Henry Sapoznik
Kapelye
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Henry Sapoznik is the author of The Compleat Klezmer and Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (Scribner, 2000), winner of the 2000 ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Scholarship. He founded the seminal klezmer band Kapelye, and the Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he was its first director (1982-1994). Sapoznik is a Grammy-nominated producer-performer of historical and new recordings of Yiddish instrumental and vocal music, and a consultant on numerous documentary films, including Aviva Kempner's The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. He is co-founder and executive director of Living Traditions, which sponsors the annual Jewish cultural event KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk-Arts Program. Sapoznik is a contributor to the New Grove's Dictionary of American Music, the Journal of American Folklore, and the definitive Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United States,1893-1942.
Most recently Sapoznik produced The Yiddish Radio Project (YRP), a documentary series aired on National Public Radio's All Things Considered (Spring 2002; the episodes are also available online using Real Audio). Related to the radio project, he is reissue co-producer of Sony Legacy's new four-CD collection of archival Yiddish, klezmer and related American popular music (released April 30, 2002). Extensively annotated by Sapoznik, the collection, rescued from the vaults of Columbia Records, includes:
Various Artists: From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 (two-CD set), a hand-picked survey of the music of Yiddish theatre, composers, singers, musicians, cantors and comics, and remarkable crossover covers by stars as diverse as Mildred Bailey, Irving Berlin, Cab Calloway, Eddie Cantor, Xavier Cugat, Slim Gaillard, Benny Goodman, Al Jolson, Gene Krupa, Peggy Lee, Ted Lewis and Sophie Tucker.
Abe Schwartz: The Klezmer King, an anthology of rare tracks by the Romanian Jewish immigrant fiddler, composer and bandleader who defined the modern klezmer sound
Dave Tarras and The Musiker Brothers: Tanz!, a reissue of the definitive 1956 fusion of Yiddish music, jazz and popular American song -- long out of print -- by three of the era's finest klezmer clarinetists and reed players.
PopMatters: What are your first musical memories? Was there ever another path besides music in your life?
Henry Sapoznik: My first musical memories are of singing in the choir at age six to accompany my late father, who was a cantor. Though I wanted to eventually do other things -- cartoonist, astronomer, archaeologist, chef -- I think music was always my fate.
PM: In the spirit of Kaddish, can you share a few words on your father, Zindel Sapoznik, and his influence?
HS: My father was the last of his kind, and an orphan in time. He should have lived in the previous century, when his great art would've been revered. He was an old fashioned khazn who learned what he knew as a meshoyrer under the previous generation of great khazonim but was lost in modern America and could never adjust to the demands of the contemporary world. Worse yet, when old fashioned khazones went out in favor of "congregational singing", he was abandoned by his congregations and not honored for his great gifts. It was a sad end, and really sad was that he died before my Mysteries of the Sabbath: Classic Cantorial Recordings 1907-47 [Yazoo, 1995] came out, where he was "re-issued" along with the other greats, like his former boss Gershon Sirota. That was my final testament to him.
PM: You're the son Holocaust survivors, and in 1979 you helped found the klezmer group Kapelye. But you're also a former ethnomusicology student who once studied and played old-timey music. What got you into ethnomusicology, where did you study, and what were your music interests then? How do these rather different sets of experiences intersect in your life, in what seems to have become your life's work?
HS: I got into City University of New York in ethnomusicology around 1973 after kicking around studying fiddle music with Tommy Jarrell down in North Carolina. I have always been a big fan of "back stories" and felt that ethno would enable me to put the music I loved into a more global context. The only music I was interested in at that time was old-time music, but there were no instructors who specialized in it, so I had to rig a course of study that allowed me to learn from a variety of instructors outside the CUNY system. It eventually worked, granting me a degree in 1977. Though I was implored to stay and do a masters, I was much too anxious to go out into the real world and apply what I'd learned, which in truth was not all that much. I'm still not sure what my "life's work" is; I'd like to think that whatever I do next will be new, fun, challenging, exciting and well paying.
PM: I've listened to the Legacy recordings, read the album notes, seen the Yiddish Radio Project websites, NPR's and your own, and heard the radio documentary. This is a huge project. From the description, it sounds as though it unfolded almost organically over time as you followed your interests. Surely it wasn't as easy as it sounds.
HS: You're quite right that nothing is as easy as it sounds, but then again I do tend to be pretty single-minded and persistent, and have always taken the hard route to pursue my interests. When I started the klezmer work there were only a handful of others interested in it; when I began radio research there was, and continues to be, no one else. I'm not sure I ever had any other goals in mind, shy of the time I wanted to quit music and open a restaurant in Washington State. My stubborn streak and demonic attention to my goals allowed me to keep a fire burning under the Tanz! project since I first suggested it to CBS in 1982. It only took 20 years for it to happen. What stands out for me about the YRP is the fact that it happened at all. It became a far more expansive and detailed overview than I ever would have dreamed given the years of disappointment and frustration with funders and media outlets. It has taken seven years to make it reach the airwaves, and I consider myself incredibly lucky.
PM: Any comments on the anti-Semitic response to the YRP broadcasts among some NPR listeners?
HS: Several months before the series aired I sent an e-mail around to my cohorts at Sound Portraits and to the folks at NPR, tipping them off that we'd be bombed by both pro- and anti-Zionists, even the sprouting of good old-fashioned Jew-haters. Sure enough, it happened, but NPR was shocked at the vehemence of the racist language their supposedly well-educated upscale audience was spouting. I was less shocked or hurt by the racism, and more touched by the equal number of positive and supportive mail (mostly from non-Jews). That inspired me much more than the racist mail depressed me.
PM: What can you tell me about the YRP documentary film?
HS: I'm working with a filmmaker, the same fellow who produced A Tickle in the Heart, to make a documentary about both Yiddish radio and the tour we recently had. It will be partially a performance film and partially a set documentary. Funding is not set, so I'm back at the bottom of the mountain again. Besides the film I hope a museum exhibit and a book also will come out of these materials, but I can't guarantee lightning will strike twice in the same place.
[Note: A Tickle in the Heart documents the life of the legendary Epstein Brothers Klezmer Orchestra, and drummer Julie Epstein, its last surviving member. Epstein is the winner of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Folk Arts Award (1998), and is currently with the Yiddish Radio All-Star Band assembled by Sapoznik as part of the YRP tour.]
PM: What's the story with the YRP website's Yid-O-Matic English translator? And as the voice of Yid-O-Matic, what is David Rogow's role? [See "Related Links" for The Yiddish Radio Project.]
HS: The "Yid-O-Matic" was our attempt to create a software system which would allow non-Yiddish speakers to experience the beauty and musical cadences of Yiddish without having to endure dubbing. We actually beta-tested "Y-O-M" for Real Audio, who was looking for an instant language-translation system; they were very encouraging. The deal with Rogow -- and the other veteran Yiddish performers in the YRP series and on The Yiddish Word of the Day -- is that we want every listener to have the thrill and privilege to hear the voices of these great, enduring Yiddish personalities. The more people hear the words and encounter the culture in the voices of those who lived through it, the closer they too become to the culture itself.
PM: Speaking of culture, earlier you commented that besides music you're "not sure I ever had any other goals in mind, shy of the time I wanted to quit music and open a restaurant in Washington State". So music -- the ideal -- wins out over food -- the material -- by a slim margin? I can identify with that, but I have to ask: What kind of restaurant? Do you still like to cook? Favorite cuisines?
HS: The restaurant where I learned my love of food was in Brussels, and I even enjoyed part-ownership of it from the late 1980s to 1995. I truly loved the process of preparation and the fact that in French kitchen argot a stove is referred to as a "piano". I still love French cuisine and still cook it, along with Asian and many of the recipes I learned from my mother.
PM: Tell me something about your mother, who has a cameo on the introductory episode of the Yiddish Radio Project NPR broadcast series. She seems right at home in front of the microphone -- and inquiring gourmets want to know, what are her favorite recipes?
HS: My mom is a natural, smart, quietly funny, a real people person. She's had a hard life, ripped as she was from her beloved home town of Rovne [Poland] during World War Two, losing her family to the Nazis. She has faced what life has thrown at her with dignity and a serene good grace. She is exactly as she sounds on the radio series: a kind and wonderful person full of wonder and charm. She's a great cook although she would humbly insist she's nothing compared to her own mother: her greatest dishes (aside from all of them?): her gefilte fish is manna from heaven, shnitzl, stuffed cabbage, yoyekh mit lokshn -- chicken soup with noodles... God! I'm getting hungry just thinking about this! -- and her bilkelekh, little biscuits she makes during Passover. Yow!
PM: You're at the tail end of a national multimedia tour to promote the YRP. Any reflections on the experience, audience reactions, new insights into the Yiddish radio legacy?
HS: I am really amazed at the vitality and scope that old Yiddish radio had. It was the combination of everything else that was happening in the Yiddish world: journalism, music, theater, comedy, literature, drama. All rolled into one alive, sparkling medium and just as present as the day it was first broadcast. Nothing happening today, not klezmer music, not Yiddish theater, can hold a candle to these old broadcasts for cutting through to what was on people's minds and giving a contemporary audience the feel and passion that infused the Jewish world at the time. Audiences across America have been moved to tears in ways I never saw in all my years of playing with Kapelye. The preservation of the human voice is a powerful tool, and it shows that people want to experience the real thing, not some second-generation photocopy of it. I'm even more amazed that no one ever thought of working with these materials before. They are far more precious and meaningful than my beloved old 78s, in that they are unedited, unfiltered and unselfconscious, a preferred way of evaluating the values of any society and what was important to it.
PM: The tour included performances by The Yiddish Radio All-Star Band, whose members you've presumably known for some time. How did they come together for the project? What has it been like to work with these players?
HS: They came together because of Pete Sokolow: my teacher, my guide, my inspiration and partner. He is the most important person in the entire klezmer world. Period. No one else can even come close. He introduced me to all the old guys, and they added something real, precious and unique to the klezmer world, and to the tour. It was a thrill and honor to have them working together, and it produced some of the finest klezmer music ever heard. I can't tell you enough about how wonderfully professional, kind and forthcoming they all were. I dubbed them "The Buena Mitzva Social Club". They loved doing it because the current klezmer scene has seen fit to go off on bizarre fusion tangents which ignore and push aside these great players. No one hires them anymore, instead they salivate over anyone who plays klezmer mixed with some other obscure and culturally atypical genre. I felt it was a small victory that these musicians were honored and spotlighted and given their due as the true giants of klezmer music.
PM: Regarding the Sony Legacy recordings, specifically From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950, I appreciate the way you juxtapose different cuts to illustrate the musical connections and crossovers between Jewish music, jazz and Tin Pan Alley. Earlier you said, "When I started the klezmer work there were only a handful of others interested in it; when I began radio research there was, and continues to be, no one else". But are there figures among the people you've met and interviewed over the years who helped you to conceptualize the bigger picture, to "put it all together"? People who stand out as mentors, guides, savants who pointed the way, helped you make the connections manifest specifically in the Sony Legacy releases?
HS: Pete Sokolow, of course. And my co-producer Michael Brooks, who is a genius savant, and a generous and open-hearted giant.
PM: As Avenue A illustrates, blacks and Jews began listening to, borrowing from, parodying, and thus re-energizing each other's traditions in the United States almost as soon as recorded music came into existence. What's your assessment of the current state of what has been a critical historical musical relationship, Theodore Bikel's collaboration with people like Willie Dixon, Odetta and Bernice Johnson Reagon, for example, or the Klezmer Conservatory-Don Byron-Frank London-Mickey Katz-Slim Gaillard axis, if you will?
HS: I'm not convinced that this is currently a "critical historical musical relationship". I think Don Byron, brilliant player and even more talented self-promoter, is an anomaly who used klezmer to make himself seem a far more open-minded and "courageous" player than he is. The fact that he has pointedly and dramatically distanced himself from klezmer shows that it was only a way station on his way to play other musics more meaningful to him. I think he learned just enough about the klezmer sound to make his way into it, and then superimposed his own sound aesthetic on top of that, with no regard for the melodic-harmonic and modal underpinning of the music.
PM: Given that you were limited to material from the Columbia vaults for the Sony recording project, I'd guess there are probably many more artists and songs you would have liked to include on Avenue A.
HS: The great cantor Alter Yechiel Karniol, the Abe Schwartz performances of "Tantz, Tantz Yiddelach", "National Hora #2", and "Firn Di Mechutonim Aheim", all of whose metal parts were missing. The "metals" are the stampers which press out the discs.
[Note: Most of the metal stampers were discarded during the Depression or melted down in the war effort. But when Sapoznik and co-producer Michael Brooks searched the Columbia vaults at Sony Music in 2001, they found stampers for nearly all the tracks included on the Legacy titles, and were able to press fresh 78s that, when processed with today's digital technology, produced sounds sharper that the originals.]
PM: How do you know of those tunes: via discographies, old timers' memories, or rare 78s still in existence?
HS: I know of the large majority of records issued by having had the honor of working with Dick Spottswood on his historic seven-volume discography, Ethnic Music on Records, where I headed the research of the Jewish discs. I also know about the discs from my 13 years in the trenches as the director at the YIVO [Institute for Jewish Research] sound archives.
PM: About the story of finding the "lost" stampers in the Sony vaults, can you describe your feelings at the time? Or was it only after you were able to reproduce the sounds they had preserved that the magnitude of the discovery hit you?
HS: Having worked on Spottswood's discography, I treated the listings in the book as a kind of "wish list", an uber-mail order catalog which promised that, because the records were issued once, that they may be out there somewhere. I hoped that someday I would have the opportunity to be allowed into the vaults to search for the original discs. My chance finally came seven years ago when Arthur Levy, Executive Producer at Sony, got the company to hire me to produce the series. Armed with the matrix numbers, the only way to identify the discs, I gave them hundreds and hundreds of numbers, hoping that at least some of them might still exist. We were all amazed at how many of the metals still survived, some seven out of ten, and though I knew most of them, it was the ones I had never heard before which really thrilled me. But there was no escaping the excitement of hearing the transfers made from brand-new pressings, remastered and sounding as if they had been recorded a week ago. Though I obviously love the other reissues I've produced over the years, the Sony series stands out as the major accomplishment of the entire klezmer revival.
PM: Free association: Abe Schwartz? Dave Tarras? The Musiker Brothers?
HS: What a privilege to be involved in helping re-establish these great men in the pantheon of fame, which they well deserve. I believe far more in the power of re-issues than I do in the majority of new "klezmer" records being issued. Too many people break the rules far sooner than they learn them, offering their unwary and innocent fans a watered-down version of the majesty and depth of the universe of klezmer. Listening to Sam Musiker beautifully meld klezmer and big-band harmonic ideas shows how paltry are the current "fusions" of klezmer and whatever else. Few people have the depth of understanding or the love of klezmer and other [Yiddish] forms to do now what Sam Musiker did almost 50 years ago. I hope that by reissuing these recordings, people will learn that they have invented little and lost a lot.
[Note: The late Sam Musiker, a third-generation klezmer clarinetist, composer and bandleader, was an innovative presence on the celebrated 1956 LP Tanz! (Dance!), one of the Legacy reissues. His brother Ray, also a clarinetist appearing on Tanz!, is currently a member of The Yiddish Radio All-Star Band.]
PM: Last week was May Day, an important date especially here in Europe. Over two million German metal workers appeared to be on the verge of a major strike, a half million people in Paris marched against Le Pen and the neo-Nazis, and a sizable anti-Nazi demonstration materialized in Berlin. My wife and I were listening to the superb Italian folk duo Gianluigi Trovesi (clarinets) and Gianni Coscia (accordion) -- their rendition of John Lewis's "Django", wherein they quote the Yiddish song "Dos Kelbl" ["Dona, Dona", by Sholom Secunda, a song protesting the Russian Jewish pogroms]. So we got out a CD of Zupfgeigenhansel, the German klezmer group, and listened to their interpretations of "Dos Kelbl", Abe Schwartz's "Di Grine Kusine" [a condemnation of the New York sweatshops where many Jewish immigrants worked] and "Arbeitslose-Marsch" ["March of the Unemployed"]. I suppose I'm suggesting that the music has always had a political edge -- as with groups like the Klezmatics, and your own work with Kapelye, for instance. Your thoughts on this? Where do you see the music headed politically, in these unsettled times?
HS: Klezmer has been taken on as a political music in places where it never was before. It has been dubbed part of the progressive movement, whereas old players would only scratch their heads. How do I feel about German musicians playing klezmer music? Better than I do about them singing Holocaust resistance songs. In my book I talk about what I call "cultural ownership" and its limits. I got a chill when I heard baby boomers in Germany singing "Zog Nit Keynmol" ["We Are Here" or "Never Say", the anthem of the Vilna partisans during World War Two]. I appreciated the thought behind it and the feeling of wanting to make cultural-political amends, but I still felt that perhaps a hint of discretion might have been in order. I remember buying a Zupfgeigenhansel LP on my first tour of Europe in 1979. I wrote to them excitedly about my own work and never heard back. So it goes.
[Note: See "Related Links" for a thoughtful and informative article on the history, meaning and cultural politics of klezmer in post-war Germany, (the former) East and West, by respected (German and non-Jewish) klezmer bassist Heiko Lehmann.]
PM: Related to the preceding, there is a kind of re-exportation of klezmer to Europe underway, with growing continental audiences, home-grown groups in the Nordic countries, Germany (a huge klezmer market), Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine, while U.S. players are developing trans-Atlantic connections. Take David Krakauer's playing with the remarkable Algerian Sephardic pianist Maurice El Medioni, and Krakauer's recent A New Hot One (Label Bleu, France, 2000). Or Frank London's work with Serbian trumpeter Boban Markovic and Egypt's Hasaballa Brass Band, Brotherhood of Brass (Piranha, Germany, 2002). By extension, there's the vibrancy of new Sephardic musical explorations in Europe. At the same time, more in key with your own concerns, you have groups like Budowitz, Di Naye Kapelye and Khevrisa reviving the older European string-based klezmer forms. How do you see this all fitting together, if it does?
HS: I think my favorite player on the world scene today is British clarinetist Merlin Shepherd [of Sukke, Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars, Budowitz, The Burning Bush]. Easy, insightful and devoted to bringing an old sound to a new hearing. Merlin is unparalleled in his knowledge of the old sound, but he doesn't squander it to make a contemporary statement. I like Krakauer a lot personally and think that, like Byron, he is a master player, but he's so busy making grandiose statements with the music, political-musical or otherwise, and poor klezmer music suffers at the base. Merlin does make a contemporary statement but without neon signs, billboards, or sending up flares. I also think that Frank London is a genius when it comes to making an apparently endless variety of fusions with seemingly incongruous elements. He is to be congratulated for making klezmer an ongoing part of the world music scene, which seems to value fusion instead of elemental music that accurately reflects the community from which it comes.
PM: Looking at klezmer today, any other musicians or groups who stand out in your mind as standard bearers? Artists who deserve wider hearing?
HS: I like Josh Horowitz [leader of Budowitz] for his great scholarship and quirky and tasteful tsimbl [a trapezoidal struck zither, analogous to the hammered dulcimer] and accordion playing. Marlene "Cookie" Siegelstein [Klezical Tradition] is a marvellous fiddler who plays with a robust, insightful dynamism nearly unique today. Lauren Brody [Kapelye, The Yuri Yunakov Ensemble] is a wonderful accordion player whose tasteful and harmonic insight into the music makes her a valued member of every bandstand; she's also a kick-ass singer! And when it comes to bass players, I am a lucky guy with people like Marty Confurius [Russ Barenberg, Andy Statman, etc.], Heiko Lehmann [Sukke, Budowitz, Kapelye, The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble], Jim Guttmann [Klezmer Conservatory Band] and Stuart Brotman [Brave Old World, San Francisco Klezmer Experience], who are treasures, while bass-tuba player Mark Rubin [Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars, Austin (Texas) Klezmorim, and an in-demand session player] is a gift from the music gods, a real pillar on the bandstand.
PM: Insofar as KlezKamp is about passing the music on to future generations of players, what does the future of klezmer look like from your vantage point?
HS: In a way I kind of envy the new generation of klezmer players. They have grown up in the last 20 years with klezmer as a natural part of the musical literature available to them. They are not burdened with issues of "preservation" or of the urgency of having to "save" the music. They have a kind of easygoing and insouciant attitude about it that keeps them from a frantic self-importance. They have inherited the legacy of the music without any of the doubt about its being an "endangered species", and play the music as if it's been there forever. That is a legacy I'm proud to have a small piece of.
PM: It must be tremendously satisfying to know that at the end of the project -- assuming an end is in sight -- everything you've collected will be archived at the Library of Congress.
HS: Yup. It's going to the Library of Congress just as soon as I finish the book, the film, the museum exhibit and whatever else. That should be in about five years. Whew!
PM: Henry, many thanks for your patience and expansiveness. Any last words for our readers?
HS: I guess I'm still sort of amazed that I've been able to do what I really love: listening to quirky, odd old records, writing about them, reissuing them, learning to play from them and bringing their music to a receptive and new audience. It does seem sort of astounding to me that my own passions seem to have found an outlet in the greater world, and that I have never had to stray any farther from the question "what interests me?" in order to find what I would do with my life. Yet if I thought that the work I'd done in klezmer music with Kapelye, KlezKamp and my various books and reissues would have been enough, I feel that I've been blessed with another even more important opportunity to rediscover and bring to the world these amazing old Yiddish radio shows. I have no idea what will come next for me, but no matter what it is, if anything at all, I will always be grateful and content that I had the chance to do this much.
Referenced Recordings
Various Artists
From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950
Columbia/Legacy C2K 86323 (two-CD set)
U.S. Release: April 30, 2002
Abe Schwartz
The Klezmer King
Columbia/Legacy CK 86321
U.S. Release: April 30, 2002
Dave Tarras and The Musiker Brothers
Tanz!
Epic/Legacy 86320
U.S. Release: April 30, 2002
— 31 May 2002
