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.”