Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 2 (Spring 1998)
Can This White Lutheran Play Klezmer? Reflections on Race, Ethnicity, and Revival
Christina Baade, University of Wisconsin
I would like to thank David Borgo for centering his discussion of ethnicity and klezmer
around "Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz." It's a compact disc I really enjoy--
both for the artistry that went into Byron's well-conceived redefinition of the cover
album and for the multiple readings it invites. My response will center in three areas:
first, the place of race in discussions of ethnicity; second, klezmer as not only an ethnic but also
as a revival genre; and third, some questions of authenticity.
David has put his finger on an important tension when he states in his concluding
paragraph,
American ethnic musics, whether newly created or transplanted, seem to share an openness
to combining elements in the dynamic process of defining musical and ethnic identity. It
may be that these musical traditions necessarily take on some ethnic identity component of
"American-ness."
What is "American-ness"? I think that American-ness in music is closely related to
African-American musical forms. From Antonin Dvorak's citation of black spirituals to
Charles Keil's contention that "Black Music" has become virtually all of American
music as jazz suffused pop and rhythm and blues became rock," an elision has
occurred between what is marked as African-American and what is coded as American in
music.1 Performance of Black-associated musical forms thus became a means of
assimilation for immigrant musicians for purposes as mundane as obtaining club dates to
the complex shifts involving blackface, which Dale Cockrell, Eric Lott, and Michael
Rogin have described.2 Indeed, as David has mentioned, Jewish musicians
in the United States learned to perform in jazz idioms to maintain their assimilating
immigrant audiences. (For example, the Ukranian-born clarinetist David Tarras
balanced Yiddish music and popular American music -- usually jazz -- throughout his
career in the United States, from the 1920s to the 1950s.3)
While ethnicity complicates our discussion of what it is to be White, a single-minded
focus on ethnicity distracts us from the deep and specifically American ways our
thinking about ethnicity has been shaped and centered around notions of race. A dismissal
of "scientific" or "objective" understandings of racial difference does not equip us to
ignore the structural and interpersonal ways racial thinking impacts our lives. For
example, I think that David's title is more arresting than mine. To be sure, my
title is derivative and admittedly more awkward than David's. I suspect, though,
that it is more surprising that a non-Jewish black clarinetist plays Klezmer than a
non-Jewish white clarinetist. Indeed, I have seen no more than passing reference
to the fact that Matt Dariau, the current clarinetist of the Klezmatics, is not
Jewish. Further, Andy Statman, a balei teshuvah or "returnee" (one
who chooses to practice Hassidic Judaism later in life) balances his musical career
between the bluegrass mandolin and the klezmer clarinet. Statman has not been interrogated
for playing music associated with rural, goyish Southern Whites. The key to this lack
of reflexivity--and part of the key to David's provocative title--is ethnicity
complicated by race.
Of course, notions of ethnicity can challenge our thinking about race in useful ways.
Jewishness marks a White person as more obviously "ethnic" and "different" than most
other White ethnicities-- and thus some consider Jewish ethnicity less "White" (or
even non-White) and closer to "Black." Indeed, among African-Americans and Jewish-Americans, the
debate over whether Jews and Blacks have, should have, or ever had a special cause for
alliance is documented in pamphlets from the 1940s and in books such as the 1994
Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments.4 Tensions between Blacks and Jews
seem a particularly "safe" way for our society to focus its discussions and anxieties about race.
Klezmer is understood to be not only Jewish ethnic music as it falls in the racializing tendencies
of American music, but is is also marked by the self-conciousness of revivalism. Indeed, its
status today as a revival genre differentiates the dance music of Yiddish culture from other
Jewish-identified musics such as Israeli folk music, cantillation, and Hassidic dance music. When
earlier Jewish musicians who included klezmer in their repertories -- such as
David Tarras, Ray Musiker, Sid Beckerman, Pete Sokolow, and yes, Mickey Katz -- were still
alive, leaders in the revival -- such as Lev Liberman and Henry Sapoznik -- found the
msuic they began to call "klezmer" on archival recordings. Klezmer was revived due to the
interest of a younger generation of Jewish musicians who approached klezmer after involvment
with other revived and ethnic musics (Liberman performed Balkan folk music, and
Statman and Sapoznik played bluegrass, for example). That the music we call
klezmer was revived in the 1970s says a great deal about changing notions of Jewish
identity at the time. There existed a new willingnesss to be marked as "ethnically Jewish,"
a broadening of notions of "positive' Jewish masculinity outside of identification with
Israel, and a renewed fascination with The World of Our Fathers -- to the use the name of
Irving Howe's 1976 history of Jewish immigrants in America.5 To be a
klezmer musicians was one of the myriad and conflicted ways an individual could perform Jewish
identity. As a virtuosic revival genre, klezmer also attracted non-Jewish
performers. As I have proposed previously, the notion of authenticity tied to the klezmer revival acts more as
a flag for emotional and ideological investment than as an assurance of musical truth
or truthfulness.6 Scholars like Richard Taruskin have questioned our
very modern motivations when we speak of authenticity -- what do we hope to convey
and whom or what do we seek to exclude? Those who play and write about klezmer create
its history in their own image and assert new modes of musicianly and Jewish
identity.
To speak of authenticity in the revival of an ethnically marked music is not only to speak
of who may perform it, but how it should be performed. It seems almost obligatory to
emphasize to novice audiences that klezmer is not jazz; such discussions appear in the
introductions of klezmer collections published by Tara Publications, a publisher specializing
in Jewish and Israeli folk musics, as well as by Mel Bay.7 In klezmer, jazz
influences mark some music by more assimilationist, more American, less Jewish,
and even more African-American. I think this is why Katz was held in disdain by early
klezmer revivalists. He internalized jazz idioms and played with klezmer as "merely one of many
elements in his musical makeup kiet" as Will Friedwald wrote, comparing Katz's treatment of
klezmer with Duke Ellington's use of the blues.8 Byron, trained
rigorously in klezmer by Hankus Netsky in the context of the Klezmer Conservatory Band,
was alreaded marked as a racially different klezmer musician. He extended a revivalist
appraoch to the neglected and disavowed music of Mickey Katz.
Byron's 1993 recording falls into what I consider the post-revival klezmer scene of the
1990s. The same year, Sheldon Posen observed that for folk performers, "[i]f anything,
'authentic' has become a 'flavor' within that performance sound."9 Musicians
and those who write about klezmer hold dear the historic eclecticism of the music. This sense of
eclecticism is used to justify a continued interchange between klezmer and other musics
present in our late-twentieth century soundscape. Individual players and bands may strive
to "authentically" recreate the style and ornamentation of pre-immigration nineteeth-century
European klezmer; they may reproduce a 1930s Yiddish big band sound; or like the Klezmatics,
they may to meld funk, rock, and Moroccan influences with a carefully considered klezmer
style and repertory. Musicians like Alicia Svigals and Ray Musiker compose their own
shers, horas, and bulgars. With the popularity of Itzhak
Perlman's forays into klezmer, the genre is recognizable to those beyond its
far-from-monolithic and not-entirely Jewish "in-group" of klezmer fans, performers, and
critics.
I placed myself in the title of this paper because I, and a portion of my band, are
non-Jews playing klezmer in Wisconsin, of all places. The questions fo ethnicity
and authenticity haunt me as I play this music -- and I've been assured that I "sound
Jewish" enough times to think that I really can play it. I was struck by the
postmodern irony of my positon when I came out as not-Jewish to a fellow clarinetist at
KlezKamp (helf at the Paramount Hotel in the Catskills) last December on the first night
of Hanukkah--which fell on Christmas Eve, the holiday my family celebrates. In Madison,
people often assume that I am Jewish because I play clarinet in the only klezmer band in
town; at KlezKamp, I felt ridiculously self-concious that I was the only
"Christina" out of more than 400 participants.
Anxiety about authenticity is tied to notions of ownership, questions of who rightfully may
perform. Ownership is decided not only on a "case-by-case" basis depending on the perfomer,
but also a performer may be marked as coming from the ethnic outside more or less strongly
depending on the context (for me, a progressive Midwestern college town versus KlezKamp in
the Catskills during Christmas). Don Byron is marked as coming from the outside more obviously
because of our American notions of race.
While we struggle with what we mean by "authenticity" and questions who should and
should not perform what music, we are left with the fluidity, the boundary-crossing, the
uncontainability of music and what musicians can do with it. Let's celebrate good music
and honest performances, and then interrogate our musical motivations again.
NOTES
1. Antonin Dvorak, "The Real Value of Negro Melodies," New York Herald (May 21, 1893) in
Dvorak in America: 1892-1895, ed. John C. Tibbetts (Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1993), 356. Charles
Keil, "'Ethnic' Music Traditions in the USA (Black Music; Country Music; Others; All)," Popular Music
13, No. 2 (1994), 177.
2. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997). Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
(New York: Oxford University PRess, 1993). Michael Rogin, "Blackface, White Noice: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds
His Voice," Critical Inquiry (Spring 1992): 417-453.
3. Henry Sapoznik, Liner notes for Dave Tarras: Yiddish-American Klezmer Music, 1925-1956 (Yazoo 7001, 1992).
4. Louis Hara and L.D. Reddick, "Should Negroes and Jews Unite?" Race and Culture Series
No. 1 (Negro Publication Society of America, 1943). Paul Berman, ed. Blacks and Jews:
Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1994).
5. Mark Slobin suggested a similar list of reasons for klezmer's renewed popularity in
"Rethinking 'Revival' of American Ethnic Music," New York Folkore 9, NO. 3-4 (1984): 40.
6. Christina Baade, "Jewzak and Heavy Shtetl: Constructing Ethnic Identity and Asserting
Authenticity in the Neo-Klezmer Movement," Monatshefte 90, No. 1 (1998): 31.
7. See, for example, Stacy Phillips, Mel Bay's Klezmer Collection for C Instruments (Pacific,
Missouri: Mel Bay Publications, Inc., 1996) and Henry Sapoznik, The Compleat
Klezmer (Cedarhurst, New York: Tara Publications, 1987).
8. Will Friedwald, Liner notes for Simcha time: Mickey Katz Plays Music for Weddings, Bar
Mitzvahs & Brisses (World Pacific CDP 7243 8 30453 2 7).
9. I. Sheldon Posen, "On Folk Festivals and Kitchens: Questions of Authenticity in the
Folksong Revival," in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil Rosenberg
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 130.
Christina Baade is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.
She has written and presented on American klezmer and plays clarinet with the band
Yid Vicious.
