Keywords:Cheremkhovo, Russia; English language; family background; family history; Lake Baikal; Siberia; store owner; storekeeper; Ukraine; Yiddish language
Keywords:bar mitzvah; Eastern Europe; Eastern Parkway; family history; kosher butcher; Metropolitan News Delivery; mohel; moyel; New York City, New York; shochet; shohet; shoykhet; Yiddish newspaper
Keywords:Alan Jay Lerner; Bob Keeshan; Brooklyn, New York; Buddy Strouse; Captain Kangaroo; chemical engineering; Columbia University; Cornell University; Leona Helmsley; music teacher; musician; New York City; pianist; piano; piano player; piano teacher; ragtime
Keywords:Abraham Lincoln; Benny Goodman; Brooklyn Technical High School; clarinet; classical music; Crown Heights, New York; Earl Hines; engineering; Fats Waller; George Gershwin; harmonica; high school; librarian; musician; piano; Teddy Wilson
Keywords:adolescence; Brooklyn, New York; Catskills; German language; musician; New York City; Poland; Polish; Russia; Russian language; Ukraine; Williamsburg; Yiddish language
Keywords:1930s; Domenico Scarlatti; Frederic Chopin; George Gershwin; Johann Sebastian Bach; musical education; musician; pianist; piano player; records; swing music
Keywords:Benny Goodman; bicycle; Bix Beiderbecke; clarinet; Duke Ellington; Fats Waller; Hebrew; James P. Johnson; King Oliver; Louis Armstrong; math teacher; music; musician; phonograph; pianist; piano player; piano teacher; saxophone; swing music
Keywords:1950s; American Army; anti-Semitism; antisemitism; Berlin; Dixieland; Europe; German language; Germany; Holland; musical tour; Russia; travel; World War 2; World War II; WW2; WWII
Keywords:bar mitzvah; bar-mitsve; Epstein brothers; Europe; false teeth; French waltz; jazz; klezmer; landsmanshaft; Long Island, New York; Lynbrook, New York; Manhattan, New York; monkey; trumpet; Willie Epstein
CHRISTA WHITNEY:Okay, so this is Christa Whitney. Today is December 5th, 2013. I
am here with Peter Sokolow in Brooklyn, New York, and we're going to record aninterview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do Ihave your permission to record?
PETER SOKOLOW:Yes.
CW:Thank you. So, as I -- we can switch between English and Yiddish, do it all
in English. Do you have an opinion about that?
PS:Vos ir vil [Whatever you want].
CW:Vos ikh vil [Whatever I want], okay. Fun vanen shtamt der mishpokhe [Where
does your family come from]?
PS:Di mishpokhe shtamt fun rusland. Mayn bobe fun mayn tates tsayt geborn in
sibirye -- tsheremkheve -- dos iz akhtsik mayl ost fun irkutsk. S'iz leybn leyk 1:00baykal. Ober di mishpokhe shtamt fun yukreyn. [My family comes from Russia. Mygrandmother on my father's side was born in Siberia -- Cheremkhovo -- this iseighty miles from Irkutsk. It's near Lake Baikal. But my family is fromUkraine], hu, you know.
CW:Kleyn shtetlekh oder shtet [A small town, or cities]?
PS:Tsheremkheve -- damoltst, dos iz geveyn a kleyn shtetele. Shpeyter iz dos
gevorn greyser. [Cheremkhovo -- then, it was a tiny little town. Later it got bigger].
CW:Um-hm. Un vos flegn zey ton far parnose [And what did they used to do for a living]?
PS:Mayn ur-groysfater hot er gehat a kretshme. Dos iz zayn gesheft. [My
great-grandfather had a store. That was his business.] My great-grandfather, ur-groysfater. 2:00
CW:Um-hm. Un fun der ander zayt [And from the other side]?
PS:If klingt a bisl doytsh, doytsh iz tsu ersht un den kumt yidish. [If it
sounds a little German, it's because German came first, and then Yiddish].
CW:Uh-huh. (laughter) And the mother's side? The maternal side? Do you know the
parnose [livelihood]?
PS:Yeah, what parn-- my grandfather on my mother's side came from Galicia. He
was the son of a baker. And when he came to this country, he never pursued thatat all. He had -- he ended up in the rag biz, if you know what that is,(UNCLEAR), the rag --
CW:In New York?
PS:Yeah. Yeah, Lower East Side, whatever. They ended up in the Bronx.
CW:Can you explain the rag business?
PS:Clothing. Men's and women's clothing. He ended up mainly in women's and
children's clothing.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:For a while he owned a garage, but he ended up with a company that did
manufacturing of ladies' and children's clothing, and he built it up. He had a 3:00nice business.
CW:Do you know any stories from der alter heym [the Old Country], passed down?
PS:From der alter heym? Well, you know, my -- I'm a second-generation American.
My parents were born in this country, and they talked very, very little aboutthese things. I can tell you a little bit about my great-uncle, who was the onlyreligious man basically in my grandmother -- my maternal -- paternalgrandmother's family. He was a shoykhet [ritual slaughterer], which is a bu--kosher butcher. And also, I don't know whether he was a moyel [ritualcircumciser] or not; he may have been. He taught all the children of my father'sgeneration their bar mitzvah parshas [Torah portions]. And he was married to two 4:00of my great-grandmother's sisters. And the first one died and he married thesecond one. And the second one gave him four daughters who -- several of whom Iknew. And I also knew the -- he only had one son from the first wife, and him, Ikind of knew, but I didn't see him very often when I was a child. But the otherones I got to see all the time, because my grandmother was very close with them.As a matter of fact, one of those f-- they were first cousins -- one of thosefirst cousins married my grandmother's brother. So, that particular brotherbecame very wealthy. He was one of four people who established the MetropolitanNews Delivery firm in New York, which started with Yiddish papers and then wenton to everything else, and he had lots of dough. He had a big -- when I was achild, he had a large mansion on Eastern Parkway between New York and Brooklyn 5:00Ave-- Nos-- I'm sorry, start that again. He had a large mansion between Rogersand Nostrand Avenue on Eastern Parkway, which was hot stuff in those days. Andmy, (laughs) my grandmother's cousin had servants. She had fur coats. She hadnice stuff. And they engineered a wedding that was kind of a shidekh [arrangedmarriage] kind of a thing between my grandmother and a fella who made seltzer.My grandfather was a seltzer man. But she was very jealous of her sister-in-law.That marriage lasted about six years. My father was the only child. Shepractically threw him out of the house when he was -- my father was about six.
CW:Hm.
PS:And, of course, my father never forgave my grandmother for that. She was a
real feminist in the days when that sort of thing didn't exist. 6:00
CW:What did that mean? What do you mean?
PS:Well, she was a take charge kind of a person, and she ran -- she was a single
mom, as they call them. And, you know, my father grew up just with her. Funnything is my grandfather lived in the neighborhood, and my grand-- my grandmothermade him go to see his father, and he used to -- sometimes he would ride on thewagon with him and carry the boxes of seltzer wa-- you know.
CW:Did you know your grandparents?
PS:My grandmother on my father's side, I knew extremely well. She was the only
one that I really got to know. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. Mygrandfather, the seltzer man, died in 1926. I was born in '40. My grandfather onmy mother's side died in 1935. He wasn't even fifty yet. And my grandmother onmy mother's side, I knew -- I didn't see very often, but -- and she got sick. 7:00She died when I was about eight. But my other one lasted until I was in mytwenties, and she and I were very close. I used to go over to her house all the time.
CW:What was she like?
PS:She was a tough lady, but funny thing is that -- (laughs) -- okay, I'll get
into some of these. My grandmother -- my father was the meal ticket. He went toBoys High, which was like the college of high schools in Brooklyn. You probablywent close by it when you ca-- were trying to come here. He ended up atColumbia. He didn't want to go to Columbia; he wanted to go to Cornell. And histraining was chemical engineering. And he studied piano as a child. He did verywell with it. And he couldn't get a job in the chemical engineering business, 8:00because Abraham Sokolow did not get a job in -- you know, they didn't want him.
CW:'Cause of his name.
PS:Of course, because, you know, they didn't want no yidls [little Jews] there.
Just didn't happen. That was a closed -- all the engineering things were closedat that time. All they wanted were what we call "nisht fin indzere [not ourkind]." And so, my father became the breadwinner there. My grandmother'sbrothers -- she had three brothers -- all of 'em became quite well-to-do, paidher rent, and I guess they must have paid for some of the provisions that theyhad in the house or whatever it was. They had a lot of meals at my uncle Meyer'shouse, and whatever else. But my father couldn't get into chemical engineering,so he had to end up -- he ended up teaching piano. And what he did was he taughtthe kind of 1920s post-ragtime kind of a style. And he had a lot of Jewish 9:00pupils, young Jewish pupils. Some of my father's pupils -- one of 'em was BuddyStrouse -- (singing) "The sun will come out tomorrow," that one. Alan JayLerner, the lyricist, was one of my father's pupils. Bob Keeshan, CaptainKangaroo, was one of my father's pupils. Him I met. He was a nice, nice guy.Leona Helmsley was one of my father's pupils. And while other piano teacherswere getting fifty cents an hour, my father got three bucks a half hour. And hebuilt a business. And he had -- for a while, he had between seventy-five andeighty students a week.
CW:Hm.
PS:Well, he built -- he made a business out of it. It's not what he wanted to
do, and that led to problems with me -- between me and my father later on,because he didn't want me to be a musician at all.
CW:Um-hm. Where did he teach out of? The home, or did he have an office?
PS:He went to people's houses. He went around either by train, took his car,
whatever it was. And he also played some jobs, which I ended up at as an 10:00industry for me. He didn't like that part of it. He did it because it was money,and so he did that. Every time he would meet a girl, my grandmother would try tobreak it up. When he met my mother, it was too late. He was already forty. Mymother grew up in the Bronx, a mixed marriage. She grew up in the Bronx, he inBrooklyn. And they knew each other three weeks, they were married already.
CW:And your mother grew up in the Bronx?
PS:My mother grew up in the Bronx, Crotona Park area. They ended up in -- as her
father became more well-to-do, they ended up on the Grand Concourse. And theyended up moving to West End Avenue in Manhattan. My father had m-- my mother,I'm sorry -- had married previously. Her husband died. And she had a child bythe first husband, and that child died, too. So, in the space of a year or two,she lost her father, her first husband, and her baby. Yeah, it was pretty rough. 11:00She met my father, and we were three: my brother was younger than me, my sisterwas older than me, I'm the guy in the middle. And they're all still around. I'min constant touch with my brother. My sister is living in Israel now. And so,that became my father's family. When my grandmother became a grandmother, shemellowed a little bit. She loved the idea, and she liked being with us. We livedin the same neighborhood, and she would walk over. My grandmother was walkinguntil she was past ninety.
CW:What neighborhood was that?
PS:Crown Heights. Near Ebbets Field, olev-asholem [may it rest in peace]. (laughter)
CW:Can you describe the neighborhood, and --
PS:Crown Heights was, at that time, a very middle-upper-class neighborhood. Nice
old -- we lived in a private house. The first place we lived was a two-family, 12:00which was on President Street between Franklin and Bedford. Then, right afterWorld War II, 1945, my father bought the house on Crown between Bedford andRogers, which was -- excuse me -- which was practically around the corner fromEbbets Field. So, whenever there was a yell in -- everybody turned on the radioto see what was going on. And, well, my upbringing was interesting. As I say, myfather and mother -- my mother was twenty-nine when she married my father. As Isay, she'd been married before. He was forty, so he was a little past, you know,like -- I married, I was twenty-two. I had my first child, I was twenty-five 13:00years old. My father had his first child, my sister, when he was forty-one. Iwas born, he was forty-four already. My brother was born, he was forty-six. Myson is forty-six; he's got grown children. So, you know, it was -- it was not anatural thing for him, and for my mother it certainly wasn't. My mother was --she had taught school, and --
CW:Public school, or --
PS:Yeah. She taught elementary. She's taught high school. When I was thirteen,
she went back to work; she became a high school librarian, and I'll get to thatin a minute. My father had a dream for me that I would become some kind of atechnical or engineering thing, because I had an interest in -- but my interestin technical things was mainly historical. I loved old cars, trolleys, old 14:00subway trains, ocean liners. I still have books and books and books all aboutthat subject. And before I got interested in music, that was my kind of hobby.But I didn't have the sort of -- there's a certain thing that one has to have tobe an engineer, and I just didn't have it. And I went to a technical highschool. I went to Brooklyn Tech, which was a very highly respected school. Ididn't do great there for the first couple of years, because I was a -- I wasreally, like, a kind of an immature baby. And we had these -- some of thetechnical subjects, industrial processes, taught us how the steel was made andall that kind of stuff, and -- there were shop courses, which I was really notthat good at. Well, (laughs) it turned out that my real talent was music, and 15:00oh, boy, my father didn't care for that much at all.
CW:So -- oh.
PS:He had a harmonica in his drawer. He learn-- he read someplace that Abraham
Lincoln taught himself the harmonica. He couldn't do a thing with it. My fatherlearned piano, you know, notes, notes, notes, notes, technique, technique,technique, and he had it. My father was really good. He played classical musicquite well. He played the Gershwin style. I sound somewhat like my father. Myfather was my first musical example. So, he was my first guy. And he had recordsof black piano players: Fats Waller, my guy, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, all guyslike that. And the records he had of Teddy Wilson were Benny Goodman smallbands. I heard Benny Goodman, I went crazy, so I ended up taking up theclarinet. And -- 16:00
CW:So, before we get to music, can I ask --
PS:Yeah.
CW:-- what was Jewish about your home growing up?
PS:Not much. My mother was a red Communist. She didn't have a card, but she was
what I call an armchair Communist. In other words, she waved the red flag, allher friends were Stalinists, but when the checks came in from the dividends, thestocks, she put them in the bank. So, that's an armchair Communist.
CW:So, did you -- did she go to meetings? Did you meet her friends?
PS:You know what? Well, the -- all right, I'll have to explain to you how this
happened. She belonged to the American Labor Party. American Labor Party was nota Communist party, but there were a lot of proto-Communists involved in thatbunch. And toward the end of the American Labor Party's checkered career, it 17:00became more and more left. And my mother and all her pals were very, veryleft-wing types. And okay, they -- bah-bah-bah-bah-bah, this and that and theother thing, and the Jewish business was soft-pedaled. My grandfather, mymother's father, used to go to ballgames on, on Yom Kippur, so he didn't want toknow from it at all. My mother had two brothers, younger brothers -- she was theoldest -- and they didn't want to know from it, either. Now, my father, hisfather had gone to a synagogue which was populated by Lubavitch types, butbefore Lubavitch came here in large numbers -- this goes back to nineteen --1908, 1907, 1906, whatever it was. My father got some Hebrew training at asynagogue in Williamsburg, which -- they davened Nusach Ari, which is aLubavitch thing, not ashkenaz [Ashkenazi], not tsfard [Sephardi], but Nusach 18:00Ari, which is something that only the Lubavitch do. So, my grandfather wasobviously, you know, involved. Maybe it was only because he went to thatparticular synagogue; I don't know. I couldn't ask him because he was gone bythe time I came around. And my father had little to say about that. He didn'tsay how religious he was, how religious he wasn't. My father was afirst-generation American in every way. He didn't want to know from it, and mymother certainly didn't want to know from it, but her father, who came from theother side, didn't want to know from it. But my grandfather on my father's sidedid something. So, my father learned -- because when he was reading Hebrew --and he didn't read Hebrew to -- around us very often. When we were younger, someof the seders, he would -- pronounced the "O" as if it were "A," and that's whatLubavitch do. In other words, instead of "shalom," they pronounce "shaleym."That's the Lubavitch way of pronouncing it. And that was his -- his training 19:00came from that. And he also studied his bar mitzvah with the uncle I was tellingyou about, my great-uncle Shmuel Moyshe, who was the only religious one in thatpart of the family. So, their relationship with religion was -- there was noShabbos. There was no kashres [kosherness] there. They didn't observe anythingat all. There was -- you know what we had? Hanukkah candles. Grandma would comeover and give us Hanukkah gelt.
CW:Pesach? Other --
PS:Pesach we had, but you know something? It wasn't a real Pesach, because as we
got on over there -- my mother used to bring, you know, khomets [leaven andleavened food banned for Passover] into the house on Pesach. So, it was -- theseder, we didn't have it, but later on, it disappeared completely. And all I cansay is that I, as one generation removed, didn't want to know from it. And as 20:00soon as I -- well, they put me in Hebrew school, the Brooklyn Jewish Center,which was Conservative. The kinds of teachers that I had were not religious inorientation at all. They were teaching, like, Israeli-type Hebrew "mechonit[Hebrew: mechanical]," you know, "baruch atah [Hebrew: blessed are You]," youknow, the Sephardic pronunciation and all that. And I was not turned on by theseparticular teachers. So, by the time I was bar mitzvah, I never went back toHebrew school again. That was all. But I was a goo-- I was a decent student. Icould've done fairly well with it, but it was -- it just wasn't there.
CW:What about Yiddish? Did you hear it growing up?
PS:Yiddish, I heard some Yiddish from my grandmother. My grandmother came from a
family which spoke mostly Russian. If they spoke among themselves, they spokeRussian. They didn't speak Yiddish. Because, after all, they lived in 21:00Sheremkheve. They weren't that -- there were some Jews there, but not very many.Those who came from the European part of Russia, Ukraine, or whatever it was, ofcourse spoke Yiddish, and when they got to Brooklyn, to Williamsburg, if theyhad other Jews to speak with they probably had to speak Yiddish, because many ofthose didn't -- did not really like the idea of speaking Russian or even Polishor things like that. But the only Polish one in my family was my maternalgrandfather, who, as I say, was a galitsianer [Galician].
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And my grandmother knew quite a bit of Yiddish, of course. My father knew
quite a bit of Yiddish, but they never spoke it at home. My mother, when she --zoln di kinder nisht farshteyn, zi hot gegangen tsu reydn ofn telefon [so thechildren wouldn't understand, she would switch her language on the telephone],and her accent was, "Ikh hab gegangen tsu [I went to] --" You know, it was like,like a real Yankee accent. (laughter) But because of that, I was able to pick up 22:00some. Now, my father had studied German in high school, and as I say, I kind ofidolized my father. And when I went to high school, I studied German, too. Well,when I got to the Catskills as a musician, I realized I could understand almosteverything those people were saying, because frankly, Yiddish is at leasteighty-five percent German, if not more. All right, some of the words like"milkhome [war]" and "metsie [lucky find]," "levone [moon]" and things likethat, those words are Hebrew in orientation. And also, a lot of it was, youknow, if you were -- if you grew up in Poland, you had Polish words in there. Ifyou grew up in Russia, you had Russian words in there. And I picked up Yiddishworking as a musician. As a teenage musician in the Catskills, I began to pickup my Yiddish. My Yiddish is okay. It's not great, but it's okay. 23:00
CW:Yeah. So, back to, you know, your father being -- learning music from your
father. So, you heard him playing music?
PS:I heard him playing -- I used to sit under that piano that's sitting over
there, at three or four years old, and listen to him play those Gershwin things.If you want, I can give you an example.
CW:Well, let's do it after. I'll write some notes about --
PS:Okay.
CW:-- what we want you to play after.
PS:All right, fine.
CW:And so, then you mentioned the records that you were listening to.
PS:I listened to the records from the time that I was about eight years old, and
I gravitated very much toward them because I liked the feeling of the music. Itwas swing music from the '30s.
CW:Mm.
PS:And that was the first music that I really gave a listen to. My mother used
to listen to classical radio, and my father played some classical music. Fromwhat my mother told me, it was mainly at her instigation that she said, "Well, 24:00you know, you don't have to play only that Gershwin stuff. Why don't you playsome classical, too?" And he did. He got Bach, Scarlatti. He played someBeethoven, some Chopin, but the Bach was really his thing.
CW:Hm.
PS:My father played Bach very well.
CW:Did you list-- did you have any Jewish music growing up?
PS:Hardly.
CW:So, can you tell me more about this sort of tension with your father around,
you know, you becoming a musician and sort of --
PS:Well --
CW:-- at the early years? (laughter)
PS:I was, let's say, ten years old. I had taken some piano lessons from my
father. I got as far as (singing) "We sail the ocean blue, where we saw --" --that's as far as I got. My father was a very pedantic and slow kind of ateacher. He didn't -- he taught me all -- all I learned from my father I learnedby his example, not by his (makes rhythmic sounds). He was a very, very pedantic type. 25:00
CW:Was he using a specific technique? You know --
PS:Well, there were kiddie instruction books, you know.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And funny thing is he was my first Hebrew teacher, and he taught the same
way, bee-ba-bo, that kind of thing. Funny thing is I learned more from him thanI learned from my first Hebrew teacher. He also was -- you know, when I washaving trouble with math in the beginning of high school, he was my mathteacher. So, he -- that he could do. He was very good at that. And when I pickedup the harmonica, I found out I can play tunes on that thing. In five minutes Iwas playing all kinds of songs. And I think my father must've heard me, and hegot a little frightened. I didn't know whether, you know -- now, when I -- ittook me a long time to do it, but I've been listening to those Goodman records.For a while I put them away. Well, when I picked them up again I was about 26:00eleven, and ooh, boy, I wore some of them out. Then I started going out andbuying my own records shortly after that, when I had my allowances or whateverit was. I bought my own records. I have a library downstairs you wouldn'tbelieve. And --
CW:What kind of stuff were you buying then?
PS:Mainly the swing stuff.
CW:Swing stuff, yeah.
PS:Yeah. Ellington, Goodman -- I started reading the books, and from the books I
got, Okay, I want to hear this one, I want to hear that one, and some of theolder stuff I -- you know, King Oliver, Armstrong. Bix Beiderbecke became a bigfavorite of mine. James P. Johnson, who was Fats Waller's teacher. I learned howto play almost exactly like him, and taught myself how to play like Fats Waller,of course. I sing like him; I play like him. And when I was about thirteen, myfather finally broke down and got me a clarinet, and he found a teacher, a local 27:00guy in the area, a guy who actually was a club date guy. He wasn't a realteacher. But I don't know how well I would've responded to that kind ofteaching, because frankly, I was a lazy kid. But I had the clarinet maybe threeweeks. I was playing a full scale in the low register. I started playing songs.And the more I learned of the clarinet, the more I could play. Finally, I beganto meet a couple of young people who played some music, and they said, You wantto make some money, get a saxophone. Oh, boy, started going there. My fatherdidn't want to buy me a saxophone. Oh, please! But the instruments he bought mewere cheap stuff, and the problem is I learned some bad habits on 'em. I had togo out later on and buy my own -- with my own money. Well, for that matter, myfather also -- (laughs) my father had a thing about spending money; he didn'tlike it. And my bar mitzvah present was a bicycle, but I paid for half of it 28:00myself, because he didn't want to buy that one; he wanted to buy the cheaperone. I didn't want the cheaper one; I wanted the more expensive one. So, I tooksome of the money that I got in checks, and I bought the bicycle that I wanted,not the one that he wanted. (laughter) Well, he bought me a cheap saxophone, andhe bought me a cheap clarinet. Finally, I ended up getting rid of them. Butstill, I learned, partly by playing along with the records as they were playingon the phonograph.
CW:Mm. And so, your father, you said, was your main teacher, at least for piano,
and then you had --
PS:Yes, he was. I learned more from him by, as I say, by his example than by
what he taught me, you know, like in words or, "Do this, do that, do that andthe other thing."
CW:So, what was your first gig?
PS:My first gig was in December of 1956. It was a little kiddie -- you know, the
kids used to have these little dances or kinda stuff like that, because I got to 29:00know some -- I had been going around to other teenage musicians' houses and weused to rehearse, we used to jam, we used to do that kind of thing. So, Ilearned a bunch of songs. I learned songs very quickly. If you ask me to play myentire repertoire by -- at this point I must know ten thousand songs or more,all by memory, and I can play 'em in keys, 'cause I had to play for singers andthings like that, you know. But the point here was that this was my calling, andI just jumped on it. So, first I learned 'em on the sax and the clarinet, andthen I sat down at the piano and I learned the harmonies, too. And I taughtmyself basically how to play kind of a jazz style on the piano, as well. So, Ihad the -- everything going for me there. So, my first job was one of thesethings. I got five dollars. I was on the sax, and there was a piano and a 30:00drummer, and who was the fourth piece? I believe it might've been a guitar. Andwe played dance music for the kids. Now, the funny thing is that rock and rollbegan to come around at that point. My sister was rock and roll crazy. She hadall these -- I learned a whole bunch of rock and roll off my sister's records.She had Chuck Berry. She had Fats Domino. She had a lot of the black ones.Little Richard. She had Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis, when Elvis came out, oy, iz vernmeshige di velt [the world went crazy]. She went totally bonkers. And so, Ilearned a lot of these, like, Elvis -- "Little Teddy Bear," and, of course, the"Hound Dog" and all that stuff. So, I could play rock and roll, even though Ihated it. Because to me, I was now listening to swing, Dixieland, and moremodern jazz, which had much more sophistication and harmony and improvisation,where the other stuff was just ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. It was nothing. So, to 31:00me it was, "How can you listen to that garbage?" Well, my sister got angry atme. She would yell. She told me to go to hell. (laughter)
CW:So, can you just ex-- describe how you did this? How do you, you know -- how
did you learn a tune from a record?
PS:The record would play, and it would go into the tape recorder that was in
there. And after about two, two, three, four times, I had it. I knew it. I couldalso hear the harmonies, even though I didn't know what they were called. I alsohave a disease known as absolute pitch; in other words, I can sing a note, ortell you what note it is without the use of an instrument. So, I was a quicklearner. That was my real thing was learning that kind of stuff. So, by the timeI was, like -- I took up the clarinet originally, I was not quite fourteen yearsold. I was about thirteen. The piano, I already played some. The harmonica I 32:00played quite well at that point. And I began to just pick up on these things.Unfortunately, because I was such a quick learn, I let my reading go, so I wasnever as good a music reader at that point in my life as I had to be till -- tomake a living at music. I learned it. You know, it was just something I wasforced to do. And I didn't love it, either, 'cause my ear was so good that I waspicking up all this stuff. I learned it all quickly.
CW:Mm.
PS:And also, for a lazy guy like me, it was just perfect. I could just, "Oh,
yeah, I could do that. Yeah, nothin'."
CW:(laughs) So, did you start out -- which came first, the club dates or the Catskills?
PS:The club dates came first, not by much.
CW:Can you describe that scene?
PS:Club dates. The word "club date" is a euphemism for a country club type of a
job. But, as I say, it was a euphemism. What it really meant was weddings and 33:00bar mitzvahs, sometimes landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally fromthe same region]. I did a couple of landsmanshaft when I was young. Banquets,you know, that kind of thing. And there were bands that were playing at thesethings. I did my first bar mitzvah, I was nearly graduating from high school. Igot a job playing at a synagogue in Williamsburg with a band which I puttogether of some of my friends. And it was the brother of one of the guys in myhigh school class, so we played the job. We didn't do a great job, but we gotfifty dollars for four musicians. So, all right. And I went from -- well, beganto get calls from other musicians, and they would say, Listen, I got this. Youwant to come and do -- "Sure, absolutely." Take my horn. I didn't drive oranything like that. I think I used to go on the bus.
PS:Oh, I played some non-Jewish ones, too. What did we play? We played whatever
American songs were popular at the time. Some of the tunes even from "My FairLady," or shows a little bit earlier than that. There were popular songs, like-- guys like Tony Bennett, or Sinatra was singing, songs like "Over TheRainbow." Well, Tony Bennett was singing, (singing) "Because of you there's asong in my heart." Okay, fine. That was one of them, and other ones like thatwere (singing) "There goes my heart, there goes the one I love, bah-bah-bah-bah,bah-bah-bah." Those were the ones that were popular at the time. And as I said,"Could've Danced All Night," "The Street Where You Live," things like that.Those were the popular showtunes of the time. And we played waltzes. Now, where 35:00did I pick up the Jewish? When you got involved in this, and if you were goingto go to the Catskill Mountains, you had to learn some Jewish songs. There was abook called a Kammen, K-a-m-m-e-n, which was a folio of partly Jewish, partlyHungarian, partly Polish, things like that, and you would buy this book -- therewas a book for tenor saxophone, there was a book for trumpet, there was a bookfor piano and accordion, and I had this book, like all the other guys did. Weall had Kammen books. So, the first one was Kammen book, (sings wordlessly).It's an old, old freylekh. (sings wordlessly) So, we learned these. We playedthem from the Kammen book. Now, later on, I found out -- some of my older 36:00friends that I had made by that point told me, we saw a guy come on a job with aKammen book, we knew he was an amateur. But we were amateurs. We were kids. Wewere just learning. So, I went to the Catskill Mountains. First place I playedwas an Orthodox hotel. I didn't know for nothin'. Boy, was that a scare.
CW:Yeah, tell me about that. (laughter) What was your first impression?
PS:The place was called Shloime Ehrenreich's Hotel, and it was like -- exactly
what it sounds like: it was a dump. And it was the equivalent at that time ofglatt kosher. I did not know very many, if any, religious people at the time,but there were religious people, many of whom would come over as Holocaustsurvivors. And they were coming to this hotel, and they -- some of them wereHungarian. They wanted to hear Hungarian czárdás, which we -- there were somethat came in, but we really didn't know. And the kind of music that they thoughtof for dancing at weddings, khasenes, at parties, had to do with what you -- 37:00what -- you know, like, the parshas that you would read for --- "Od yishamabe'arei yehudah [Hebrew: It will be heard again in the cities of Judea]," youknow, that they were playing for the bride and the groom. (singing) "Yosisalayich elohayich, kimsos khosn al kale, khosn-kale, khosn-kale [Your God willrejoice over you, as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, bride-and-groom,bride-and-groom]," that kind of thing. The only "khosn-kale [bride-and-groom]"song we knew was (singing) "Khosn-kale, mazel tov!" And that was the -- more forthe nonreligious people than for the religious. I was out of that place in threeweeks. I hated it. I was treated like a -- like a goy, you know? They -- I was,you know -- compared with they, them, I was. I got a job after that in abungalow colony, one of the few that had a band, and they were friends of minewho were graduated -- I graduated with high school from. So, we were allBrooklyn Tech guys, class of 1957. We had two saxes, me and another guy, a piano 38:00player, who played like my father, oddly enough -- he played the old style --and a drummer, who later on became the composer of a song called (singing) "Myboyfriend's back and he'll save your reputation, hey-la, hey-la," and this guywas a rock and roll kind of a guy. So, we got involved, we learned some rock androll, we learned some of the jazz tunes, like "Lady is a Tramp" and songs likethat, which were older show tunes, which the jazz guys used to play. We used toplay some of those. We learned how to play cha-chas, rhumbas. Did we learn theYiddish show tunes? I learned the Yiddish show tunes the next year. I waseighteen years old, and I went to -- I had graduated high school already. Thefella who took my place in what we called a dance band at Brooklyn Tech, I endedup -- finally, in the senior year, I made the dance band. I was one of the 39:00saxophone players. The guy who took my chair lived in an apartment house with anold bandleader, a guy -- at that time, in his forties, was an old man. I waseighteen. And I went to this guy's house -- again, by bus -- and I brought mystuff there, and I got the job because I knew a lot of songs. And when I wentthat summer, it was a place in Mountain Dale called the New Prospect Hotel, andthat was the real, classic, old-fashioned Catskill Mountains place.
CW:Can you just set the scene for people who have -- don't know about the Catskills?
PS:Mm. The Catskill Mountains were not really (laughs) the Catskill Mountains at
all. The Catskill Mountains, the real high Catskill Mountains, were up goingtoward Albany, Kingston, that area. This was the foothills of the Catskills,further south from Ellenville in Ulster County, going up to Monticello, going up 40:00to Liberty, Parksville, Woodridge, Mountain Dale. There were all these prettycrummy little towns, and these places came alive during the summer, becausethere were bungalow colonies --- a sakh [a lot], there were a ton of bungalowcolonies. And there were lots and lots of hotels. There must've been about fivehundred hotels. There were little dumps like the place I played. Then there werethe big fancy ones like the Concord, the Grossingers, and the Windsor, andNemerson, and Stevensville Hotel, and places like that. I was working with twoolder musicians, and one of them was a trumpet player who kind of doubled onbass. Only thing is he played -- what he played on the bass couldn't be calledbass playing in any way. He just played whatever note came out of there; he wasjust going, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. But he played the trumpet. He hadteeth that were out of line, and his high note on the trumpet was the middle of 41:00the horn's range. And he was a really corny -- and the accordion -- the guyplayed mostly accordion. He played piano and accordion. He played all the songs,but he played 'em with wrong chords. And the first night out I told him, "Youknow somethin', Harry? You're playin' the wrong chords." He said to me, "Youyoung punk! You mean I'm thirty years in the business, you're tellin' me I'mplayin' wrong?" I said, "Suit yourself." The next day Harry takes me to meet myfirst Epstein brother, Isidore, or Chizik Epstein, played the saxophone in thereal old-fashioned style with a big vibrato, (imitates saxophone) sounded like atruck starting up. And these were -- but these guys played Jewish. They werereally -- they were my introduction to klezmer. But in those days, if you calleda guy a klezmer, it was an insult. "You ought to punch him in the mouth, 'causehe's nothin' but a Klezmer." Klezmer means guy only plays these little, little,little Jewish songs, and he can't play, "Lady is a Tramp," (laughs) he can'tplay "Body and Soul," or g-- you know, whatever songs were the hip songs to 42:00play. These guys didn't know. But what they did for me was more than I canimagine. First of all, Ralph, the trumpet player and bass player, he sang prettybadly, but he sang all the Yiddish theater songs. "Shteytele belts [Little townof Belz]," "Sheyn vi di levone [Beautiful as the moon]," "Bay mir bistu sheyn[To me you are beautiful]" in Yiddish, of course, and "A bisl zun, a bisl regn[A little sun, a little rain]." So, I got to learn all these songs very quickly.These were not in the Kammen book. These you had to learn, you know. There wereother folios around, so I picked up a couple of those. But also, I was able topick up the Yiddish words, because that was my training ground in Yiddish. So, Iwas not only learning the repertoire, I was learning the Yiddish language. Andsome of the things that people talked about in the Yiddish culture I learned 43:00about not at home, 'cause my parents didn't want to know from it; I learned fromthe people in the Catskills who were the guests at those hotels.
CW:Yeah, who were the guests?
PS:They were older people, basically, who were coming up to the country for a
little -- you know, they came up for a couple of weeks, so they would playshuffleboard, they would play whatever it was, you know, and then they would --we would play some dance music for them, play waltzes and foxtrots and rhumbasand whatever. The cha-cha became popular. We played the merengue for them, youknow, whatever it was. And to them, this was a real vacation. But some of thehotels that I played at, they -- there was lot of chicks in those hotels:zibntshiks [seventies], akhtshiks [eighties], and nayntshiks [nineties].(laughter) Which meant -- this was the average age of the guests at the hotel.So, they wanted us to play, (singing) "Vos zanen mayn zibn gite yorn [Where didmy seven good years go]?" You know, so we learned a bunch of those things. 44:00(singing) "Dertseyl mir alter, dertseyl mir geshvind vayl ikh vil visn vu alesatsind [Tell me, old one, tell me right away, because I want to know whereeverything has gone]." And we -- this was important. I learned "Romania,Romania," I learned up in the Catskills from these things. I do it.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:I do all these things. And then, I learned some of the Israeli music, you
know, the "Hava Nagila."
CW:That was up in the Catskills, too?
PS:I learned -- we start-- we would play -- whatever hora music we played were
Israeli, because the old klezmer bulgars were gone, and nobody wanted to hearthem. They wanted to hear (singing) "Havinu shalom aleichem [Hebrew: We broughtpeace unto you]," you know. They wanted to hear (singing) "Hava nagila," and --what do you call it? (singing) "Artzah alinu, artzah alinu, artzah alinu[Hebrew: We ascended to the Land, we ascended to the Land, we ascended to theLand]." These were the ones that we basically played, and (singing) "Tzena,tzena, tzena, tzena ha-banot u-r'ena hayalim ba-mosheva [Hebrew: Go out, go out,go out, go out girls and see soldiers in the moshav]," and that kind of song.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And the bulgars -- the first time I ever heard a bulgar was --- must have
45:00been off a Dave Tarras record. I got some Dave Tarras -- a friend of mine made atape and I copied that tape, and I learned a bunch of things off of that. So,all of a sudden, I had a small inkling of what the klezmer thing was. Then, whenI played with Dave, I was nineteen. I got to play with Dave. Because these --Ralph and Harry hired him to do a job. Most of the things that he played werenot his real European freylekhs and bulgar material; most of it was the Yiddishtheater stuff. But, of course, Dave was Dave.
CW:Can you describe what he was like?
PS:Yes. He was a very proud man. I was a kid, nineteen years old. He takes a
look at me and says, "I am teacher of clarinet. All the best players come tome." In other words, get down on the floor and lick my boots. And I would be 46:00playing, like, kinda harmony parts. I kinda laid back because I was afraid ofthis guy. But he would play, and, you know, these pearls would come out. Well,the first Epstein brother that I met was one of the ones who led me into this.And when I went to him -- when Berman took me, when Harry took me to the placewhere he was working in the Catskills, he looked at me -- he was a short guywith a big, fat belly, and I was like a head taller than him. He looked up at meand says, "How do you do? How do you like this chords?" As I said, as if to say,"nishto gedakht," "don't even think about it." We got a little laugh out ofthat. As a matter of fact, a bunch of funny stories came out of that. We weredoing a job in a hotel, Chi Epstein, myself, couple of other guys, guys whodoubled on violin, and Chi Epstein (laughs) and I were standing back there, and 47:00they were playing "All The Things You Are," which is an extremely complex song.It goes into every key on the chromatic scale. And there's Ralph with his bass.He takes his bow, and the song is in the key of A-flat, so he picks out anA-flat, and he played nothing but an A-flat all the way through this. While thesong was going into E, into G, into this or that, he's playing an A-flat. Wewere doubled over. He'd come off the stage, Ralph, and he goes (claps twice),"How'd ya like that, fellas? With a bow, eh? With a bow!" (laughs) We couldn'ttell him, you know, this idiot, he -- well, the problem was that I came up inthe bottom of the music business. These guys were really awful, and themusicians I played with were terrible. But it was a good education for me. I hadto, first of all, block them out, because if I try to play a harmony part, acorrect harmony part, (laughter) it would clash with what these shmegeges[losers] were playing. So, it was really like, you know -- but I didn't get my 48:00enjoyment out of that. My enjoyment was playing jazz.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:I used to jam with my friends. That was the real enjoyment. But the money
that I was making doing this (UNCLEAR), I didn't have to take an allowance frommy mother anymore. I was -- I was a working man. And plus, I was learning allkinds of repertoire, and that's what gave me the Jewish. That mainly came frommy Catskills experience.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And, of course, to be able to speak some Yiddish. And I found that I could do
it, because I knew enough German. I'd studied three years of German in highschool, and my first year in college I had a year of German, as well. And Ispoke German fairly well.
CW:Was it all in Yiddish in the Catskills?
PS:No!
CW:No.
PS:Not at all. Not the places that I were working. The only places that really
were Yiddish -- there were some places which attracted a clientele where theywanted Yiddish entertainment and all that kind of stuff. Now, I did find one 49:00year that in that place in Mountain Dale, they had a comedian come in who dideverything in Yiddish. His name was Mikhl Rosenberg, and he was known. He was amaster. He comes up over there with a poker face, didn't crack a smile. But hewas telling these stories in Yiddish. The people were on the floor. Now, Iunderstood maybe about a third of what it was that he was saying. Today I wouldunderstand much more. But I think we played for Jenny Goldstein. Jenny Goldsteinwas a Yiddish theater star. I didn't get to meet th-- some of those people, likeSeymour Rexite and things, until I was already much later on. I got to meetMolly Picon, and I got to meet Seymour Rexite, and I got to meet some peoplelike that, Fyvush Finkel, and all of these. But, it was a start. 50:00
CW:So, at that time -- you know, we -- I think of the Catskills, and sometimes
you think of, you know, blacklisted artists. Was politics -- were you aware ofthat when you were out there?
PS:Sure, I was aware of that! My mother was right in the middle of it. We were
"Save The Rosenbergs." Are you kidding? I knew about the blacklisted people. Butthe hotel we played at now, the, the play-- the hotels we were playing at wereso cheap, they wouldn't have paid the price, 'cause the blacklisted guys(laughs) wanted some kind of a living wage . These places were paying garbage.
CW:Right.
PS:No, they were too lower-class.
CW:Yeah. So, who were your -- I mean, you've mentioned some of them, but I'll
ask: who were your main mentors --
PS:Okay.
CW:-- in music?
PS:Now, my father, of course, was the first one, and he was very important,
because he was a good musician.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
PS:The Epstein boys were four brothers: Chi, the first one, we used to call Chi;
PS:I bought an electric keyboard, and I asked some of my friends who were -- I'd
been playing -- I was a sax player. I was playing on the job. I kinda listenedto them. I asked them some -- for some hints what kind of instrument to get, howto do this, how to do that and the other thing, walk a bass line in the lefthand and all that stuff. Well, because I played the Fats Waller stride pianostyle, I learned easily how to play one-finger basslines for electric keyboard.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And then, because I had the stride style going for me, I became a Dixieland
guy, as well.
CW:Um-hm. Can you describe -- we're gonna keep going on this, but just before we
do, can you describe --
PS:Yeah.
CW: -- what was a typical Hasidic gig?
PS:Well, it all depends on where. If you played in Williamsburg, that was mainly
Satmar Hasidim, so you had, you know, the full beards and the hats. I also 60:00played -- in Crown Heights I played the Lubavitch weddings. And when I first gotstarted in that originally, if you played for Bobov, you had to play Bobovsongs. If you played for Satmar, you had to play Satmar songs. If you played forLubavitch, you had to play Lubavitch songs. Later on, it kind of all became, youknow, farmisht [mixed up]. It became like a pot of cholent.
CW:So, who did you learn the nigunim [melodies] from?
PS:I learned the nigunim on the job.
CW:On the job.
PS:On the job. Also, Rudy Tepel had made a couple of recordings, one Lubavitch
recording and one regular Hasidic stuff, European, like Modzitz and Satmar andall these things. I copied down all the songs on that record and I learned them.As I was writing, I learned the songs.
CW:So, by then, you're -- you said earlier on you weren't so good at writing,
but by then from -- you had till then --
PS:Oh yeah, by then, I had already picked it up.
CW:Yeah.
PS:Yeah. And I could write very fast, because, as I say, I hear exactly what it
is, and I just go bang, bang, bang. So, also I became an arranger, and be-- to 61:00become an arranger you have to be able to do that, and I -- so I did.
CW:And did you have to -- like, for the Catskills gigs, did you have to sight
read, you know, whatever they put in front of you?
PS:Yeah, sure.
CW:Yeah.
PS:And I wasn't that great at it, but I became better as I went along. But those
hotels, you know, the kind of bands we had were so bad at that -- (laughter) --the people who came, the acts that came in over there knew that they would get-- they were gonna get murdered anyway.
CW:Mm. So, I kind of have this impression that you have two careers going on,
you know, simultaneously.
PS:That's right, yeah.
CW:Can you explain that?
PS:M'zol makhn a lebn. Un tsu makhn a lebn, zol men shpiln ale muzik. [You have
to make a living. And to make a living, you need to play all music.] In otherwords, I had to play Dixieland music. That was more for my own enjoyment, but ofcourse, there were jobs, there were Dixieland jobs, so I made some money onthat. When we played the regular American, you know, Jewish American kinds ofjobs, it was mostly American music that, as time went on, was more and more 62:00rock. And we had to also play the various Latin styles and all those things, andwhatever else, and the new show tunes came out, you know, Barbra Streisandmaterial became popular, and this became popular, that became popular, you know.Had to learn some things from Blood, Sweat & Tears. You know, whatever was outthere, Chicago, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the kinds of groups. Beatles songs -- whenBeatles songs came in, man, everybody had to learn all the Beatles songs, so I did.
CW:And you were up at the Catskills until the very end. You said your last
summer --
PS:Well, yeah. Here was my Catskills thing. Fifty-seven, '58, '59, '60 I went to
Europe with a Dixieland band, college Dixieland band. I went to Europe.
CW:Where'd you go?
PS:Mostly Germany, and also Holland. Were we in Belgium then? No, we weren't.
63:00Where else? We went West and East Germany at the time.
CW:What was that like?
PS:Well, you know, Germany at the time was wiederaufbau; everything was being
reconstructed. And every place you went there were cranes, they were buildingup, they were tearing down all the old things. When we were in Berlin, the firsttime I was in Berlin, we actually took an Army tour, and at that time there wasno wall yet, so we went around. It looked like -- the Russians actually leftEast Germany to look as horrible as -- well, because, you know, the Russianswere the ones who suffered the most under them, so they paid 'em back --
CW:Um-hm.
PS:-- in spades. And I played in a couple of clubs, a club in Frankfurt am Main.
Berlin, we played Army things. They hired us mainly to do, like, Army, 'causeAme-- the American Army was a big, big presence, and be-- well, because the 64:00Communists were right over the border. So, here we were protecting ourfreedom-loving friends in Germany -- you know what I mean. Well, I learned thehard way. But --
CW:Can you explain more what you mean?
PS:Well, I was able to speak enough German to get by over there, and "Alle
Mentshen sind Brüder, Alle -- aber Ich war im Armee, Ich war im Luftwaffe[German: All men are brothers, all -- but I was in the Army, I was in the AirForce]," und Alle [German: and all] so they would immediately tell you what partof the Armed Forces they were in. And you could hear, you know. You knew. Youjust knew. And also, we didn't say, "Ich bin ein Jude." Nein. Das passt nicht.[German: "I am a Jew." No. You can't do that.] Can't do that. Oh, no. And Isounded like -- you know, when I spoke German, I sounded like I was speakingGerman, not Yiddish. And it was a strange experience, put it that way. But, it 65:00was -- hey, listen, I was a kid of twenty. I learned --
CW:What did your parents think when you went to Germany, or Europe, for the
first time?
PS:I don't know. I thought they kind of approved of it. You know, it was a nice
idea for me to go over there, and it was a great experience, you know. Nothinguntoward actually happened, but, you know. But you cou-- you feel -- they feel adraft. (laughs) Hey, that wasn't that far after the war. It was fifteen yearsafter the war was ended, 1960 -- neunzeh sechzig, ehe die Maue, die Maue wasschon nicht gebaut [German: 1960, before the wall, the wall wasn't built yet],you know? It wasn't built yet.
CW:Right. Can we go back and tell me what, you know -- you grew up, basically,
during the war. What do you remember of that?
PS:Very, very slight. I was three, four, five years old. There were -- sometimes
the air raid sirens would go off. They would have these drills, things like 66:00that. Once in a while, people would have to -- you know, turn off their lightsand then pull the shades down and all that kind of stuff. And the defense guyswould walk around the streets checking it out. I do remember one interestingthing: when my mother listened to news broadcasts, she listened to WEVD, and shelistened to the Yiddish, so that, you know, she understood more than she wouldadmit to. So, they were listening to the Yiddish broadcast, zoln di kinder nishtfarshteyn, you know what I mean. And I remember at the very end of the war, whenVE Day came around, they had effigies of Hitler and Mussolini hanging, but thewar really -- you know, I was a kid of five. It didn't really, didn't reallypenetrate. It wasn't that kind of thing.
CW:Do --
PS:I had no idea of any Holocaust or anything like that. No idea.
PS:I found out about that a few years later. You know, I was ten, eleven,
twelve. That's when it began to happen. You began to hear about these things.
CW:And you mentioned before the -- with the -- people wanted to hear the Israeli tunes.
PS:Yeah.
CW:How did the rise of Israeli culture affect the music, Jewish music scene in
the Catskills, and the Yiddish not being as desirable, maybe?
PS:Well, you see, for dancing, the "Hava Nagila" became the thing. And, you
know, the people who were of that generation were first-generation Americans,and my group was second-generation Americans. They weren't, you know -- DaveTarras and Naftule and all that kind of stuff meant nothing to them anymore. And 68:00so, it's a Jewish song, that's all. So, you played -- these were the ones weplayed for that sort of thing.
CW:And you knew Dave Tarras. I mean, how did he re--
PS:Very well.
CW:How did he react to that?
PS:He learned some of those songs, too. Hey, like all the other guys. They had
to learn that, so what the people want to hear, so you do it. Maxie Epstein madea klezmer album, and the guy wanted him to put "Hava Nagila" on it, so Maxie dida klezmer version of "Hava Nagila." And Dave Tarras's son-in-law, Sammy Musiker,who I never met -- oh, boy, do I wish I had. I also wish I had met Naftule. WhenI was in Shloime Ehrenreich's Hotel, Naftule was in the same town, Loch Sheldrake.
CW:This is Brandwein, right?
PS:Yeah. I didn't get a chance to hear him, because I had no car, and nobody
would've taken me over there. And he was a gue-- they -- he was a free,non-paying guest at the Overlook Hotel, which was in the same town. And he would 69:00sit there and drink. Naftule was an alcoholic. He would sit there and drink. Andonce a night or twice a night, he would pick up his clarinet and start to play.He's still good. He was still good. He didn't sound like he did when he wasyoung, but he could still play. And I missed that opportunity. I didn't reallyget a chance to hear Naftule until I heard his recordings. That's too bad. Well,I wasn't old enough. Lot of guys I knew used to play with Naftule. They knewhim. Sidney Beckerman did, and Howie Leess did, and some of those guys, all theold trumpet players, [Louie Levinsky?], and certainly, Willie Epstein playedwith him. And Maxie Epstein, I think, did too.
CW:Um-hm. So, you were really of a different generation, obviously, than these
people you were playing with. What was it like to be the young guy? (laughter)
PS:You wanna know something? I was an apprentice. And I was, like -- did
70:00consider myself fortunate enough to be playing with these people, I always had afeeling for history. I liked old cars. I could tell the year of all the old cars-- '33 Buick, '32. I knew the difference in style. I knew the difference insound from the bands I heard and all that, from the old recordings and things.And imagine being able to play with, like, Louis Armstrong. Well, Dave Tarraswas Louis Armstrong. He was a pioneer. And I got a chance to play with theseguys. You listen to a guy like Maxie, boy, I'm telling you. A yidishe tam [AJewish flavor]. (clears throat) And being that they approved of me, and theyliked me, they thought that I was talented, can't go wrong with that. Can't beatit, I'll tell you something, because I really worked at it. It was something 71:00that was -- I was motivated. Even though it was old music, I liked it. I really,you know -- every dance music has got its own kind of swing: the Irish --
CW:Um-hm.
PS:-- the bluegrass. Well, the Jewish had its own kind of swing. I got to play
with some of those old drummers: (imitates drumming) Benny Zuger, Irving Gratz,Willie Coleman. I got to play with some of these real old-time drummers. Man,that was a kick. Well, the old Dixieland drummers used to play like that, too.(imitates drumming) The Dixieland drummers used to play like that. So, it's likebeing in the middle of an old-time record. It's a tremendous feeling. I stillplay once in a while with bands that -- we play swing-style stuff from the late'30s, and it sounds like an old band. It's supposed to.
CW:Yeah. Do you have any favorite stories from gigs?
PS:Well, let's see -- you know, I did so many of them.
PS:Well, like I say, Ralph playing the one note, that's one of the funny stories
of that thing over there. (pauses) Gee. The problem is the older I get, thefarther back it g-- it becomes, you know? It's kinda tough to (pauses) -- whilewe were playing in Europe, I went to Europe with the Epstein brothers, andWillie was playing a solo, and all of a sudden he just drops. I thought, Oh myGod, he must've had a heart attack. His false teeth fell out. (laughter) He hadfalse teeth. You know, playing the trumpet, the trumpet, you have to pushagainst the teeth. (laughter) That's what happened; the false teeth fell out.
CW:So, when did you go with them to Europe?
PS:Originally in 1992. That comes after the next part of the story.
PS:I think we should -- I think we should get to that.
CW:Let's, let's -- yeah. Any other funny stories before then, before we get to that?
PS:I was doing a bar mitzvah in Long Island, in Lynbrook. There was a place
called the Beth David of Lynbrook. And there was a hot-shot guy who was a real,like, a kind of a just this side of illegal business kind of a guy, and he wasthrowing a bar mitzvah for his kid. And there was a flower place with a verticalsign that had movable letters, like a movie theater would have. You know,"azaleas this price," that thing. He took that thing and he hired it out, andnow it said, "This way to Alan Brownstein's bar mitzvah. And so, we go into theplace over there, and he has a monkey handing out yarmulkes. Well, the monkeyfell asleep. (laughter) And so, I don't know what happened to the yarmulkes, but 74:00-- I did two of those for him, but this one particularly had the monkey. Andthey would ride into the ballroom on, like, little motorcycles and things likethat, and -- God, so -- some of these people were so ridiculous. It was really,like, (laughs) the morons, you know? Had no idea what they were supposed to bedoing. And this was supposed to be a bar mitzvah? I mean, that's not what a barmitzvah's all about. My sons had real bar mitzvahs. But oh, okay, never mind.But the -- there were -- there was the monkey handing out the yarmulkes andsilly stuff like that. You know, this -- some of these, some of these thingswere -- oh, yes, I did a few landsmanshaftn for a refugee leader. (laughs) Thisman was unbelievable. His name was Al Peratin, P-e-r-a-t-i-n, Peratin. He had awife who played the piano, badly. I was one of the saxophone players. For some 75:00reason or other, this was the Diplomat Hotel on Forty-Third Street near SixthAvenue, Manhattan, and it was a landsmanshaft, and they're singing "TheStar-Spangled Banner," and all of a sudden, the bubbles -- they'd had a bubblemachine, like Lawrence Welk used to have, and the bubbles are coming out in themiddle of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the "Hatikvah." These bubbles arecoming out. He put together a band, this Peratin. He had another saxophoneplayer on the job who looked like he just stepped out of a coffin. He waswearing an outfit -- at that time, 1960 or so, the lapels were thin, had smallbowties. This guy was wearing a mohair suit with airplane lapels,double-breasted style, spats on his shoe. He looked like something out of 1925. 76:00And to get a vibrato out of the horn, he shook it, so it was (makes sound), likethat. His name was Iggy, Iggy Levinson. I still remember to this day. And oy,what a horror. We had a trumpet player who sounded like -- there was a guy usedto play for Paul Whiteman called Henry Buzzy who played with a sound, (imitatessound) like a nanny-goat. This band starts to play, and it was all I could dofor falling on the floor laughing. And the old lady was going bang, bang, bang,bang, bang, bang, bang, and he pl-- the -- Peratin with his drum -- he had abass drum like this going (imitates drumming noise). It sounded like a bunch ofCzechoslovakians trying to play jazz, at that time. See, later onCzechoslovakians learned how to play jazz, but this was 1960. The trumpet playerwalks out. As it turned out, he was also a cantor. So, I say to Peratin, "Hey,where's he going?" (imitates accent) "I promised him he wouldn't take the job 77:00unless I let him go and do a tseremonye [ceremony]." Where's that tseremonye?Lower East Side on Kaplan. So, he gets on the F train and goes down. So, hedisappears. We're playing some French waltzes, at that time French waltzes,(sings wordlessly), (singing) "The lovely river Seine," (sings wordlessly). Thisguy comes running in, pushing people off the dancefloor, out of his way. He wasin a coat, this trumpet player. He jumps up on the stage, cuts a measure in ahalf, and starts going, (singing) "Shteyt a meydl un zi trakht [A girl standsand she thinks]." The whole band fell apart, didn't know what to do. And I lookat him and I said, "What the hell are you doin'?" And he says, "Azey redt mentsu a zeyde [This is how you address a grandfather]? I am the older one. I'm --I should be respected." Not only was he a horrible trumpet player, he was alousy singer, too. So, this -- the whole band almost fell apart. (imitatesaccent) "What's the matter with my band?" (laughter) The leader was -- Peratin'syelling, "What's the matter with my band? Oy, oy, oy!" I worked about four or 78:00five of these. And after those jobs, I -- across the street was a differenthotel where some of my --- the guys were working. I went over there, and Ilooked at Harry, the old accordion player, and he looked at me. We started tolaugh uncontrollably. I started describing this music. It was just -- it was,like, from an old -- an early talkie from either, like, Poland, or something, orLithuania, something like that. Never heard a music like this in my life. Andhere I was, like, a hip -- you know, I was -- (laughter) -- how'd he end up inthis place? He says, (imitates accent) "Kid, you're terrific. I give you all thejobs." I said -- what could I say to him? I said, "Okay, fine." The only thingthat I must say about him is that he paid me the full union scale and the otherguy wouldn't. But, all right, so I worked with -- I worked with a bunch of 79:00people that were -- they were so horrible as not even to be described. But inthose years, you know, not like when the DJs took over. All those guys weredrummed out of the business very quickly. When the DJs took over, all of us gotdrummed out of the business. You can forget about the whole thing; everythingwent underground. But that was the way it was, and these guys had jobs. They hadlots of work. Mamenyu [Dear mother]. (laughter) He said, (imitates accent) "Igot terrific band. I got a wiolin and a wibes." The wiolin, a wibes, avibraphone. And the girl who played the wibes, wibes was one of his -- they hadtwo daughters and a wife in there. It was the Peratin Family Band. The girl whoplayed the wibes put her foot down. It has a sustain pedal on it. The first notewas still ringing the -- at the end of the job. (laughs) The sound of this bandwas absolutely unbelievable. You -- I wish I had a recording of it. I really do.It was absolutely frightening. And yet, these people were booking work! Well, of 80:00course, you see, the refugees didn't know the difference. To them, it was fine.And also, he talked their loshn [language].
CW:Um-hm.
PS:(imitates accent) "I used to play the wiolin," he said. "I had a beautiful
wibrato." (laughs) Man! But he was a nice little guy. But the thing is this --he, he shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near a musical instrument. Oy vey.Yeah. They had a hotel they used to play in in the summer, and when the actsused to come over, they used to have to prepare themselves. They used to have todrink themselves to death, (laughs) you know. It's like, Oh my God, I'm going to-- I'm going to the Butler Lodge. What am I gonna do? I got the Peratins. Oy,oy, oy. Yeah, there were -- I started out in the -- in really the bottom rung. Iworked my way up. I ended up working with good players of my own age, and I wasjust as happy to do that.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:Now, I was working with Dave in the mid, early to mid-'70s. He still had a
81:00couple of jobs left, and it was very nice, because he put together some goodbands, and it was always -- you know, you always had nice music when you had aguy like Dave. And of course, with the Epstein boys, I was the fifth Epsteinbrother. I used to sit in the bandstand and watch 'em fight. Well, as long asMaxie was, you know -- Maxie was -- all of them were good. Julie was a gooddrummer. Julie played good, good Dixieland drums, too. He used to take me on hisDixieland jobs.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:I was his good luck charm. Took me on society jobs. I went to work for Lester
Lanin, and I worked for people like that. The funny thing is that the klezmerthing came along in the late '70s.
CW:How?
PS:Henry Sapoznik's father was the cantor in our local synagogue on Avenue S,
the Marine Park Jewish Center. And I remember once we were there on a RoshHashanah, and I see this guy with a ponytail and a white suit, and I said, "Oy, 82:00an umglik hot mir bakumen [Oh, what terrible luck]. Imagine that. These poorpeople. Look at that son they have over there, a hippie." Well, he was kind of ahippie. Well, we managed to get together somehow, and he brought over some ofhis friends, some of these guys who were doing research, and they brought mesome recordings and asked me to talk about them. And I played them some of thestuff that I had. By that point, I had a few of the Dave Tarras things. Theyplayed me all these Naftules, and I picked up a bunch of recordings of that. So,I started to learn some of the stuff that was before my time yet. Then Henry gotthe idea that -- well, firstly, he formed the band called Kapelye, and he wantedme to be the clarinet player in Kapelye. I said no. I'm -- at that time, I wasliving in (UNCLEAR). I was married. I said, "No, I can't do that. I havechildren. I can't go --" You know, these guys were barnstorming. They were all 83:00single. I can't do that. And besides that, I didn't want to go back to being aclarinet player anymore. I was playing keyboard. That was where I wanted to be.When he got the idea for KlezKamp, I was the -- one of the first ones he evertold about it. Nineteen eighty-three, he got this idea. "Now listen, I'm gonnado this thing. You know, I want to --" "Hm," I said, "that sounds interesting."Well, when he formed the first KlezKamp, I brought him Sid Beckerman. And so, Iwas the first clarinet teacher in KlezKamp, 1985. Netsky taught piano that year;I taught clarinet. So, Sidney and I team taught. I would say, "Here's a way todo -- Sidney, show 'em." And Sidney would play his little thing. Because Sidneywas not much of a talker, but he could demonstrate. And he also did very wellone-on-one. He would say, "Try this, try that, try the other thing over there." 84:00So, we would -- a kid would come up and start playing a little thing, and Sidneywould say, "Why don't you try doing it this way?" It worked perfectly. It reallywent very well. So, we became two of the big s-- I made Sidney into a big star.He says, "Now that I'm a big star, do I still have to take out the garbage?" Andfor Sidney, that was a wonderful thing, because people always considered him tobe, like, third-rate. He was not -- you know, he didn't have the real -- DannyRubinstein who really played -- that was Howie Leess's cousin -- and Howie, andPaul [Pinkerson?] was a real great classical clarinet player, really could playthe music. Sidney played -- (imitates delicate playing). But meanwhile, if youlisten to Sidney a little bit, and you hear that he doesn't sound just like theother guy -- he sounds like himself. That was the thing that really went over.So, I went to Sidney, and I said -- we took him on a job. We -- Henry and Ibooked a job, and we took Sidney on the job. And Sidney ran away from me. I 85:00said, "You s-- never gonna do this to me again. I'm coming to your housetomorrow." So, I went to his house with a little keyboard and a littlebattery-powered keyboard and a battery-powered amplifier, and a -- you know, alittle Sony Walkman recording machine. I said, "Okay, play." He played aboutforty or fifty tunes. I took 'em home. As I was writing 'em down, I learned thecorrect harmonies for them. And by the time the next job came around, I kneweverything that Sidney taught me. He was shocked, couldn't believe it. Then hecouldn't go anywhere without me, because I was the only guy who could play hisstuff. And so, we went up over there --
CW:So, what was different about what he played?
PS:The style was a little bit different. He didn't play with as -- it wasn't
quite as yidishe tam, but it still was -- it was very Jewish, of course, but the 86:00sound was -- he had very, very little vibrato. It was kind of a (imitates sound)kind of a sound, not like the -- when you hear a Dave or a Maxie, you could hearmore vibrato coming out of the thing, where Sidney had very little. But you knowsomething? By the time we made the "Klezmer Plus!" album, I had Howie on the saxand Sidney on the clarinet, and a good trumpet player. Sidney was not your -- hecouldn't go into a recording studio and read (snaps) everything right off, butwe were all playing stuff that he was so familiar with. And I said, "Okay,you'll play this one, you'll play this one, you'll play this one," and I gavehim a little list of things. "We're gonna play here. I'll play a little bit, heplays a little bit, et cetera." That record came out great! And Sidney became --oh, man, everybody started copying his stuff. We heard an Argentine groupplaying -- repertoire off that record. So, what's this all about? Oh, boy, Ididn't know it, but people were copying my stuff. So, you know, KlezKamp became 87:00-- later on, we brought some more -- I brought up Paul Pincus, high qualityclarinet player -- Howie Leess, I brought up there, so Sidney, Howie Leess, him.I brought up Julie Epstein, the drummer. And we introduced them to some of theolder generation of the music. Because, you know, the Frank Londons were into adifferent kind of a thing.
CW:Well, so, you said when Hank Sapoznik had this idea you thought it was
interesting. What -- I mean, what did he -- how did he pitch it? What did he say?
PS:Well, he wanted to make a seminar out of the thing, to teach young, aspiring
Jewish musicians how to play the style. That caught me right away. And so, wedid it, and it became the place to be. Actually, when KlezKanada was founded, it 88:00was founded much, much later, and KlezKanada was a cheap copy of what we did.
[BREAK IN RECORDING]
CW:You saw the -- things were changing, when -- by the time KlezKamp changed --
came around. What had changed in the way that you were playing out or in theJewish music scene?
PS:Well, a lot of young people were now in there, and they began to put -- pop
effects in there. And, you know, most of these were not familiar with the oldways at all. These were American kids. And what they would do would be to kindof -- it seemed to me that much of what they were doing sounded like acaricature of the music. It didn't have the flavor of the real thing. But I 89:00learned, to my dismay, that the people wanted a caricature. They didn't want thereal flavor. The real flavor was too old-fashioned for them. They wantedsomething that had a kind of a -- after all, if you listen to Frank London, itsounds like a mixture of, like, av-- post-avant-garde jazz and rock and roll.It's only guys like me; we're the only ones left, and I'm one of the few that'sleft now at all, because almost all those guys I had up in KlezKamp are deadnow. Sidney's gone, Paul, Howie Leess is gone. They're all gone.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:I'm one of the last ones left. And yet, I still doggedly hold on to this
thing, because I like that sound. I like the real sound. See, what's his name,Andy Statman had it. But Andy got tired of playing the Naftule tunes over and 90:00over again, and he started making up his own things. He's got this kind ofchanting thing that he does. So, he doesn't do that anymore, either. And most ofthe Klezmer bands that play have been either students of KlezKanada or studentsof the other place, and they just -- the problem is that the style is theweakest part of that music.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:It's -- doesn't have the -- what I would consider to be the real, the real --
it doesn't have the correct swing to it. It doesn't have the melodic phrasingthat the music requires. And, well, of course, when you hear people speakingYiddish, you can tell that, yes and no, if you know what I mean.
CW:So, you taught -- you know, as you just said, you taught many of the people
CW:Did you like teaching? What did you like about --
PS:What did I like about it? Because it gave me an opportunity to show people
what the real thing was about. I had good and bad. I had some pupils over therewho really, really -- weren't really, you know, into working at it. Sometimes Iturned out some very good ones. I had one band, oh, boy, that was around thelate '80s or so. Boy, that thing sounded -- I called the Longines Symphonette.That was a large group, and I had good players in there. I had one pianist. Ishowed him how to do certain style of piano, so, boy, this guy jumped on thatthing like nobody's business.
CW:Hm.
PS:Once in a while, you really get some winners. But, you know, the rest of the
thing -- most klezmer bands are quite amateurish. Well, has to be, because thekind of people who are playing it are not professionals who -- like guys like 92:00me. Well, the fact of the matter is that when we started teaching this music toother people, they took away our livelihood eventually. Some of our studentsbecame the next bandleaders, and people took them -- also, some of them werewomen leaders; that was a hip thing to do at the time. And, you know, we kindalooked like a bunch of old guys. People don't want old guys.
CW:Hm.
PS:That's what happens.
CW:Yeah. What do you think of this term that everyone uses, "klezmer revival"?
PS:Well, it's a revival. That's exactly what it was, because when it started --
you know, the klezmer revival is old. It started in 1978, '79, '80. That'sthirty-odd years ago, thirty-five years. Think about it. The klezmer music --what happened was that during the war, especially, the music that had been 93:00klezmer -- they were old people, people who had come over in 1890s, 1900s, 1910sor something like that. Those people were already old. They were beginning todie off. Their children liked Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, whatever it was.Jewish music was tertiary, or even quadruple someplace. You know, it was goingdown in people's -- so by the time that I came into the business, nobody wantedto hear it anymore. It was just about gone. So, when this Israeli stuff came in,it was much simpler. Here's Sammy Musiker. Sammy Musiker was Dave Tarras'sson-in-law. His daughter married Sammy. Sammy was a giant of a clarinet player. 94:00He was a featured clarinet soloist on a very good swing band, Gene Krupa.(clears throat) And boy, could Sammy play. Well, Sammy invented a form ofklezmer that he thought was gonna catch the people's ear. He's gonna take thebo-- the best qualities of klezmer and swing and put them together in a newklezmer style. And so, he wrote all kinds of stuff that was -- went from one keyto the other, and all over the place over there. It sounded like more -- youknow, like advanced swing already. People (UNCLEAR), What the hell's he doing?(laughs) And then, along came (singing) "Hava Nagila, Hava --" Goodbye, Sammy.Sammy was in the Army. He was drafted into the Army. He was there for fiveyears, from '41 to '46. He comes out of the Army. Number one, the clarinet's nolonger popular; everything is sax, although Sammy played good sax. But there 95:00were so many saxophone players, you know. Sammy had a clarinet head. But, youknow, the few clarinet players that were left: Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, themodern guy, Buddy DeFranco. You know, the clarinet was not hip anymore. So,Sammy comes out of the Army, and what's he have to do now? He's married to DaveTarras's daughter. While he was in the Army, they got married. So, Sammy hadbeen working for Dave Tarras. Sammy is the -- Dave is the king and Sammy's thecrown prince. Do you think the king, who's still living and still at the heightof his powers, is gonna give the crown prince? Go away from here. So, Sammywanted to get away from Dave. He wanted to be a musical personality, and hethought with this klezmer swing, that would do it -- but it was too complex.What he did was he overestimated the intelligence of his audience. The audience 96:00are a bunch of dummies. After all, the audience would buy Al Peratin; theaudience would buy Ralph Kahn. That's what they were buying, and people lovedit. Ralph Kahn booked a lot of jobs. 'Cause they didn't know the difference.They didn't know what they were listening to. And so, what happened was that theIsraeli tunes came in, and all you needed were three or four of them to play ona job, and that was all. And okay, you'd play a little bit of the -- of thepopular "Sheyn vi di levone [Beautiful as the moon]" kind of stuff, and "Bay mirbistu sheyn," maybe two or three songs, so there was very, very little to play.Poor Sammy had to go back to club dates again, instead of becoming a jazzrecording star or radio star or something like that, like he was thinking ofdoing, like when he was with Krupa. "Oh, man, Sammy Musiker," you know. Nope,didn't happen. So, what happened was that the klezmer music went -- also, peoplethought of klezmer as being the music of a destroyed race. After all, European 97:00Jewry was practically destroyed, and the klezmer was a reminder of that. Israelwas the new, hopeful upcoming. "Hatikvah" -- (singing) "Kol od balevav penimah[Hebrew: As long as within a heart]" -- this is the coming place to hope. Andtheir new music was a music simplified that brought new hope to people. Listento this. (singing) "Artzah alinu, artzah alinu, artzah alinu!" Which is not(mimics playing clarinet) -- nah, that sounds too old-fashioned. That'sgrandma's music. Now, (singing) "Artzah alinu," that's for us. That's it.(singing) "Tzena, tzena, tzena, tzena ha-banot u-r'ena hayalim." Ah, that's thenew, modern -- well, then the Hasidic stuff came around. See, the Hasidim don'twant to know from the Israelis, because they consider the Israelis to be total 98:00goyim. So, they had their own (singing) "Yosis alayich elohayich," which isright in the middle of the klezmer and the Israeli. (sings wordlessly) It's muchsimpler than the (sings wordlessly). Well, what happened was that all thesemusicians like Dave and like Naftule who were really virtuosi on theirinstruments were making up these songs that challenged them, but the (laughs)audience didn't know from nothin'! But the Hasidic stuff is -- well, some rebbemade up a tune. (sings wordlessly) Very simple, that's it. (sings wordlessly) Weused to sing, (singing) "Old Man River, that Old Man River!" That's what wecalled that thing. And after a while -- see, the Hasidic music now, you wouldn't 99:00recognize it. It's rock and roll. It's a hundred percent rock and roll. A guycame over from Israel called Piamenta, Yosi Piamenta, who I played with manytimes. He introduced, first of all, seismic volume, and second of all, realrock. (singing) "We want moshiach now! Um-la-um-la-um-la-um! We want moshiachnow! Um-la-um-la-um." So, all of a sudden, all the bands, instead of playingclarinet, now you played saxophone. You had to -- and the honking style.(imitates saxophone) So, today's Israeli --- no, today's Hasidic dance music isnot really Hasidic anymore. It's rock and roll.
CW:So, how does the klezmer revival fit into that?
PS:It doesn't. In other words, the people who are doing the klezmer revival are
nonreligious people. They don't know about the Hasidic music. They don't want to 100:00know about the Hasidic music. They wanted to sound still a little bit Jewish, sothey add some rock effects to it, whereas the Hasidic music at present is allrock and roll. Every band has to have a guitar player. There were no guitarplayers when I first went in the business. The band used to be two trumpets,two, two reeds, so they could switch off on the clarinet, one keyboard, and adrummer. That was the band. And not anymore. Now they have electric bass.(imitates growling bass) (singing) "We want moshiach now." (laughter)
CW:When you look at the klezmer scene now, who do you respect?
PS:That's a difficult question for you to ask me. I was there when it was born.
The best young clarinet player in the line is Michael Winograd, without aquestion. As a matter of fact, I'm in a band with him. He also is able to go 101:00from place to place to place and say something. He's got a trumpet player namedBen Holmes who is absolutely superb. This guy plays such beautiful -- he soundslike my friend Marty Bass. It's a delight to listen to this boy. We have a bandcalled the Tarras Band. We play Tarras, Tarras rep. It's a nice band. It's anice band, keyneynehore [expression to ward off evil]. Yes, I think that -- see,Frank London is very creative. He has a lot of ideas. Sometimes I think heoverdoes it. But, then again, he has a big audience, and he also knows how tosell. Boy, does this guy know how to sell. So, his Klezmatics are one of thebest-selling bands in the so-called klezmer line. But much of it is quite pop-oriented. 102:00
CW:Hm.
PS:But he knows a heck of a lot. See, Netsky had a situation where he put
together a bunch of guys who were playing -- his ideal was the Abe Schwartzrecordings from the '20s, and he made a band sound like that. I don't know howbusy they are anymore. Not very, I don't think. See, guys like me, I'mpractically retired. They don't want me anymore.
CW:What has it been like to you -- for you to sort of mentor these young artists
that are now the main representatives of klezmer, Jewish music?
PS:Put it this way: they come to me, they ask me questions, I answer them. I
give it right off the top, like I do here. Same deal. They can take it or leaveit. I basically think, and I give my opinions. Sometimes my opinions are too 103:00old-fashioned for them, but I think I have somethin' to say. I feel that thereshould be a place where authenticity should be one of the characteristics of themusic. I am not interested in, you know, turning it into a different kind of athing than it really is.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:You notice one thing: bluegrass people play bluegrass; they don't put rock
and roll in there. And if they can do it, why can't we? Why does it have tosound like rock? Why does it have to sound like country and western? Why is ourmusic -- people say, Eh, it's too old. It's not my way of thinking. Well, I also 104:00play Dixieland music and that's plenty old.
CW:So, why do you think people do have that reaction to --
PS:Why do they have that reaction? Audiences. I'm gonna be teaching a class this
year at KlezKamp called "Mayne libe tsuherer," or "My Dear Audience." What isthe audience? How -- what do they want to hear in the way of music? They liketrends. They like trends. That's what they're interested in. And a new trend isto have it sound like this or that or the other thing. My dear friend, JoshDolgin, who I love -- he's a great, funny guy, very, very bright -- he takes allthis hip-hop stuff, and he's got it all bah-bah-bah-bah. You can get the hip-hopstuff anyplace. What makes it Jewish? Nothing. It's hip-hop, okay? And I getinto arguments with him. That's my own fault. I should just say, "Do what here-- do what you want. Go away from me." And that's basically what I've learned to do. 105:00
CW:Um-hm.
PS:The problem with the audience is that they know very little and don't want to
be educated, okay? So, if you have a gimmicky sound that will produce, you know,a titillation, that will give the audience the kind of a feeling that, Yeah,okay, hey, what about -- isn't that fun? Oh, boy! But there is an art to this.Maxie was art. Dave was art. Naftule in his own way was art. Shlemke -- Sidneywas art. I played with all these great people. The style was -- bands weresolid. They were good. But for some reason or other, it just -- it doesn'tbehoove people anymore to be authentic. Certainly I feel that way about the -- 106:00as I said, if bluegrass can be played authentically and have a huge audience --people come and listen to it from everywhere -- what's the matter with theklezmer? For some reason or other, it's not hip to be authentically Jewish. Butnow, among the Orthodox, the Orthodox don't want to know from it. All they wantis this rock and roll. Well, I can't force feed them. That's all. So, I fadedinto the background. I play with my babies.
CW:Do you see any points of interaction between the Orthodox world and the
klezmer scene?
PS:No. The Orthodox world is essentially based upon using music for their
parties, and also it's got to have a God reference. If it doesn't have a Godreference, they don't want to know from it. Klezmer music is, essentially,instrumental music that may at one time have been God-centered, but it isn't -- 107:00you know, most of the music that the Orthodox people like are these singers:Shwekey, Lipa Schmeltzer, this one, that one. Lipa Schmeltzer's just a rock -- ahip-hop artist. The one I call the Michael Jackson of Jewish music, AvrahamFried, who happens to be a friend of mine. I like him; he's a nice guy. He wasin the choirs of Lubavitch when I was the house conductor there thirty yearsago, forty years ago. And Mordechai Ben David, (sings wordlessly) okay. They areselling rock/pop. So, what it has done is that it has cleared the performancearea of any real authenticity the music once had. When I came into Hasidicmusic, (phone rings) it was played like klezmer. We got two phone lines.
CW:Okay.
PS:All right, let the machine take it.
CW:Okay, let's wait for a sec.
F:(UNCLEAR) the ringing, yeah.
PS:It's too bad. So, I'm not in the house, then. (laughter) Okay.
CW:Okay.
PS:Yeah. Ask that same question again.
CW:(laughs) So, the -- we were talking about how the klezmer scene -- I mean,
PS:Oh yeah, the Orth-- relationship between the Orthodox --
CW:Yeah.
PS:-- and the klezmer.
CW:Yeah.
PS:There are a very, very few people, mainly Israeli types, who are really
basically very Hasidic type who like the clarinet sound. There's a guy calledKletzkin; I believe he plays very well. And there's another fellow over there; Iforget what his name is. But what they're doing is playing old klezmer tuneslike old klezmer. They're doing an authentic job of it. But certainly in thiscountry, the music that pervades that scene is pop music, with pop style. It hasbeen that way for the last twenty-five, thirty years.
CW:Hm. So, if you want to look -- what makes authentic Jewish music, in your opinion?
PS:It has to be -- first of all, it was performed by people who grew up in a
109:00totally Jewish milieu, and it had a quality of the music itself that was afolk-type music. Essentially, Klezmer music is dance music. I was shocked whenall of a sudden, I see people sitting in audiences listening to dance music? Weused to play it like it was dance music, you know? It has to have a quality ofthe sound that -- you can hear it immediately and say, "There it is, real Jewishmusic." It has to be Jewish. If it's full of rock and roll and full of all thatkind of stuff and full of, you know, Lester Bowie licks and things like that,it's not -- it's not really, you know -- it's just bastardized, frankly. 110:00
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And what can I tell ya? Listen, I'm guilty of it sometimes, too. I throw in
Fats Waller piano on some of my, some of my klezmer things. Because that happensto be a specialty of mine, but there's nobody else who could do it becausenobody else can. But it's a tough situation. When I was playing with Max, it wasalways because Max was totally true to the form. I just went with him. I justlaid right behind him. We just gave him that rhythm that he needed to play his stuff.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:And more than that, I can't say. It is a style. It had a style of its own. It
was its own thing. It was a mixture of nothing else. It was Jewish. Yeah, therewas a certain amount, you know, maybe you'd get a little Hungarian qualitybecause lot of those people played around the Gypsies, so a certain amount ofGypsy music did sink in there. Certain Polish, Russian, even Middle Eastern, 111:00Turkish and things like that. Well, that kind of stuff was endemic, you know.Naftule used to have a nice -- he had a feeling that he liked Turkish and Greekeffects in the music that he played, but he phrased it like Northern EuropeanJewish music.
CW:Hm.
PS:It had a Jewish quality. It sounded like khazones [Jewish liturgical music].
It sounded like a cantor singing. If it loses that cantorial feel, it's gone.That's what's required, okay?
CW:Yeah. Do you consider yourself an activist for this --PS:Not anymore, I
ain't. No. In other words, I have always been a guy who's involved in thebusiness of making music. People call me, I go, and I play it. This comingSunday, I'm going out to the White Plains Library with a nice little klezmer 112:00trio, and it's Ken Maltz and myself and Marty Confurius, the bass player, and wecall ourselves the Legends of Klezmer, because we are, at this point. We'replaying authentic klezmer. And --- (pauses) activist? Vos meynt dos, aktivist?Veys ikh nisht. [What does that mean, activist? I don't know.] (laughter) Inother words, when I get up and perform, I am an activist. Do I want to gorunning around and calling up people and knocking on doors and things like that?That's a businessman. Frank does that, not me. (laughter)
CW:What's the relationship with Yiddish language in your -- in your lifetime and
your career?
PS:Well, a certain amount of it -- I'm performing in Yiddish sometimes. You
113:00know, I certainly can speak -- I've known a lot of these Yiddishists and thingslike that, and I can talk to them in Yiddish. I did. I have. I do. It's a partof the thing, you know. It's part of the culture.
CW:What role do you see yourself as a performing artist playing in transmitting
Yiddish culture?
PS:Just doing my thing, and it's there. That's it. I just do my thing, and there
it is. I do it as authentically as I can, and some people like what I do.
CW:What do you see as the future of Jewish music?
PS:Future of Jewish music is gonna be more and more of the amalgam with the pop
thing. I have always said that when rock and roll comes in contact with any 114:00other form of music, rock and roll eats up the other music. Rock and roll is thedominant force in music, and has been for fifty years now. I can't believe itmyself. It's fifty years. I mean, the swing music only lasted for about fifteenyears, that's all, and boy, was that good. You had guys like Roy Eldridge andColeman Hawkins and Lester Young. Man, what great players and all that kind ofstuff. Well, after a while people just, eh, you know. (singing) "In the still,ang-ning-ning-ning-ning-ning-ning, of the --" or "Nothin' but a Hound Dog," or"Hold My" -- you know, "I Want To Hold Your Hand," or whatever else, or the --whatever all the pop things are going on.
CW:Mm.
PS:The young kids just love it. They look at me like I'm some kind of a
dinosaur. That's when I say to people I'm playing over here, "You're listeningto music for dinosaurs. Here I am, the original dinosaur." That's fine. I buy it.
PS:Because I am an old-time music performer, I like old-time music, I prefer it
to performing more -- other kinds of things, even though I can. Played lots ofrock and roll in my time, played lots of Latin in my time, played all thesethings. I played in Irish bands.
CW:Mm. Has there been a particularly -- when we talked about the disasters, has
there been a meaningful performance for you?
PS:What do you mean by that?
CW:Like, a particular gig that you played that was emotionally meaningful for you?
PS:Not really. I'm a pro. I go on the job and I do it. If the audience connects,
that's the only -- emotional thing that I have with it.
PS:Ven ikh muz, red ish. Ven ikh red mit laytn v'redn yidish. Ikh hob eyn zakh
vos ikh ti yeyde mol, ven ikh shpil far a grupe altitshke folk. Ikh zug tsu zeyazoy, "Vifl mentshn du farshteyn yidish?" [When I have to, I speak. When I speakwith people who speak Yiddish. There is one thing that I do each time that Iperform for a group of older people. I say to them, "How many of you understandYiddish?"] They look at me, hm. "Vifl mentshn farshteyn gornisht kayn yidish[How many of you don't understand any Yiddish]?" People raise their hands and Isay, Ah! (laughter) And so, okay, I have to translate for them, and very often Ido. I tell them -- "Dertseyl mir alter, dertseyl mir geshvind -- tell me, oldfella, tell me right away. Vayl ikh vil visn ales atsind -- I want to knoweverything right now." You know, so I do it line by line sometimes.
CW:Yeah.
PS:'Cause a lot of these people say, Ikh farshtey a bisele [I understand a
little]. I understand a lot more Yiddish than a lot of people. But as a matter 117:00of course, I don't really talk it, like, frequently with people.
CW:Um-hm.
PS:When I do, I do. I can.
CW:I just have one more question, but is there anything else, any other topics
we didn't get to you really want to -- anything you wanted to say?
PS:I don't think so. Not really. In other words, my two basic things are classic
jazz and this. And sometimes I mix 'em up a little bit, sometimes I don't. Alldepends on who I'm working with. All depends on what the situation is. A lot ofthe people that I work for are essentially Americanized people, and they want tohear some of the -- some of each. In other words, I go into American composersof Jewish derivation, like Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, et cetera. So, I do some oftheir material. And I tell the stories about Sholom Secunda and all that stuff, 118:00you know, so. Not really, because, as I say, I'm a pro. I go up there and Ientertain for the people. I have standard shtik [routine] that I do all thetime, and it works, 'cause most of the people I work for are older people. Mostof 'em range in age from late seventies to nearly ninety.
CW:Hm.
PS:So fine, I do it.
CW:Actually, I lied; I have a couple more questions. How did you meet your wife?
PS:How did I meet my wi-- how did I meet my wife? (laughter) Hey? You really
want to know?
CW:Yeah.
PS:We were in college together. Brooklyn College, my alter shmate [old rag].
Believe me, what a shmate [rag] that is now. Oy vey. We met in the musicdepartment over there. We were doing Gilbert and Sullivan type shows, and --what's his name? Offenbach and people like that, she used to do. She's a trainedsinger, classical singer. She sings in choirs now, Jewish choirs. And she has 119:00quite an exceptional sensitivity and knowledge of the -- her main thing when shewas young was Israeli stuff. That was what she really liked. She really didn'thave much of a feel for Yiddish, but she picked up Yiddish coming to KlezKamp,people like that, she had contact with people like Adrienne Cooper, who taughther some of the things about repertoire, and whatever it was, and she picked upa bunch of these things. As a matter of fact, in one of our -- what do you callit -- things for -- one of our memorials to Adrienne, I had her do "Vilna,"which was one of the songs that I learned from Adrienne. And she did a superb"Vilna," really. It was delightful. It was really, like, an excellent piece. Andso, we met -- I was like twenty, and she was about a year and a half younger,eighteen and a half, nineteen. You know, she was a little bit -- she ended upmajoring in English; I ended up majoring in music. And we married in 1962. We're 120:00married fifty-one years, keyneynehore, and we have two sons and sixgrandchildren, which is not a bad deal. And she's very sensitive to music. Shelikes what I do; I like what she does. And it's been very successful in that camp.
CW:And what kind of Jewish home did you create in your --
PS:There is the person who's responsible. She is the one who is responsible. Her
mother came from a family in which the grandfather, her grandfather was like arov [Orthodox rabbi]; was a very, very religious man. Now, he had lo-- ninesurviving children. They had some -- you know, the -- I don't have to tell youabout what went on there. And in that case, only three of them maintained anykind of Yiddishkayt at all. My mother-in-law was one of 'em. My father-in-lawwas really came -- a situation like my father, nonreligious people. He was alsoborn here to people from the other side. And funny thing is he ended up a 121:00chemistry teacher. My father ended up me-- he taught piano when he was a kid.So, my father (laughs) ended up teaching piano because he couldn't become achemical engineer. My father was a chemistry teacher at my high school, BrooklynTech. My mother was a librarian at her high school, James Madison. And so,obviously, it was bashert [predestined]. And when we were married about a yearor two or whatever, all of a sudden, the lights didn't go on anymore on Shabbos,turned off the light in the refrigerator. I didn't know what to do, because Ididn't want that. That was not what I was looking for at all. But the boys werebrought up frum [pious] and they went to yeshivas. And they, today, study,learn. Both of my sons are brilliant, as far as Hebrew learning. And my older 122:00one, Michael, can daven from the Omed like nobody's business. He's just superb.But he could (UNCLEAR), ah! One of the best bal-koyres [Torah reader insynagogue] that I've ever heard. When the grandchildren begin to come into thepicture, all of a sudden I began to see things a little differently. She becametotally shoymer-shabes [Jew who observes Shabbos] when her mother died in 1975.Then she began to put on sheytl [traditional women's head covering (wig)], that--- she wears a sheytl. And everything that had to be done, she did. And shebrought -- the boys idolize her. They took her way of life. Me, while I wasgoing out on Saturdays, playing jobs and all that kind of stuff, no, no. She andthe boys went to shul. Well, when this little one, (UNCLEAR), this grandson cameinto the picture, I began to think about -- I said, "What do I need this for?" Iwas already getting old. I had my first grandchild. I was fifty-three; I'm now 123:00seventy-three. It became easier for me to realize that living an Orthodox lifeis not as limiting as I thought it might be, because besides that, my music isgoing the way of all flesh, you know? So, I became -- this house isshoymer-shabes. Shabbos comes around; that's why I didn't want you people tocome to me tomorrow. It's just not possible. I won't have it. And go to shulevery week, the whole works, everything. I don't do all the things that I shoulddo, but I'm, you know, a heck of a lot closer than I used to be. But she istotally and completely observant, and anybody has any questions, ask her. Sheknows. She kn-- basically knows many of the answers. One of her brothers becamestrictly Orthodox. My sister married an Orthodox man. So, two of my mothers' -- 124:00the red Communist, two of her kids married frum. So, my sister is inerets-yisroel [Land of Israel] now. Well, so we have Orthodoxy in the family.And my sympathies are basically with the Orthodox approach. I think it's a goodapproach. The children -- I have -- her middle brother has about fortygrandchildren, along with mine, and these are diamonds. Each child is precious.They're so good. They're so nice. They're so sweet. They're real children.They're not like, you know, young rock and rollers. Well, there's something tobe said for that. They're children. And as far as I'm concerned, that's the wayto do it. That's the way to bring 'em up. There's a kind of a ziskayt, there's asweetness about it that the others just don't have. They're all so, you know, inyour face. None of my grand-nephews, grand-nieces, none of my grandchildren are 125:00like that. They're not in your face. They don't behave like that. It isn't done.They're good -- they're children. It's nice, nice to have children. And they'regrowing up, and they're growing up to have values. Far as I'm concerned, that'sthe way to go. I don't need to go to places where everything is treyf [notkosher]. That's Jewish. Not really.
CW:Hm. So, do you have an eytse [piece of advice]?
PS:Vos eytse? Eytse far vos? [What advice? Advice for what?]
CW:Eytse --
PS:Vi tsu shpiln? Vi tsu redn? Vos tsu makhn? [How to play? How to talk? What to do?]
CW:Vos zol a yunge muzikant makhn [What should a young musician do]?
PS:A yunge muzikant zol makhn a pur zakhn. Di ershte zakh iz tsu shpiln di
instrument git. Her zikh arayn tsu layt vos shpiln artistish, shayne zakh tsu 126:00farvos tsu hern tsu lernen. Un der shveyter zakh iz az es zol zayn yidish, tsumyidishn tam -- m'ken lernen vi tsu tin. Kim tsu mir, ikh tsayg akh, es vet zaynfayn. [A young musician should do a couple of things. The first thing is to playthe instrument well. Listen to people who play artistically, listen to beautifulthings that show you why to study. And the second thing is that it should beJewish, have a Yiddish flavor -- you can learn how to do it. Come to me, I'llshow you, it will be fine.]
CW:Nu, a hartsikn dank, un [Well, thank you very much, and] -- thank you very
much from --
PS:Um-hm.
CW:-- me, and also from the Yiddish Book Center.
PS:Okay. Do you want anything on the piano?
CW:Yeah.
PS:Okay.
CW:But let's take a little break.
PS:Okay, very good. All right, you gotta -- you gotta take this off.