Jazz88’s Peter Solomon speaks with trumpeter Frank London about the history of klezmer music in America and 40 years of genre bending klezmer interpretations and collaborations by the Klezmatics. London was a founding member of the Grammy-award winning ensemble. The Klezmatics play the Dakota Tuesday night (May 27th) with Minneapolis-based ensemble Red Thread. Find details about the eprformance here.
TRANSCRIPT:
PETER SOLOMON – I’m Peter Solomon. You’re listening to the morning show on Minnesota’s jazz station, 88.5. Klezmer music is the traditional instrumental dance music of Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews. For almost 40 years, the Grammy winning ensemble, the Klezmatics, have reimagined the tradition through fusions of sounds from Latin music, Balkan, African, Middle Eastern and jazz traditions as well. The Klezmatics are appearing at the Dakota tonight, and so I’m broadcasting a conversation with founding member and trumpeter, Frank London. Our conversation begins with Frank London reminiscing about how he originally became interested in klezmer music.
FRANK LONDON – It was in the late 1970s I ended up in Boston, studying at the New England Conservatory, studying African American music. And at that moment in my life, my goal was to immerse myself in every possible music tradition I could find. And so, you know, it was like have trumpet, will travel. I was playing in a Haitian band, Volo Volo. I was playing in a salsa band, La Orquesta Pabon. I was playing Balkan music. I was doing Brazilian stuff. I was doing jazz. I was doing free improvisation, avant garde, just just everything, because I just needed to experience all the world’s musical treasures.
There was, and still is, 45 years later, a teacher at the New England Conservatory named Hankus Netsky, and he had a background in this klezmer music. His family, I think his great uncle, or his grandparents, had had a klezmer band in Philadelphia at the early part of the 20th century, and he put together a concert to play this music, and he asked me and a bunch of other students to be part of it, and that was my introduction to klezmer music. Out of that one concert, we formed the band, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which still exists in Boston, 45 (or) 50 years later. And I’ve kept with the music and expanded my knowledge of it. And so that’s the basic backstory.
SOLOMON – So how would you explain klezmer music if you kind of encapsulate the definition for somebody who’s never heard it before?
LONDON – Absolutely. I mean, in a way, it’s too easy, because it doesn’t actually give the whole story. But here you go. Klezmer music is the instrumental music of the Eastern European Ashkenazic Yiddish speaking Jews. There’s your definition. Having said that, having said that anyone who knows anything about this music at all knows that most klezmer bands also sing songs in Yiddish. Technically, that’s Yiddish vocal music. It’s not klezmer. Musically, it’s often the same exact thing, except with words. So even though the definition of klezmer is instrumental music, when we talk about klezmer music, now we’re talking about the instrumental and vocal music of these people. And I guess the other thing to throw in for the person who really knows nothing about it is that it was originally a functional music for playing at community events, especially weddings. It’s known as a wedding music, but also at other community events, holidays and things, and that the music also, if we expand the definition, it was used for Yiddish theater. So it was a theater music. It still is a theater music, a concert music and a functional music for dancing, for ceremonies.
SOLOMON – To what extent is there a commonality between klezmer and jazz?
LONDON – Almost none. I say that because people have called klezmer Jewish jazz. The answer is first answer is none. I mean jazz is based on the idea of improvisation. Klezmer is essentially a music without improvisation. Of course, I’m overstating every extreme. There’s a lot of fully composed jazz, and there is some improvisation, but essentially it’s different. Klezmer is much more a folk music like Irish music, where you play tunes and you play tunes like that. That being said, Jewish musicians came to America starting in the 1880s East European Jewish musicians, and by 20 years later, by the turn of the 20th century, they encountered the musicians who were playing the early jazz. And the thing about musicians is we listen to each other, we like each other, and they were playing a lot of the same instruments. So that starts it, you know, you had the clarinets and your trumpets, and whether it was a tuba or a bass instrument and a drum. So they started hearing each other play, and a lot of the same musicians started playing in both kinds of bands. Of course, they also played in other bands. They played in symphony orchestras, you know, I’m saying so there was overlap. And as with anything else, there is some overlap repertoire between the two that happened in America, not in Europe. And I could point to specific examples, whether it’s Lieutenant Joseph Frankel’s 1914 recording of the Yiddisher Shimmy and the Yiddisher Charleston. Cab Calloway doing “Utt Da Zay Sang the Tailor.” But these are kind of novelty numbers, really. It’s It’s musicians respecting each other and having fun with music, but they’re really two different musics and two different traditions. But that did change, starting in the 1950s when certain people started actually consciously trying to create a fusion.
So it’s not that klezmer is Jewish jazz, but starting in the 50s, you had people starting to make a crossover, there’s a record of Jewish jazz By Terry Gibbs’s brother, Terry Gibbs, the vibes player. His brother was a wedding musician, a Jewish wedding musician, and Terry was a jazz vibes player. So they put it together and they made an album. I started really doing this serious in the 1980s you know. So nowadays, there is a real connection between the two, but it’s acontemporary thing. It’s not essential to either music.
SOLOMON – That brings me to the question about the specific group that you’re we’re talking about today. Can you talk about the formation of this band (the Klezmatics) forty years ago? I understand that the principal players met in the in Greenwich Village. Is that right? And can you talk about how it came together?
LONDON – The Klezmatics came together totally by chance, a person who none of us have any idea where he is now or if he’s alive, or what he’s doing, a person put an ad in The Village Voice (the Greenwich Village newspaper) saying, looking for musicians to play klezmer music. And a bunch of different people responded to that ad, including myself, for different reasons. I had just moved from Boston to New York, and I already knew klezmer from the Klezmer Conservatory Band, so I said, “Great, here’s another way to make some money.” I’ll find out. And then we brought different people into the band. So David Licht, the original Klezmatics drummer., he had just moved to New York, and someone gave him my name as someone to play Klezmer. I said, “Great, come on down. We’re rehearsing, etc, etc.” It was kind of really ad hoc. And then the guy who put the initial ad in after we played a couple of gigs disappeared. So the guy leaved, we’re sitting there as a band, and we’re like, “Yeah, we like doing this. Let’s make a band.” Then we gave ourselves a name, and the rest is 40 years of history.
SOLOMON – Now the Klezmatics are known for some unusual collaborations. I can’t think of everything. I know there was one critically acclaimed recording setting the lyrics of Woody Guthrie to, you know, to new musical settings and stuff. And you’ve collaborated with musicians all over the world. So it seems like the point of the band is to be expansive with klezmer and to combine it with other things. Can you talk about that, and is there any friction, like with anybody that has a desire just to kind of stick to the traditional stuff?
LONDON – I would say that from the very beginning, and I got to admit that at the very beginning, we were not very good at klezmer. We got a lot better. And we got a lot better by doing all the things that you have to do to be part of a tradition. We studied old recordings. We studied with old masters and learned with them. We did our homework. We transcribed music. A lot of our early recordings are simply old recordings that we’ve transcribed. So on one hand, we wanted to be a quote, unquote, traditional band. And actually, I would say by about three or four years into it, maybe five or six, we actually got pretty good at doing that, and we still do that. That’s still part of who we are. We got a very big gig near the beginning. We were formed in 86 and by 88 we got a huge gig to play at a festival in Europe, and we were like, You know what? This is a big opportunity. What is our identity? And we weren’t yet into this whole idea of, we’re going to mix it with this and that that wasn’t the point. But we made three choices that defined us. We decided, first of all, we were not doing this for nostalgia, and we wrote off nostalgia as one of the reasons. Because sometimes you would play at that point for the older folks, and they would say, oh, play this song. Oh, play that song. I remember hearing it in the Yiddish theater they played at my wedding. And I’m like, You know what? That’s all very well and good, but we’re trying to play music that we want to play. So that was the first choice. We played music that we cared about, not for nostalgia. Secondly, and connected to that, we weren’t composing any new music yet. So in a sense, it was all like found objects, to use an art term. And so we decided, well, we’re only going to sing songs where we actually believe in the lyrics, like we haven’t written our own songs yet, so we’re going to find songs where we believe in the lyrics. So another reason we didn’t come out and do “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” or “Romania. Romania.” I mean, they’re great songs. They’re fantastic. They’re not us. That’s not musically us, and that’s not lyrically us, as we used to say somewhat insultingly, is like we don’t sing about how great things were in Romania, where you could dance with someone else’s wife. That’s not exactly, yeah. So we found the Yiddish socialist song tradition, and it’s like, yes, this we can, we can go with
We found drinking songs and party songs. We said, Yes, we believe in drinking and partying. So we built our repertoire of songs we believed in, not played for nostalgia’s sake, but for our living sake. And maybe those were the main two guiding principles. And I think we were pretty much from nearly the beginning, open. Maybe because musicians like me were in the band. Maybe if me and one of the other guys at the beginning weren’t in the band, it might not have been so open. But since we had seriously multicultural musical backgrounds. It made sense, and it’s just so much fun, you know, I mean our very well. Our first album, we was a collaboration between the Klezmatis and another band of mine and Matt Darriau’s called Les Miserables Brass Band. That’s a different story. But even on the second album, we had a guest, Mahmoud Fadel, who’s a Nubian percussionist living in Berlin. We recorded in Berlin, and it made sense like he was on the same record label we were. He got introduced to us by the record label. And we were experimenting with wsome Arabic music rhythms and how they in fact worked with the Jewish music he was there. We’re like, Great, let’s do something together, you know. So I think it’s just an expression of openness, and it’s led us in interesting and unexpected directions. And that’s like you mentioned, the Woody Guthrie record, we won a Grammy for that. There’s almost no klezmer music on that record. There’s really it’s a klezmatics record, but it’s not a klezmer record. And we’re making a new record now, and this is the first one where actually the point of the record is collaborations with other artists from different traditions. So we’re working with a Crimean Tatar improvising guitar player. We’re working with a gospel singer and a gospel chorus. We’re working with an all female Colombian Drumming and singing ensemble. You know, we’re consciously doing that, so I basically don’t care about what other people say. I love to play straight klezmer with no improvisation and no mixing of anything. And that’s a great fun. And the Klezmatics Do that, and then we do this also. Why limit ourselves?
SOLOMON – Can you tell me who’s going to be playing with you on Tuesday at the Dakota and what kind of repertoire Are you going to be performing?
LONDON – Excellent. It’s a group called Red Thread. I don’t know if it’s led by Sarah Larson, who’s a phenomenal singer, or if he’s just part of the group, but she’s put, you know, the the Yiddish community is tiny, and everyone knows each other, so Sarah has been to different Klez camps and Klez events and things like that. And we know her and and this is our manager actually suggested this. He said, You know, you guys are doing all these collaborations. Why don’t you find someone in each town you go to to work with? So it’s kind of fun.
So Sarah is great, and you know, they’ll be joining us on some of our tunes. I think she sent us some of her music to learn. By nature, it’s a little bit rough and ready. You know, we’re gonna get together, get into Minneapolis, go to a sound, check and work with them, but it’ll be fun. She’s great. We know her.
SOLOMON – Is there anything else you want to say in advance of your gig on Tuesday? Well,
LONDON – We’re really looking forward to it. We used to play Minneapolis more frequently, so we’ve been there a number of times, but it’s been quite a while. So we’re looking forward to coming back. We hope to see people come out. You know, I’m hoping that it’s a mixture of people who know the band and haven’t heard us and are excited, and people don’t know us all, and let them get their first taste of the klezmatics.
SOLOMON – Frank, London, it’s a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you.
LONDON – It’s really great. And have a good day.
