all day long, but hopefully we can all agree that these labels have preserved and documented so much music that changed our world and would be incredibly hard to imagine music as we know it without.

Join us on Saturday, April 23rd, as we present "ATL Collective Relives The Sounds of Chess Records," at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center at 8PM.

And just a few days later, on Thursday, April 28th, we will be paying tribute to Norman Granz with the iconic jazz trio of Benny Green, John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton at the Woodruff Arts Center's Rich Auditorium at 7:30PM. Tickets are available now.

One of Those Special People

Joe Alterman, Jimmy Heath, Bill Charlap, and WABE's H Johnson

In my last blog post, I shared many of the reasons I’m thankful that music is in my life. One being the incredible people it's brought to me. As we enter Black History Month and mark two years since his passing, I wanted to reflect a bit on one of those special people, someone who I became especially close with during my exploration of “What Is Jewish Music?” during my first year as Executive Director of this organization - the legendary saxophonist and composer, Jimmy Heath. 

          A bonafide jazz legend, I grew up idolizing Jimmy Heath and will never forget the first time I got to hear this National Endowment For The Arts Jazz Master live. It was the summer of 2005, at the Blue Note in New York, and I couldn’t believe I was hearing the man and sound I’d heard so often on recordings create right in front of me. Not only did I love the way he played, but I also loved how he smiled nearly the entire evening, stood up and danced whenever he felt like it, and playfully egged on and joked around with his bandmates. It was obvious that he took the art extremely seriously, but himself, perhaps not so much.

            I had a feeling he was a funny person and confirmed this a few years later when I was a student volunteer at the 2011 National Endowment For The Arts Jazz Master Awards. He asked me where the bathroom was. “It’s time to see Henry Pissinger,” he said.

Shortly after I moved back to Atlanta in 2016, I heard that Mr. Heath, who was then 88, had moved here too, to be closer to his family. I’d heard rumors of people occasionally seeing him out, but I didn’t get the chance to see him here until the Opening Night of our 2019 Atlanta Jewish Music Festival, when Jimmy came out to hear his good friend Bill Charlap perform the Leonard Bernstein songbook at the Atlanta History Center.

Being my first event as Executive Director and having different vision for the organization as my predecessor, I was tasked with explaining it all in my pre-show speech that night. Here’s a portion of that speech:

Here's what I'd like you to know about the festival. The truth is that, while you may think of the horah/Klezmer music when you hear the words Jewish music, Klezmer music is already a genre of its own. Jewish music, however, is not a genre of music. It's much more than that. Consider Jewish people like Alan Lomax, who traveled the country and the world documenting rural musicians, seeking along the way to convince them of their worth by playing their music back for them; or Milt Gabler, the only one willing to record Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after Columbia Records and John Hammond turned it down; or Alfred Lion, Frances Wolf, Norman Granz, people who are responsible for the documentation of so much incredible American music and got into the music business just as much out of their love for the music as much out of their hate for the prejudice they saw to the musicians they loved. These are people who preserved and championed the roots of black American culture, helping elevate street life to the realm of high art. And that's what I want to reflect here: what Jews have contributed to the world of music. Music's for everyone and, as a musician myself, I find my Jewish pride as a musician comes from knowing how we’ve worked with others to shape and create music that‘s hard to imagine living without. I believe that while Jewish music isn't a genre of music, it encompasses many. After months of exploration, I choose to define the Jewishness of the music by its story, not necessarily by its melody. There is a Jewish imprint on nearly every genre of American music and the stories within are stories that are uniquely Jewish but also uniquely American. These are stories - like Bernstein’s - that we can all identify with and celebrate together.

As the audience applauded the end of my speech, I noticed Jimmy’s applause too, but I became nervous when he approached me at the end of the concert that night and said, “I’d like to talk to you about your speech.” Being a 92 year-old African-American legend who had lived through almost everything I spoke about - and having been an artist on Jewish-owned record labels for which I suspected he wasn’t paid his due - I didn’t know what to expect. But it turns out I didn’t have reason to worry. “You were spot on,” he told me, and he said that he had lots of stories about Jews and Blacks, Jews he had known and worked with that he’d be happy to share with me.

I asked him if he wanted to hang out sometime, to which he said yes, but not at the Waffle House like I proposed (He called it the “Awful House.”). We exchanged phone numbers, and I was surprised to see him call me the very next day with an invitation to join him a week or two later at a student concert at Clark Atlanta University’s Ray Charles Performing Arts Center.

We arrived about an hour before the doors opened, which was a treat because we had to make conversation for an hour. We really bonded during that time, during which Jimmy shared stories about performing with Erroll Garner in Paris in 1951 and, among many others, Ray Charles who he said was pretty cheap and “tried to get me to write an arrangement for him for only $500!”

We finally took our seats and were surprised to discover that the jazz portion of the evening was after intermission. The first set featured marching band music by John Phillip Sousa, during which Jimmy playfully saluted the band from his seat many times. He was having fun poking fun, but in a mid-concert whisper he explained to me why he wasn’t the biggest fan of Sousa’s music: it brought him back to his days in the marching band in high school in North Carolina where the black schools only went to 11th grade while white schools went to 12th. “They thought we were going to be janitors so why do we need the extra grade?,” he told me, before smiling and playfully saluting the band again.

During intermission, he told me it was time to see “Mr. Leaky,” further endearing himself to me with the same bathroom humor he first shared with me years ago. As we stood doing our separate business at adjacent urinals, Jimmy said, “What’s wrong with America? You don’t rest in the restroom! And some of my best friends and greatest Americans were named John! John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie,’ John Coltrane…it shouldn’t be called a John. In other countries they just call it a toilette. It shouldn’t be called a rest room; you don’t rest in it. Sometimes I call it the mess room. I make a mess and get out.”

By the time the concert ended we were two peas in a pod (pun intended), constantly joking around together. I was at such as ease with him that I almost forgot that Jimmy was a 92 year-old legend and not one of my buddies I grew up skipping Saturday school with. That is, until we bumped into the Jazz students who had just performed, all of whom were jaw-dropped to be in the presence of the master. The professor told Jimmy Heath that he teaches about him in his Jazz History class, to which 92-year-old Heath responded, “I am Jazz History!”

The next week I made the first of many trips up to his house in Lawrenceville and, immediately upon entering for the first time, I was again reminded of the rarified air I was in. His wife welcomed me into their home and brought me into Jimmy’s office. Jimmy was on the phone at the moment and motioned with his finger that he would be just a minute. He began telling the person on the other line about me: “My new young friend Joe Alterman just arrived. We’re going to talk about Blacks and Jews and the Jews in music that I knew.” I couldn’t hear the man on the other line, but they began discussing the subject. Eventually, Jimmy hung up the phone and apologized for the delay, adding, “But I couldn’t hang up on Walter Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins!” Wow!

I turned my recorder on and we began to speak. While Jimmy seemed mostly prepared and interested in sharing stories of the Jews he’d known (people who, at the time, I saw as being “coincidentally being born Jewish”), it’s not that I wasn’t interested in that, but I really wanted to hear his thoughts on the relationship between Jews and African-Americans in the Music Business, and I began to ask him the questions that related more to the potentially contentious aspect of this important relationship. Sure, like I said in my speech, Jews did preserve and champion the roots of Black culture but, like Charles Hersch wrote in his book “Jews and Jazz,” "when the dust cleared, it seemed the Jews usually wound up holding the assets and the blacks were left holding the keys to a lot of Cadillacs,” and I was really curious to get Jimmy’s thoughts on this. Here’s some of that conversation:

Joe Alterman: The relationship between Jews and blacks is a hugely important one that is both extremely prolific, complicated and deeper than it often appears on the surface. Take the band called the Symphony Sid All-Stars, which featured you, [Jimmy’s brother and famed bassist] Percy, Miles, JJ Johnson, Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke. But it was named for the Jewish deejay Symphony Sid…

Jimmy Heath: Well, he had a big rep.

JA: But it wasn’t named for any of the band members and some people today say, "Well, that's just like the Jewish businessman to put his name on the band that he's not in.” What do you say to that?

JH: Well, he had a rep for playing jazz in New York, and that was big. And so he took the band on the road. He loved the music! And he was a deejay. That's his thing. He was a big-time deejay, a jazz deejay, bigger than anybody else in the country for playing jazz!

There were guys in Chicago, I remember deejays in Chicago and stuff, but Symphony Sid was like the one that everybody talked about, because he was in New York, the jazz capital of the world.

JA: I found a quote from Cedar Walton where he said that he was in heaven when he heard Symphony Sid say his name on the air, even when he mispronounced it.

JH: It got the audience, so we laid with it.

JA: So, it was okay?

JH: It was okay, and we all could accept when we went to Cleveland, Ohio, or someplace like that, and the brothers from the hood came out to hear the jazz, and a brother asked me, "Well, who's Symphony Sid?"

I said, "He's the deejay."

He said, "Well, what does he play?"

I say, "He plays records. He plays us on the air!”

I continued…

JA: When I look at the Jews that were in the music business, although it‘s important to keep in mind that they did have a business to run and keep open, it often feels like a balance between being good businessmen and being greedy.

JH: Yeah, yeah. There were some gold diggers. And some other people that are really artistically connected. Some are financially connected, and some are philanthropists such as Daphne Orenstein, and Maria Fisher. Now Maria Fisher is the one…she was a member of the Beethoven Society, but she loved Monk's music, and she's rich, and she helped to start the Thelonious Monk Institute.

JA: I was curious what you thought of someone like Irving Mills. While he puts his name as co-composer on Duke Ellington pieces that he didn’t compose, Duke is quoted saying, "He always preserved the dignity of my name." Cab Calloway said, "He broke so many barriers for us that you couldn't count them." So it's like a balance between doing really good stuff and kind of shady stuff.

JH: Well, they were making money off of the art, but they also had the ability to present the art to more people. It's a give and a take. You know, if you ain't got nobody to put it out on the market, and you've got all this great music and nobody hears it, what the hell is happening? If the people have the connections with the general public, you know, you've got to take the…and they’ve got to make some money out of it. That's how I like to figure those.

JA: I found this quote from Ben Sidran [There Was A Fire: Jews, Music And The American Dream] I wanted to read to you. I'm curious if you would think this is a good sum up, in a way. It says, "The Jews preserved the roots of black American culture. These small independent labels were responsible for preserving a huge spectrum of American music, from Thelonious Monk to Muddy Waters, and in the process helped elevate American street life to the realm of high art. And not just the manufacturing and marketing of this music was in Jewish hands. For example, bebop was difficult for many jazz fans to comprehend, but Jewish writers such as Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Dan Morgenstern, Ira Gitler and Nat Shapiro took up its cause, explaining to the average fan just why this new music was important, while Symphony Sid similarly championed its cause." So it's like preserving and championing. Would you agree with that?

JH: Yeah. Yeah. I would have to. If I didn't have Orrin Keepnews to record me and put my record out, then I wouldn't have been nothing.

Here comes two companies in my lifetime that tried to…black companies, and they didn't do well. They didn't have the connections. About the biggest word in any language is connections, and there are all kinds of connections, good and bad. But the connections to the world, a lot of the Jewish people had the connections in the movie industry and everything, you know?

And sometimes they would present stuff that was very degrading, but we had to go through a period. It became different along the way, and now up until this guy Trump took over, and now he's trying to turn the clock back. But you know, in my life, I owe so much to Dr. Howard Brofsky, jazz trumpet player, and Maurice Peress. They're both Jewish friends of mine forever. They're the ones who got me a gig at Queens College as a professor. I had done one year or so up in Connecticut, Housatonic Community College up in Bridgeport, and then I did one in City College in New York, because John Lewis was going to teach a semester and then he decided not to and I got a gig up there. From that, I got the gig at Queens College. Queens College is basically Jewish. Most of the professors at Queens are Jewish.

JA: I read where one of the highlights of Mezz Mezzrow's life was when he got put in the colored wing of the jail he was thrown into. He often described himself as a link between the races. Leonard Chess grew up in Chicago's “Jew Town", which was considered a buffer zone between the white neighborhood and the black neighborhood. And then Charlie Parker successfully convinced club owners and audience members that Red Rodney was an albino, and had him sing the blues. And then I've heard it argued that Benny Goodman was able to serve as a cultural bridge between both the black and white musical worlds, because he like many other Jewish artists was able to understand both. It seems like from these quotes there's like a scale of white to black, and Jews are somewhere in the middle. Is that true? You know what I'm trying to say? It's a …

JH: Yeah, yeah, but you know, there's another guy, Fields his name was. Played with Lionel Hampton, and when he went down South he'd put on pancake makeup and shit. And would be disguising himself as ...Yeah, because he's a white guy.

JA: Well, is it weird? Like when Mezz Mezzrow says, "I'm a link between the races," is that offensive or is that true?

JH: If he felt that way himself?

JA: Yeah.

JH: Yeah, I can't deny that.

I think that there's a closeness in our history. There's a closeness in being dissed by other races of people that's in common. We have that in common, yeah…

When we went to Europe with the Clark Terry Band [1974], [Jewish saxophonist] Arnie Lawrence and I decided to be roommates. When we went to Germany, man, Arnie was nervous. He was scared about everything. I said, ‘Now you know how I feel in America. It’s not comfortable, is it?’”

Looking back on this conversation now, I can tell that I was looking to hear something negative, but Jimmy wasn’t having it. Sure, that all existed, both in the business and in his life, but Jimmy wasn’t bitter about it and chose to see the positives and the light - that which helped his career and that which brings people together. He reminded me of an older African-American gentleman I met who interrupted one of my first speeches about the Black/Jewish relationship in American Music. This man, who could sense how uncomfortable - almost apologetic - I was speaking about the questionable business decisions of certain Jewish record executives, interrupted me to make me feel more comfortable. “Listen,” he told me. “It was a business.”

Eventually, our eye-opening conversation led Jimmy to his computer, where he opened his iPhoto app and walked me through hundreds of photos from his life for the next few hours. There were so many treasures. Photos with Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and so many more, but I’ll never forget one photo of Jimmy conducting his first big-band in the late 1940s. Just in front of Jimmy’s baton stood Charlie Parker, and behind Parker sat a young John Coltrane.

Jimmy and I really bonded over the “Jewish thing.” Over the next few months, his health started to fail, and he was in and out of different hospitals and doctor visits. I’d often get a quick call from him exclaiming one thing to me. “Joe! Guess what? My doctor today was Jewish!”

Throughout it all, Jimmy’s humor and instinct for seeking the light never failed him. One day I called him and asked how he was doing. “Not too well…To be or not to be: that is the question!,” he responded, before letting out a big laugh.

Shortly after turning 93, he exclaimed to me, "I'm way uptown now!" Then he asked, "How old are you?" "30", I told him. "Damn," he said. "You're not even at the park yet!,” before following it up with: “The thing about the Park is once you get in you never get out!” [Central Park begins at 59th Street and ends at 125th Street]

I’ll never forget the last time I saw him. We were standing at his doorway as I was about to leave his house. It was a beautiful, bright and totally clear-sky kind of day. As he opened the door for me to depart, he looked up at the blue sky and, with a big smile on his face, clasped his hands together and exclaimed, "Thank you God." He then turned back to me and said, "Sonny [Rollins] and I talk a lot about not fearing death. Sonny says that we did what we came here to do and that something better's coming." He then paused briefly before adding, "Man, I made it to 92. And I was the gangster of the family! My brother Percy was a Tuskegee Airman, and he only made it to 82."

A beautiful, powerful and real moment, Jimmy's gratitude was palpable, I could still feel it long after heading home - and I still do whenever I think of Jimmy today.

Without music, Jimmy and I would probably have never been brought together. While the “Jewish thing” brought us even closer, meeting special people like the incredible Jimmy Heath is just another example of why I’m so thankful to have been gifted the love of music.

To check out my full interview with Jimmy Heath, click here.

The Way Top of the List

I’m very lucky to have many things in my life to be thankful for, and I’m extremely grateful that music is at the way top of the list.

Many of you know that I grew up here in Atlanta but moved to New York City for college, grad school and a few years following. Often, during those years, I’d invite people over for a “no-phones music-listening party,” and usually received enthusiastic acceptances to my invitation. However, I came to expect one question to often follow that acceptance - not from everyone, but from many: “What will we do while the music’s on?”

I came to realize that because there isn't a visual component to listening to music, listening to music can’t be “the activity” to many, these days.

I began to ask friends and others about their music listening habits, and I came to realize that, sadly, for many, listening to music is really only a device people use so they're not bored on the way somewhere - or, more directly, a way to be distracted from being alone with oneself. This is sad because, to me, listening to music and paying attention to the music I’m listening to has been one of the most enriching things in my life – and, even if you don't play music, I think it can enrich yours similarly.

The first thing music brought into my life was beauty. There's a great drummer named Art Blakey who said, “Music washes away the dust of everyday life,” and that statement resonates deeply with me. Once I got into music, I felt that music had elevated my life somewhere beyond the ordinary. Nietzsche once said, “Without music, life would be a mistake.” I’ve always interpreted this as music is basically proof that life is not a mistake, and I totally agree. People often say that music is life, and vice versa. My love for music has brought so many beautiful sounds and people into my life - which have given meaning to so many things, including the non-musical.

Examples of how my love for music has brought meaning to so many things in my life will follow but, for this audience specifically, I love and want to quickly share the story of how I came to meet and befriend one of my heroes, the legendary pianist and vocalist Les McCann.

I was asked to open for him at New York’s Blue Note in 2012 and was already on-stage sound-checking when he entered the club. He was in a wheelchair at the time and was wheeled up to the stage, where we first met. It wasn’t a typical meeting though; he didn’t exactly greet me. Instead, he asked me to play him some blues. I was nervous. After all, what could I, a white, Jewish millennial offer Les, one of the greatest blues players ever? I did my best, trying to play it cool - and good, and not let fear enter my mind. After a minute or two, Les said, “Amen,” and I breathed a sigh of relief. When I finished playing Les asked my name.

“Joe Alterman,” I said.

“Alterman,” he said, before asking, “You a Rabbi?”              

“No,” I told him, through my laughter, “but I am a…”

“Hebrew?”, he asked.

Through my laughter again: “Yeah, you could call me a Hebrew.”

“Well, from now on, you’re my He-bro.” And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Shortly after the start of that beautiful friendship, Les asked me how much I practiced each day. I proudly told him 6 or 7 hours a day. His response? “Way too much!”

I was shocked. I never expected one of my hero pianists to tell me I was practicing too much. Confused, I asked him what he meant.

“You need to go out and live,” he said. “You need to be doing things so that you have something to sing about when you get to the piano.”

Another piano legend, Ramsey Lewis, gave me the confidence to be myself. I was once really nervous before a show and asked him if he ever got nervous. First, he told me that he doesn’t call it nerves; he calls it “professional anticipation." Second, he said, “No. I only knew that I could do what I could do the best that I could do it, so I did it, you know?”

The great pianist Don Friedman taught me about fulfillment. I studied with Don for my 4 undergraduate years at NYU, and then we lunched weekly for the following 5, before I moved back to Atlanta, and he sadly passed away. When Don and I first met, he was in his early 70s and I was an 18-year-old college freshman; I’d never met anyone who was so kind and calm, not bitter or egotistical in the least. And, more than anything, he just seemed so happy and fulfilled. I remember often thinking to myself: If making music, my life's pursuit, can make me feel like that when I'm older, that's what I want to do. Just by being who he is, I learned that true success is internal; I've never met anyone who seemed as happy and content as Don.

The great journalist Nat Hentoff really impressed on me how dedicated and committed you have to be to really do this. He would tell me about how Charles Mingus, the legendary bassist, who was dying from ALS and couldn't even move his hands, would call Nat late at night and sing to him melodies that he had just composed. Nat, in fact, was so dedicated to his craft that, after he could no longer write or hear, he would dictate articles to his son. In fact, when I called to wish him a Happy 90th Birthday, he called me back the next day, apologizing for missing me on his actual birthday. He told me that, “For my birthday present, I just wanted a day alone to write.” One day in passing he said something else that I’ll never forget: “Why do something that doesn't let you be you?”

When I was nervous about what leaving New York could do to my career, Ramsey Lewis encouraged me to move home. “Go where you’ll be happy,” he said. “And it will reflect in your music.”

It’s important to Les McCann that I understand that my gift is not just at the piano. “The piano is just a tool,” he often tells me. “Without that piano, without those fingers, you would still be hearing music. That's the part I'm trying to get you to see. You've gotta hear what's in you.”

Growing up, all I wanted to do was to develop a “New York sound” and do whatever I could to sound like these heroes of mine. But in getting to know these heroes - with whom I shared this dream - they all impressed on me one crucial fact: I’d never sound like them because we haven’t lived the same life. But I have my own life and my story, which they all found pretty cool, so why not lean into that? And why try to sound like I’m from New York when I’m from down south? Lean into that, too!

I once had an assignment in college where I was to write a melody over a series of chord changes. Technically, the note I wanted to write over one chord clashed and made no sense theoretically. I wasn’t sure what to do. Afraid of turning in what I was honestly hearing and getting a bad grade on the assignment, I called Les. “You need to go work on a farm,” he told me. I didn’t understand… “This shit doesn’t matter,” he continued. “If you hear it, it’s good.” He was reminding me that I needed to trust myself - musically and beyond.

For me, music truly is life - and music has made my life what it is today. Everything that makes me who I am stems from my original love of listening to music.

For years now, I’ve been reading articles about various radio stations cutting songs at the two-minute mark because they don’t believe their listeners have the attention span to listen to anything longer anymore. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shared a favorite part of a song with someone; the 9:27 mark for example - and they fast forward to the 9:15 mark, not realizing that it’s the 9-minute, 27-second buildup that makes that moment so special.

This is sad to me because active and attentive music listening is not only such a wonderful, uplifting and elevating experience, but that simple act has led me to so many incredible lessons, opportunities and relationships that I never could have anticipated and for which I’m so thankful - and whether or not you’re a musician or a casual fan, attentive music listening is sure to bring many rewards to your life, too!

This listening can happen at home or at a live show. As we approach Hanukkah, I am thankful that just as the holiday ends, I'll be able to share the stage with another of my mentors – legendary tenor saxophonist Houston Person. On December 16 at 8PM, I'll be performing a holiday concert with him. I grew up practicing along with Houston's recordings pretending that I was the pianist on the record, dreaming of one day playing with him. I'm very lucky that that dream did eventually come true (here's a clip of us a few years back at Lincoln Center) and am really excited for this special hometown concert. Houston is a bonafide jazz legend, having recorded over 80 albums and performed with the likes of Lou Rawls, Horace Silver, Lena Horne, Ron Carter, George Benson and many others. Hope to see you there!

A Fine Romance: Jews & American Music

-by Joe Alterman, Executive Director

In my opinion, one of the most important moments in American history took place in 1903 when, 17 years after its dedication, “The New Colossus,” a poem written by Jewish-activist Emma Lazarus was installed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. A gift from France, it was, until that very moment, just a symbol of friendship between the two nations. 

A lot happened in that moment. As Ben Sidran writes in “There Was A Fire: Jews, Music & The American Dream:”

Suddenly the statue was no longer about two economic powers; it was a powerful welcome to the international outsider, a beacon of hope for the poor and disenfranchised everywhere…Emma’s poem had recast the discussion: America was now to be the homeland for all those in exile, the poorest of the poor; it was about the opportunity to change; it was about social justice. In short, it was about the Jewish narrative. No longer just a former British colony, not simply a remnant of the French or Spanish or Dutch colonial expansion, but a new America; the promised land for a people who traditionally traveled with little more than the skin on their bones and the ideas in their heads.

Just as the poem by this Jewish-American changed the whole idea of America as a whole, first and second generation Jewish-Americans did the same for American music. 

There’s a famous scene in American music where Louis Armstrong was in the middle of a recording session and accidentally drops his lyric sheet. Unable to grab the sheet off the ground while the tape was still running, he had to think of something to do or say in that moment - and alas, scat singing, the sound of musical, yet seemingly random syllables, was invented on the spot. 

Many are aware of the important role the Karnofksys, a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in New Orleans, played in Armstrong’s early years. Armstrong worked for this religious Jewish family that spent evenings davening in their kitchen and singing Russian lullabies to their baby; he wrote that they “instilled in me singing from the heart.” Most, however, are unaware of the inspiration Armstrong drew from this family during that crucial moment in the recording studio: Armstrong shared with his friend Cab Calloway that the source of his scat singing came “from the Jews rockin’,” referring to the Karnofsky’s praying in their kitchen. However, Armstrong never spoke about this in public because he was worried that people would think he was making fun of Jews praying, which he wasn’t.

So, the seemingly random syllables of scat weren’t so random after all. The inspiration behind this sound came from Lithuania and is just one example of the many sounds from foreign lands that inspired and/or became a crucial part of American music. 

Meanwhile, in upstate New York, Armstrong’s music resonated with an up-and-coming jazz-loving composer named Chaim Arluck. Arluck, the son of a cantor who got his music education in the choir at his father’s synagogue, dropped out of high school to become a performer and changed his name, combining the surnames of both of his parents to become Harold Arlen. Arlen would go on to compose countless American classics, including the song that the National Endowment for the Arts ranked #1 on their Songs of the 20th Century list, “Over The Rainbow.’ Despite the parallels of this story and that of The Jazz Singer, Arlen’s father was very encouraging of his son’s foray into the world of non-religious, popular music - so much so that he often sang prayers to the tunes of Harold’s melodies in shul. 

Interestingly, there was actually something familial that drew Arlen to Armstrong and to jazz. “I don’t know how the hell to explain it,” he said. “But I hear in jazz and in gospel my father singing.” 

Again, from Sidran’s “There Was A Fire:”

He claimed his father, Samuel, was “the most delicious improviser I ever heard,” and he recalled an incident from his youth when he and his father were listening to a new Louis Armstrong recording and Samuel became agitated and demanded to know where the trumpet player had gotten a particular phrase he was playing. Chaim explained it was a not uncommon “riff,” but his father maintained it was exactly something he himself had improvised during a recent service at the synagogue. Harold often repeated that he heard a lot of Louis Armstrong in his father’s cantillation.

While Arlen’s father was the cantor at Syracuse’s Temple Adath Yeshurun, his sound came from his birthplace in the Vilna section of Poland - and is the same sound that resonated with his son and made him fall in love with jazz and Black musics. When Arlen moved to Manhattan, he spent much of his time in Harlem, soaking up the sounds of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, getting to know and sitting in with the musicians whenever he could. 

Coincidentally, at the same time Harold Arlen was falling in love with Black music, an aspiring performer and actor, a young African-American named Paul Robeson was attending the synagogue services of another New York cantor - composer Jerome Kern’s immigrant grandfather - and falling in love with Jewish sounds. Robeson commented that “from the songs preached or spoken by Negroes in their religious life, and in their deep trouble under slavery, it is only a step to the beautiful songs of the Jewish people which are sung or chanted in their synagogues.” Robeson went on to perform many Jewish songs throughout his career and once commented that “The Hassidic Chant of Levi Isaac (of Berditchev),” was “a kaddish that is close to my heart.”

It’s hard to explain just what is the phenomena that has drawn so many music-loving American Jews to Black music, and vice versa, but perhaps we may find the answer in the “blue note” that both cultures share. Unlike most musics, the goal in the music of both of these cultures is not precision - as it is in European Classical Music, for example. Rather, the goal here is to tell the truth by any means necessary. Hitting the note right at its center is not the only way to hit it; sliding into or out of the note is more than okay and is actually a defining part of the music. Making use of the space in between the notes actually gives the songs and the performance of them more soul and depth. Don't believe me? Try playing the sheet music to any blues or cantorial piece exactly as written – you'll feel something missing, and this is it.

I’m reminded of a great Bob Dylan quote. "Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, 'Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.'"  

The relationship between the African-American and Jewish communities is very important to the creation of American popular music. One crucial player in this story is another cantor’s son, Irving Berlin, whose family immigrated to America from Russia to escape Cossack pogroms when Irving was 5 years old. Much like Armstrong was influenced by the Jewish people around him, Berlin and so many other first and second generation Jewish-American composers were influenced by the African-Americans around them; most immigrant groups coming to America at that time identified with the WASPs, but the Jews identified with black culture, and often lived in black neighborhoods, which were mostly segregated from the white population.  

Over the next 30 years, Berlin’s impact on American music was huge. Check this 1925 letter that composer Jerome Kern (“The Way You Look Tonight,” “All The Things You Are,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man”) wrote to famed drama critic Alexander Woolcott: 

It was at a dinner in London, and I was asked what, in my opinion, were the chief characteristics of the American nation. I replied that the average United States citizen was perfectly epitomized in Irving Berlin’s music. He doesn’t attempt to stuff the public’s ears with pseudo-original ultra-modernism, but he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time, and in turn, gives these impressions back to the world—simplified, clarified, glorified. In short, what I really want to say, my dear Woollcott, is that Irving Berlin has no place in American music, HE IS AMERICAN MUSIC.

How did Russian-born Berlin, in 32 short years, become, as Kern stated, “American Music?” For one, it was his stated intention - “They [other American songwriters] write imitation European music which doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “Ignorant as I am, from their standpoints, I’m doing something they all refuse to do: I’m writing American music.” However, there was something more. Again, from Sidran (and please note that “rag” or “ragtime” was the syncopated pop-music of its day): 

By 1911, Berlin had discovered that one could rag a song by syncopating its words without syncopating its music, by shifting to the weaker beat and forgetting correct grammar, relying instead on how people on the street actually talked (the ongoing rush of the colloquial). In America, then, we can propose that while blacks initially provided rhythmic swing to the music, the Jews, because of their familiarity with and empathy for a heightened populism, provided the lyrical or grammatical swing, a form of American English that the dominant (white) culture could easily accept. It is not so much that the Jews dressed up black American speech; rather, they translated it into the American mother tongue in a way that could be understood and appreciated by the average man on the street. They didn’t make it “safe” so much as they made it both personal and universal...if white people taught African slaves how to speak English, it was equally true that Africans helped teach everyone how to speak American.

So, yes, the Jewish-born Irving Berlin played a very important role in helping make American music American, but what, if anything, does his being born Jewish have to do with this? After all, Berlin was the composer of “White Christmas,” changed his name from Israel Beilen to Irving Berlin, is quoted saying his music was American and had nothing to do with his being Jewish, and the only song he wrote with any hint towards Judaism was called “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars.” 

I believe that his Judaism actually does have a lot to do with it, and in fact, it can be found in “White Christmas,” which begins with the words, “I’m dreaming…”

Not unlike the song “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” which was written by the Jewish Albert Von Tilzer, the younger brother of Berlin’s first employer, and contains the words “I don’t care if I never get back,” many of these Jewish-composed American songs contain a quality of what Sidran refers to as “longing for belonging.” These first generation Jewish-American composers came from countries where, as Jews, they were often not allowed citizenship and were deeply proud to be American citizens - and this “longing to belong” is reflected in much of the Jewish-composed American music of the time. 

Important to note is that while these songs all “long to belong,” they’re usually told from the point of view of someone who doesn’t quite belong, from someone on the outside looking in, observing. Someone on the outside who understands the inside and knows what’s there but isn’t quite a part of it.

To me, the story of the Jewish imprint on American music is the not the story of Jewish composers shunning their Judaism to become more American; rather, it’s the story of defining and expanding what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be Jewish in America and what it means to be an American. It’s not simply making a list of names of Jewish-born composers and celebrating that; it’s exploring and seeking out the Jewish part of each story, which, like the music and the nation itself, is ever-evolving - and that’s what makes it so beautiful. 

Case in point: one day a young, Jewish wannabe composer meets with Irving Berlin to interview to be his secretary. Berlin rejects him, telling him that this youngster would never be content to work for a self-taught composer of popular songs. This young composer then interviews with Yiddish composer Shalom Secunda, who rejects him for being “too much American, too little Jew.” This young composer, George Gershwin, was forced to find his way and, like Berlin and Arlen, forever changed music in America - and throughout the world. In fact, his “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” (the opening notes of which are same as the haftorah blessing) became the radio theme song for the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. 

I’m reminded of what recently departed music-industry legend George Wein once told me, “If you grew up Jewish, and you went to Yom Kippur, you never forget it. It’s part of your life. It doesn’t mean you’re thinking about being Jewish all the time. That’s in your soul, and you’re hearing it different from how the gentile is hearing it. They’re listening to it intellectually; you’re listening to it emotionally.”

Or, as pianist Bill Charlap shared with me when we discussed the Jewish imprint on American music, “It belongs to the world and it’s all about celebrating the essence of our own culture and realizing that to have that is a gift, and as Dizzy Gillespie said to Phil Woods, ‘You can’t steal a gift.’”

• Irving Berlin
• immigration
• blue note
• Harold Arlen
• Paul Robeson
• Louis Armstrong
• jazz
• Ben Sidran
• American music
• George Gershwin
• Jerome Kern
• Jewish