Chasing the Fat Man

MarkRubin.com Updated

2012-01-01T21:19:00.000-08:00

Howdy friends,If you get a chance, pop over and check out my newest update of my the updated MarkRubin.com.

You'll note there's a few new wrinkles. Rather than simply put up an internet business card or boring celebration of my own personal accomplishments, I reckoned it would be more interesting to the general public to simply share things that I think are cool and interesting to myself. Check out the Video section for a look at some of the amazing musicians I get to work with. And on the Recordings page you'll find a mix of recorded interviews and music that you might not have been exposed to as well.

This space here will continue to be the repository of my writings, on the odd occasion that I get riled up enough to share it. And if you want to know where I will be performing, I recommend you look to my Atomic Duo site.

Oh and Happy (goyische) New Year!

If you must buy, buy local!

2011-12-11T12:22:00.001-08:00

Howdy Friends!

It's that time of year again so may I direct your attention to the many fine releases we have available here at Mark Rubin Industries.

Even if you don't do business with us, we implore you to seek out and support your local, community owned businesses when making your buying decisions this gift giving season.

Thanks and Happy Holidays!

Guest Blogger: The State of Music in the Age of Culture as Commodity

2011-10-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

Please give a few moments to read this guest commentary, the original of which can be found here.

I want the world to be a better place and the best way for this to happen is to have societies organized in systems that allows people to have access to the resources they need to humanize themselves and their communities. I don’t have a destination in mind. A dogmatic approach to social change fails to take into account the rapid trans-formative effect that technology has on society and how localized many problems are. Rather I try to think of thing in a more generalized direction. The creative class has a role and an obligation to participate in this process of moving humanity towards a more humanizing system.

I cannot give a complete or holistic description of what the process of humanization looks like. I'm sure it is personal and unique to every person. That is where to start. A more coherent process of humanization could only take place within a system where people were given access to the resources needed to figure out what that path looks like. Food, security(physical, mental and emotional), education, shelter, health care, access to genuine community based culture and time are the basic resources people need to to maximize their emotional and personal development. A process of humanization would help us determine what makes us individuals, how we relate to our fellow human beings and how to reconcile the interplay between the two in a healthy and consistent fashion. The direction would point to an generalized rejection of conflict in favor of cooperation both between the disparate aspects of each individual and between individuals in society.

It seems as though the young artist in America rejected the idea that there is any responsibility in being an artist. I know far more musicians and have a much deeper grasp of music than other artistic disciplines, so my critique is localized and myopic for sure. However, from my admittedly small range of experience, I have seen a decided and virulent rejection by people in their 20’s and 30’s of anything in music which is openly political or progressive.

The apparent causes of this sentiment are dynamic and important but that does not take away the fact that this trend is dangerous and corrosive. Artists do, and have always had, a responsibility as arbiters of social change and social criticism. I have no doubt that most 20-30 somethings would voice a vehement opposition to this notion, but my generation is good at nothing if not the deflection of mandated responsibility.

We all have a responsibility to make society better because it is what provides the systemic framework , not only to survive to to be human in the first place. Without society none of us would be here in any semblance of our current form and indeed the concept of being human would not exist. We all own this so we all have a responsibility to it; if nothing else out of a sense of self-preservation.

The primary reason musicians, and all Artist, have an extra responsibility to act as agents of positive social motion is because Art is powerful. Music has a unique ability to replicate the the material conditions of peoples lives in a concrete, yet nonverbal fashion. It reinforces truths that cannot be communicated in words or pictures. Music can take the parts of life that are the most dissonant and show us that they make us coherent and human. It can serve a vital function in how we organize our lives. Cultural expression, more than anything else makes us human, both in its production and reception.

Because art can effect people on such a visceral level, it contains a great potential to change the consciousness of receptive parties. The proof of Art's power lies most obviously and most ironically in the most dehumanizing cultures. The Nazi's would not have had Albert Speer construct massive concrete infrastructure to serve as a backdrop to Leni Riefenstahl epic movies if art wasn't powerful. The Soviets would not have hired Sergei Eisenstein to make his epic Alexander Nevsky, scored by Sergei Prokofiev, if art wasn't powerful. The Catholic church would not have controlled art in Europe for the better part of an eon if art wasn't powerful.

The ruling class never forgets that art is powerful. Only the dis-empowered seem to waver in their understanding of this resource's unique potency. We abdicate control, by design, to the very people who exploit and dehumanize us. I would never posit that art is ever the sole activator of social movements. It, does however, occupy a double helical relationship with societies overall direction in regards to whether people allow themselves to grow and humanize or be exploited and dehumanized. It is this inherent power that obligates artists and musicians to at act as agents of social critique and social change. By refusing to fulfill this obligation we do not remain neutral.

If we lived in a landscape of politically neutral culture I wouldn’t feel as thought there was the same urgency. We don’t. The gate keepers of music are obscenely wealthy with an agenda that supports their class interests. Corporate music is functional, but its function has degenerated to act as a non-localized opiate. As my peers have noted, people want escapism. Sedation is not humanizing. This is a fundamental perversion of what music is and can be. Music shouldn't be a tool to shut people down, but rather it should help bring vibrancy to their lives.

On tour this summer I was struck by a song called “Sounds Like Life to Me” by Darryl Worley. I was going to link a youtube of the song but I don’t want to help his Internet presence. The story of the song is of one man talking to another at a bar about the hardships of trying to support a family in modern America. Here is the chorus:

Sounds like life to me it ain’t no fantasy

It’s just a common case of everyday reality

Man I know it’s tough but you gotta suck it up

To hear you talk you’re caught up in some tragedy

It sounds like life to me

The narrative of the song is this: Life is hard, you should toil everyday for someone else and expect nothing better than what your boss gives you. The song also endorses pro-life ethics and the use of alcoholism as a practical means of escape from real problems in its verses:

Three kids and a wife depend on me

And I’m just one man

To top it off I just found out

That Sarah’s 2 months late

I said hey bartender set us up a round

We need to celebrate

This implies a sense of inevitability. It refuses to acknowledge that there are options at that point in the pregnancy and encourages a man with a drinking problem to deal celebrate the hardships another child will bring by drinking. In country music this underlying theme of inevitability is projected onto every aspect of working people lives. We are chided for thinking we could expect more from our lives, even in the richest country in the world. “Suck it up.”

This sentiment is being replicated in modern country at all points. Country used to be a vehicle for the empowerment of poor, rural Americans. Now it preached the glory short sight goals and basks in the virtue of ignorance.

Pop music takes a different tack. Almost ubiquitously, American popular music of the last 25 years has, in form and content, praised and endorsed the opulence of the of the elites who profit from it and the unattainable aspirations of those who consume it. This is most apparent in the overwhelming dominance of “love” as a topic. Love is a theme that is universally accessible and thus exceptionally marketable. I’m not against the composition of sentimental music but I do think that its dominance has detrimental effect on society.

In many was the hyper-idealization of the individual has led to the notion that our country and the global society we are part of were built by people each operating independent of each other, forged by sheer will in the face of human competition and nature. This is false. All advancement, culture and infrastructure have sprung from the collective consciousness that has been built on. The cult of the individual has led to our current system where the vast majority of people think they are of immense importance or at lest could become important, while all the evidence shows the agency of the majority, acting as individuals is eroding rapidly.

Romantic love is such a personal experience that by nature it draws us inward. It highlights some of the most powerful internal narratives we have. It does not accentuate our common material interests. The exaggerated importance of romantic love that is presented to us by our major cultural outlets, film and music, reflects the perceived material conditions of our society. Only a people who believe themselves comfortable have the luxury to spend as much time as we do on this one aspect of the human experience. When we look at the art of people whose material conditions are less affluent, we see a much broader range of subjects that point to what makes us similar. We get art that demands the realization of humanity of the arts practitioners and the cultures they come from in the face of systems whose sole function id to exploit them.

This focus on love would be fine if it wasn’t being used as a smoke screen and a narcotic in the process of global and national dis-empowerment. We are feel increasingly isolated and therefore powerless to effect change. This, while we feel a disproportionate sense of individual worth. By only producing and consuming art of a seemingly benign nature, we allowing art to be used as a weapon against our communal interests as opposed to a vehicle for humanization and consciousness raising. What appears to be “non-political” music is profoundly political because it has helped us sleep through urgent times.

We are not as well off as we would like to think and it is worse everyday. Everything we do have has come from the exploitation of poor people, domestically and abroad. Even if our, meaning middle-class consuming Europe and America, material position was secure, we don’t have the moral ground to sit idle.

Artists have a responsibility because art is always political. By creating and consuming “apolitical” art we are participating in a system that uses cultural works against us. Art can either effect positive change, or reinforce the current socioeconomic dynamic. We are being political in our refusal to acknowledge the innately political nature of art in our society.

Write love songs. Listen to whatever you want. But start having conversations. Think about how the cultural products you are involved with reflect your ethics. At least consider that we make a lot of assumptions about art and culture, and many of them may be false or manufactured. How can art made and shaped by a system based on exploitation not support and replicate an exploitative ethic?

Love will be better in a world where people are given the chance to be as humanized as possible.

Great Romanian Accordionist playing "Live"

2011-08-10T00:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a little introduction to Lăutari accordionists.

We'll start with probably the most famous and influential,Fărâmiţă Lambru. He had a great singing career as well, but it was accordion that first made him famous.

"Melodii lautaresti"

And this short Sirba:

And here's a cameo in a Romanian film:

Here he's probably just playing along to a track, but no matter, its "live" of a sort:

Another favorite of mine is the great Marcel Budală:

This is some Black Belt Moldavian accordion playing going on here.

And even more here: "Cantec de dragoste si Hora"

Here's the not too well known Gheorghe Lambru in a clip along with the legendary, Ion Onoriu:

I'm sorry to make you suffer a whole minute of Zamfir on the pan pipes (which he rocks BTW) so that you can see the great Vasile Pandelescu at work :

Really and truly I've been checking out Viorel Fundament a lot lately, so dig :

Here's a more modern approach to the music from two of the hottest Young Bloods on the scene,

Ionică Minune

and Marian Mexicanu :

Here's Emil Kroitor, ex-Moldova now living in Tel Aviv. He has been described to me by every Moldovar lautari I've encountered as the greatest of them all. He collected and in some cases composed the vast majority of tunes that are played by lautari today.

Just found this cat, and he can really throw down in the rustic school. Mighty!:

This still remains one of my favorite performances, entirely give it's circumstances! :

RIP : Gil Scott Heron. Great American Poet.

2011-05-28T20:19:00.001-07:00

Here's our musical setting of the great Gil Scott Heron poem "Whitey on the Moon."

From the Atomic Duo's performance at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, May 16, 2011.

Don Walser - Just Me and My Old Guitar - Just Released

2011-04-29T01:42:00.000-07:00

Produced by Mark Rubin (Bad Livers, Atomic Duo) and mixed and mastered by Gurf Morlix, this is the only recording of Don just by himself, singing his songs and telling the true life stories of the times and characters that made up his lyrics.

{To order online now, click cover art}

In 2004, Don's hands started to cramp and go numb on his gigs and it became apparent that they were soon going to gave up on him completely to where could no long even strum his guitar. So, with a intern pal (Jake Zuckerman) we set up a field recording session in his living room with a handful of microphones and a now obsolete recording format and just let the tape roll. Don lived inside of his songs and they became real to him every time he sang them, and we felt it was important to document the man and his stories in as natural and unvarnished a manner. The pain of his singular Gospel composition the "Crucifixion," the youthful joy in knocking over "Pappy's Simmon's Privy," and the heart breaking recounting of his early life with his bride Patricia ("Times Were Never Easy,') so painful a memory he couldn't get through a take without breaking down and crying.

For many years, these tapes sat in a box under my bed. It took a long time for me to even bring myself to listen to them. A few record labels contacted me about releasing it, but the contracts I was offered were jokes; I give them Don's music and they take his publishing rights all for releasing a CD. Don't think the big guy would have swung at that pitch, so back under the bed they went.

But with the urging of his friends and family, especially long time admirer Gurf Morlix, we are pleased to share that day with you all. Simply intended to be anything but a little souvenir to his fans and a peek into the life of the "Pavarotti of the Plains," and "God's Own Yodeler." We hope you will find as much joy in listening as we did that day sipping lemonade in his front room in South Austin.

Photo courtesy Al Walser. Cover design Jeff Brosch.

The Objectives of Objectivism

2011-04-23T18:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not normally pointing out political opinion blogs, the world of culture and the cultural arts are my usual balliwick, but this recent essay really struck a chord with me.

Stranger still it was penned by Michael Gerson, a former GW Bush speechwriter and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who's conservative bonafides are iron-clad and not the guy I'd be apt to agree with. But here he is, distilling for me just what it was about Ayn Rand's philosophies that troubled me so. I couldn't put a finger on it, but Objectivism and the fast-paced trend to resurrect it, just seemed plain wrong. But when debated on the point, and you'd be surprised how many normally sensible people have fallen into the Galt cult, I would get flustered and inarticulate. I literally couldn't believe anyone would support such an obviously selfish and self loathing philosophy.

Hooray however for Mr. Gerson, who has so simply and plainly encapsulated the crux of my distress. In this opinion peice for the Washington Post, he likens Rand's fantasies of the worthy elite as boring as and and as predictable as a petulant teenager's adolescence. He further summarizes Objectivism's "principles," in his words, "on the back of a napkin."

He notes:
"Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible.

“The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”

Gerson is, like myself, bewildered at the promotion of Rand's ideas especially given her hatred of the Everyman (the little guy that Reagan claimed to champion,) and of the religious, who she thought were idiots.

He concludes:
"Conservatives have been generally suspicious of all ideologies, preferring long practice and moral tradition to Utopian schemes of left or right. And Rand is nothing if not Utopian. In “Atlas Shrugged,” she refers to her libertarian valley of the blessed as Atlantis.

It is an attractive place, which does not exist, and those who seek it drown."

I'll drink to that.

Short notes about some releases I think you might enjoy..

2011-03-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

There’s quite a bit of good music being made these days, which is strangely paralleled by the boat-loads of egregious pap that seems to clog the traditional media outlets. Public radio, at least in my hometown, has decided to become “what 50 year old men think 26 year chicks would like in the vain hope to make themselves look cool and maybe get laid” format, ground out by post –ironic hipster d-bags in skinny jeans and assorted ridiculous moustaches. Country radio gave up on trying to make substantive music many years ago and though there seems to be a vibrant and happening “urban” (the accepted term for “black people”) music scene, it’s just not my cup of tea. I rely almost entirely on the many radio stations set up to support the burgeoning Mexican immigrant community (3 count ‘em 3 whole stations devoted to Banda,) and the always reliable TRUE community public radio like KOOP and the renegade stations that skip around the dial evading the FCC here in Austin.

So here’s a few CD’s that you might not encounter normally, but I think maybe you should give ‘em a listen.

Loves It, “Yay”

When my friends hand me their new CD and then ask me what I think of it, I usually cringe. I have some mighty talented peeps, and they all make interesting art of varying accomplishment. However, I’m so set in my own freakish prejudices about music that it’s a good policy for me not to comment critically on my co-horts efforts, lest some one’s feeling get hurt. But they handed me the CD and bade me give my opinion. Here goes:

Pretty damn great. Maybe the best 1^st CD anybody’s ever given me actually.

Loves It is comprised of vocalist/song writer Jenny Parrott and her beau Vaughn Walters and together they have crafted a set of tunes which is at turns precious and poignant, without ever falling into self parody or overly contrived “quirkiness” which I reckon will be a term used to describe this music in reviews to come. Held aloft by Parrot’s imaginative songs about dinosaurs and Bobby Kennedy, the instrumental backing is as creative as the lyrical content which though clever, is never fey. “Pop” music is not often on my iPod, but “Yay” has stayed in rotation in my car disc player and that’s has high a compliment as I can give ultimately.

Benjy Fox-Rosen “Tick Tock”

Benjy is a fine bassist and wonderfully vocalist gifted with a lithe, high tenor voice. His latest CD “Tick-Tock” marks, for me at least, a bellwether mark in modern Jewish music. (This is you hint that this is a klezmer CD, but hang in there, it’ a great record.) Sung entirely in Yiddish and featuring a band made up entirely of the best klezmer players of his generation, Fox-Rosen simultaneously references the great Yiddish song writers and vocalists of lore completely unencumbered by nostalgia or artifice while still sounding entirely fresh and personal. If 25 years ago groups like the Klezmatics re-invigorated and re-constructed Yiddish music to reflect a contemporary experience, then “Tick-Tock” simply carries the narrative to the even more present, using reggae and even avant-guard musical motifs to propel his remarkable vocal skill, which is capable of communicating the lyric quite effectively despite the listeners not understanding the language. With artists like this afoot, Yiddish music and culture are assured at the very least a creative and vibrant future. Flowery praise maybe, but deserved.

Of special mention here is the clarinet work of Michael Winograd (who also shines brightly on Daniel Kahn’s latest CD “Lost Causes,” a CD which neatly bookends “Tick-Tock” only with more of a besotted, labor-union rabble rouser outlook fronted by Kahn’s whiskey and smokes vocals, best experienced in his re-imagining of the Yiddish labor song “March of the Jobless Corp.” Worth the price of the download.)

CAVEAT: I’m on the next 2 CD’s so bare that in mind.

The Tradition Lives: Yiddish-Moldavian Music of German Goldenshteyn

In 2006, myself and a group of fellow instructors at Living Traditions annual “Klez Kamp” got together in an unused hotel room and recorded a CD’s worth of material with our mentor and friend, Moldavian-Jewish clarinetist German Goldenshteyn. We had been lucky enough to spend many years learning his repertoire and his style, a truly European style of Jewish music that none of us had ever been exposed to, and we thought it was high time to get him on tape. With no rehearsal, and no more than two takes, we recorded enough material to release “German Goldenshteyn: A Living Tradition.” It was a good thing to, as he died quite unexpectedly not but months after. So happy to have his music immortalized, the family actually placed a copy of the CD in his casket.

We had planned on another recording session, and German had even picked out the material this time expanding to include Moldavian music popular with the Jewish community that he played for as a young man. But devastated in grief, it took quite some time for all of us who played on his only CD to collectively come together and finish the project that he was unable to. The result, again recorded live in an unused recreation hall in a Catskill resort during Klez Kamp, is The Tradition Lives: Yiddish-Moldavian Music of German Goldenshteyn. Rather than try and re-create a version of the modern, fashionable Moldavian music, we opted to try and intone the way that German played the tunes; better suited to Jewish dance traditions. The result is a project of pure love. There are very few releases that I play on that I actually listen to for fun. This is one of those records. See if I’m not lying and pick yourself up a copy. (A portion of all of the sales go to support Mina Goldenshteyn and his family.)

Panorama Brass Band, “17 Days”

I am a lucky, lucky dude.

When I was but a lil’ wee child, my parents would take me with them on a off-season trip to New Orleans so my old man could see Billy and Dee Dee and George Lewis play the Preservation Hall. That’s when I first saw a man playing the tuba, all by himself, out in the street. My dad pulled out a crisp $20 bill and put it in his tip jar, he and I the only people who stopped to listen to his music. It was a profound experience for me; it inspired me to be a musician in fact. Not just any musician either, but a tuba player playing in the street in New Orleans (like Tuba Fats, I was to learn later was the man who first inspired me.) We came back home from these trips laden with LP’s which then got played all year long, trying in vain to recreate that experience in a Stillwater Oklahoma living room. The LP that got played the most was a thick vinyl 12” on the Atlantic label by the Young Tuxedo Brass Band called “Jazz Begins.” Recorded live and literally in the street, side one was marked “to the cemetery” and side to “from the cemetery.” Has joyous and raucous as the pumping second line of tunes like "Joe Avery’s Piece" and "Joy Joy Joy" were, it was the dirges on side one that held my wonder. The unabashed sadness and mournful cries of the clarinets and trombones sounded not terribly removed from the hegemonic polyphony of the old school davening (vocal praying) of the old men in our synagogue in OKC, OK. I was transfixed.

Zoom forward about 35 years and there I was. Thanks to my friend Ben Schenk of the Panorama Jazz band I found myself standing in the streets of New Orleans, playing the tuba. For Mardi Gras no less. Ben had reconfigured his working jazz band as a brass band to pick up work for the carnival season. I had the great fortune of producing a CD for him (“Panoramaland,” which is an amazing document on its own right) and this season he found himself shy a tuba man. I’m not really sure how the other cats came into the project, or who actually “leads” it per se, or how I ended up on baritone horn (my fathers instrument actually.) But whatever it is the Panorama Brass Band is a mighty and unlikely, 24/7 juggernaught of good music.

There’s really not much I can say about this record as my contributions to the music are minimal really; I’m the 3^rd chair baritone player, just a section musician playing my part. But there’s some incredible moments all over it; Aurora Nealand’s solo on a brass band arrangement of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman,” a burning bari-sax solo on a Serbian number from Dan Oestreicher, Schenck’s heartachingly austere take of a melody by Franz Josef Haydn just to name a few. Recorded last Carnival season all live and heads up, one or two takes in a rent house in the Mid-City, the recording engineer and producer were also playing on the tracks, the band had already marched in several parades and the feel of the streets are present throughout.

But I have yet to get past track one. When I first heard it, I didn’t recognize it. Instead I was propelled back in time, sitting eyes closed with my back wedged up against the big Magnavox stereo system so I could feel the vibrations of the music through my whole body. I saw in my mind the Young Tuxedo’s, gathered out in front of their social and pleasure club pouring their hearts out for the recording crew through their horns, expressing the combined inequities and injustices of the experience of the systematically disenfranchised in the only acceptable manner allowed by the powers that be. It was for a single sliver of the moment when music allows the individual to be connected to the arch of history, hoping to see but a fleeting glimpse of not only what is but what can be, in other words in the presence of the ineffable. Then I envision my old man, standing there on the curb, clapping alone as the band marches past. “How else will they know we appreciate them?” he would tell me when I was embarrassed as he clapped loudly when no one else around us paid any mind.

But it’s not the Tuxedos’coming out of the speakers. It’s actually the Panorama Brass Band playing the old hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” and recognizing it, I cried. I’ll hear it again, and I’ll cry again. Somewhere I can only hope, my old man is standing on the curb somewhere, clapping.

Atomic Duo @ Folk Alliance Conference, 2011

2011-03-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Atomic Duo, aka my old pal Silas and I, traveled north to Memphis to attend the Folk Alliance Conference. Our goal was to come meet some folks, pun intended, and see if anybody else likes what we do as much as we do.

As it turns out, lots of folks do! Had a wonderful meeting with Si Kahn, who has been an inspiration for many years, and picked up quite a few pointers from him. Saw lots of truly amazing and talented acts; Jerron Paxton, Two Man Gentleman Band, Betse Ellis and every single band who performed at the Steam Powered Preservation Society's informal showcases, (follow the link to hear two live tunes from us.) Got quite a bit of jamming in with friends old and new. And saw soooo much good music being made by genuinely nice people that it puts to lie the tired yarn that "there's no good music today."

Here's a few little highlights:

First up, from a "Rooted Traditions" showcase hosted by roots guitar maestro Andy Cohen, we were asked to perform only tunes by our "masters." We chose Gil Scott Herron (w/ our jugband rendition of "Whitey On The Moon") and this lovely little Scott Joplin gem, "Scott Joplin's New Rag."

And here's the first tune from our formal showcase, the world debut of Silas' new composition "Trickle Down."

Here's the lyrics (all rights reserved, c Silas Lowe.):

Verse
My mother raised me up alone
working three jobs at a time
Barely made enough each week
to put away a dime
So I don’t want to hear about
the wealthy’s pain and woes
Cause they ain’t trickled nothing down
to help the working poor

Chorus
They talk about trickle down
but I ain’t seen a drop
They say they worked the hardest
for all the things they got
But they don’t know the pain to raise a
failing dust bowl crop
It’s time things started flowing
from the bottom to the top

Verse
They trickled all the money
to banks in Switzerland
They trickled all our children
to fight Afghanistan
They trickled all the good jobs
down to Mexico
But they ain’t trickled nothing down
to help the working poor

They talk about trickle down
but I ain’t seen a drop
They say they worked the hardest
for all the things they got
They ain’t lived a lifetime pushing
round a dusty mop
It’s time things started flowing
from the bottom to the top

Verse
The pressure sure is building
and something’s gonna crash
the credit cards are all maxed out
and no one uses cash
Things had best start changing soon
cause the bottoms gonna blow
and they won’t like what boils up
from the starving poor

They talk about trickle down
but I ain’t seen a drop
They say they worked the hardest
for all the things they got
But they don’t hungry child whose
crying just won’t stop
It’s time things started flowing
from the bottom to the top

It's madness, this Folk Aliance Conference.

2011-02-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

Barely contained chaos really, with quite a lot of acts vying for your attention. For our part we'll be slinging the National Resophonic Guitars and have a fine CD's worth of new timely Broadsides to share with the folks, so if you can see your way clear to carving out a few moments to see us, we'd be much obliged.

Here's our schedule:

Wednesday, 12am, Rm 1725, Heart & Hope Showcase

Thursday, 1am, Rm 1818, Hootenany Hall

Thursday, 2:30am, Rm 1903, Steam Powered Preservation Society Showcase

Friday, 12:30am, Rm 1904, Sandy Patton Room

Saturday, 8pm, Formal Showcase, Knoxville

** you must be registered with the conference to attend **

Additionally, Mark will be a panelist on the "Reworking Trad Ballad" (Saturday, 10am, Chattanooga)

And he will be hosting, along with Silas and other "fellow travelers" that he may have not yer even met, a panel discussion of Protest Music and the noticeable lack of it. (Saturday, 1:30pm, Beale) Frankly, if you're an artist and have something to share on that topic, I'd love to see about including you as well.

Travel safe, bi gezundt, and hopefully we'll see all your lovely mugs there.

Oh, and one thing more: would you please consider contributing to our recording project? We're scheduled to hit the studio with Lloyd Maines in late March, if we get the dough together. Thanks again!

Using the Machine against itself.

2011-02-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

78 RPMs, Lots of them, and I'd like you to have them.

2011-01-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

It really is true, the best things in life are not in fact things at all. And as I cycle through new chapters in my own story, I note that the values I held as a younger person don't seem to apply too well to the life I wish to live now. "A Time for all Seasons," I think the great poets like to say and there was a time when I valued having possession of lots of things. Recently, however I've run into lots of folks who share the same obsessions that I used to occupy a lot of my time with and the recognition has been startling. At some point the person disappears and only the frightenly obtuse "collection" or "archive" (or let's speak frankly, a "hoard") of things takes over. That said, I'd like to announce that I am divesting myself of the 78rpm platters that I have amassed over the years.

The reason why I collected them in the first place was that that's where a lot of the "good stuff" lived. Distribution of re-issued music was sketchy and in many cases non-existant. If you wanted to hear real honest to goodness Western Swing, you weren't gonna find it on the radio or even in a modern acts recordings, you were going to have to do the work and find the music and then struggle to listen to it. My old roomate Mark Hays sat me down one day and played me 4 different version of a Bob Wills 78, all with different lyrics and lead breaks, it was revelatory and set me off on a nearly 20 year path of collection.

It many ways it was my "adult "version of how I consumed music during the American Hardcore Punk rock movement, the similarities were many. You had to be proactive to find good music, and collecting 78s for me was the natural progression to buying Necros 45's from a mail order catalog in the back of a 'zine, or a Bad Brains cassette from a little independent label you never heard of. All of this was in the pre-Internet and pre-digital age, a study in musical archeology and it prepared me well for my life bent over on my knees in antiques store across the US and Canada while Bad Livers were at their touring zenith.

But then I started meeting the fetishists. We all know who they are, guys to whom the possession of the platter is FAR more important that the information contained in it. Those to whom "rarity" was more important than "quality." They can sit for hours and tell you every detail of every little obscure recording label and all the artists on them, in many casing even taking to expertly mimicking these recordings, mistakes, false starts and all. It's actually very impressive this track that so many collectors I know find themselves on. They extend it to their lives and even professions, becoming living Re-Enactors for a a period of history (that frankly I think is best left forgotten, other than the wonderful art that was created at that time.)

But more and more I see that as a trap, a "death trip" as we used to call it in Bad Livers and the weight both allegorically and actually is a burden I no longer wish to carry. The truth is that the vast majority of music I possess now, and the format it arrives in to me is frankly less than meaningless as that is simply how my personal relationship with music has developed, I could listen to it all and die an old man by the time I got back to the start. I'm sitting here now with a hard drive loaded with 15 gigs of Moldovan and Romanian music that I suspect will take a decade to properly digest.

These records brought me lots of pleasure and joy in my life and I will forever cherish not only the music contained in them, but in the places in which I found them and the journeys made to locate them. That I will have always. So cut to the chase, big boy.

If you would like them, I would be pleased for you to have them. I do not wish to sell them, but I will offer them, all of them, to anyone who would like them. All I ask in return, is that you leave me something that was meaningful to you; maybe a book, a work of art, home made cookies, whatever. I'll even accept nothing at but your thanks, if that's all you have to give. I even have a couple play back machines which I would let go as well, even a lovely Cherrywood RCA Victor console, which my TV lives upon currently, which I'd sell for mighty cheap.

Y'all know how to get me and I hope to have everything divested by Carnival time, so I can enter the Mardi Gras season with a little less baggage.

Cheers and much love to you all.

(PS: no shipping, gotta come by in person, ok? )

What is "folk" music anyway?

2011-01-11T15:32:00.000-08:00

So there I was on Facebook, answering some post when the Folk Alliance conference came up randomly, and one of my FB friends recalls I was a speaker on a panel called "What is Folk" when the conference was held in Austin a few years back. I mentioned that my participation on that panel was greeted with quite a bit less enthusiasm as I had hoped. I was asked "why?" and this is what came out:

(For the record, I have nothing but praise for the FA as a body, but the motivations of a great many of it's attendees are completely foreign to my understanding of the word "folk.")

I proffered the opinion that the definition of "folk music" was music played by people who didn't want to be left out of the party; music of functions and families. That what my pal Brian Marshall told me years ago, and that's as good a definition as I have encountered.

This didn't sit too well with "singer-songwriter" attendees, who's only attachment to music (in my experience) is what can it do for them rather than the perspective of the traditional folk musician who sees himself as serving a function of his/her culture as a whole, music only being a slight fraction of the equation; language, faith, dance, cuisine are all intertwined and carried along by music which is definitely not the myopic focus.

The "Folkie" wants to tell you all about themselves and their crappy little lives, demanding the attention and validation of strangers, no different from anyone in the entertainment business. (LIKE ME, BTW) They embark on a commercial career and if they don't make their bread, they stop and go back to whatever they should have been doing in the first place. Conversely, the traditional musician is busy living a life inside a culture, and just happens to play music and most likely will for all of their lives, whether or not they are every examined outside of their community.

Scratch a "Folkie" and typically find a person who has actively rejected their own cultures and traditions and then cleave to growing proto-culture that shares their world view (think Kerrville Folk Fest.) Over time, I'm sure this will eventually create it's own "culture" of a sort, but frankly I find it rings untrue to me. And ultimately every one of these types ends up, hat in hand, back at the door of the tradition they spent a life rejecting. (Examples abound, but Faron Young telling Jerry Lee Lewis, who re-entered Nashville after his career in rock fizzled, to "get down on his knees and beg forgiveness" of the the country artists who kept going while rock and roll tore at the fabric of their culture. Don't get me started on Jewish Folkies who re-imagine themselves Jewish only after they struck out with the goyim.)

Today there are "Folkie" versions of every great musical tradition on the Earth it seems and the participants of such versions cheerfully identify themselves as dilettantes, which lines up well with the deeply Imperialistic traditions of dominant consumer culture that has hobbled our country. If you presented a traditional musician to this tribe, they uniformly recoil in terror, recognizing that deep down they actually despise the culture from which the music was born and is a part of. Danny Barnes' essay on "I know why you're not into music" points out that there's "plenty of music for people who hate music, books for people who hate books, etc."

Danny also told me years ago in reference to the explosion of "we started as a punk band but now we're trad C & W" bands that overran Austin in the late 80's, "All these cats are all hot to play country music, but none of 'em would dare go out into the country have to deal with the people who like country music. They do alright with the hipsters in town, but I'd like to see them deal with the drunks at the Satin Sabre in LaGrange for instance." Truthfully, all they ever really did was create a self referential "scene" where out-of-work musicians play for other out-of-work musicians and the waitresses who support them. If anyone describes a "scene," this is most likely what they are talking about; a fully inward looking proto-culture. Scenes. Like "Rock-a-Billy," or "jazz" or whatever ghetto a group of people tend to create for themselves. Gather long enough, and share enough of a world view and viola' you have a safe, manufactured little culture. Hippies anyone?

I just had to have this whole conversation with a sad character who's been trying to force fit a modern instrument into a traditional dance music for decades now with only an embarrassing admixture to show for it. As a "Folkie,"and lets be honest here we are talking about people with white skin who speak English almost entirely, he's fully empowered by his wealth and his privilige to see culture as a smorgasboard, where he can pick and choose what elements suit his personal musical vision. How could he see it any way really, having had only consumerism and advertising as a cultural legacy? It can be argued further that it's just those sort of people that propel traditions forward and there is indeed some truth in that line of thinking.

However, the important (and missing in this thesis) element is how does this change come to a tradition? From within it? Is there a community of like minded, language, custom and faith connected people who within their own experience accepted change? Or is it the outsider who imposes their concept onto a culture. The steel guitar entered French speaking "cajun" music many years ago, as did the accordion before it, naturally and from an internal experimentation. Same for the arrival of the Greek bouzouki in Ireland and the button accordion to the Spanish speaking south west US. Revolutionary as their introductions may have been, they still arose as a reaction of a community well versed in their own traditions. My pal Henry Sapoznik has a litmus test for who's coming from inside the music and who haven't done their homework. It's really easy: walk up to a band playing "klezmer-punk" or "klezmer-jazz" or some other clumsy fusion, hold a Colt 1911 .45 up against the band leaders temple and say "Play me an old fashioned Jewish Bulgar, one my zayde would recognize." 9 times out of 10, sadly, the test doesn't end well. But within communities there are indeed master musicians who have imbibed the totality of their own cultures, assuming a collective voice and then and only then are capable of making truly revolutionary music that would in fact speak to the aspirations of a people while propelling them forward. (Call me crazy, but that was precisely what I had hoped Bad Livers had done for traditional American music. Only time will tell if we did any real good, and I ain't holding out hope.)

Otherwise, to use an appropriate Yiddish response, 'you can't pee on my back and tell me it's rain." Further quoting Big Mon "that ain't no part of Bluegrass, that ain't no part of nothing."

Nothing indeed.

PS:
Oh, I guess I should make a pitch for Hank Bradley's ground breaking essay on this very subject called "Counterfeiting, Stealing, and Cultural Plundering: a manual for applied ethnomusicologists with 12 tunes for fiddle composed by the author" 1989. Available from the author.

Troubled thoughts on a trip to Trenchin Slovakia, July 2007

2010-11-12T17:19:00.000-08:00

(Note: I wrote this essay 3 years ago but have hesitated to publish it, until now. Why, I have no idea? I had written quite a bit about my trip to rural Slovakia on this very blog here and here. From reading those postings, you could never imagine the kind of conflict the experience awoke in me. Over 3 years later, I'm still sorting through it.)

This week finds me headed to the Slovakia to perform with Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars. We’re slated to perform at the “ethno” music stage of the massive Pohoda music festival along with Boban and Marko Markovic’s amazing brass orchestra. The concept of this stage show is based around a joint recording project we made a few years ago called the “Brotherhood of Brass,” exploring the legion similarities between the Jewish and Rroma musical traditions and the ability of music making to create connection beyond any cultural boundaries. The resulting CD was a minor hit on the World Music scene in Europe, which unlike the States they actually have a World Music scene supported by a eager fan base and media infrastructure. We have toured this show for several summers and working and traveling with these amazing bandsmen has been the experience of a lifetime, let me tell you. From the highest peaks in musical performance and camaraderie to the deepest depths of witnessing anti-Gypsy racism. Quite a ride at any rate, and I always look forward to playing with these cats one more time.

It’s nearly 40 degrees Celsius (well over 100 Fahrenheit) when the taxi driver drops me off at the hotel in Trencin, fully an hour and a half’s drive from the Bratislava airport. I’m feeling ill from lack of sleep and probably the gamey tuna salad served on the Czech Airways flight over, and I actually utilized the airsickness bag provided in the seat pockets for the first time in my life. Now at the “Sport Hotel ostrov Zamarovce” I’m shown my room, which for Eastern standards is quite all right, with a recently renovated and thus fully operative bathroom. But like most of Europe there is no air conditioning like we are quite used to in Texas. The heat is familiar, and with the hotel facing the gently flowing River Van, there are quite a few mosquitoes as well to remind me of summer at home. I make plans to take a short nap and then head into the city center in search of a table fan so that I will be able to sleep in this heat.

After walking for what seems like hours, I locate a supermarket on a major road on the outskirts of town, purchase a nice fan and then head back to the hotel, making note to cut through the old city center to see what I can see. So I’m walking along the central pedestrian zone when I spy one of those handy-for-the-tourists sign posts that says things like “Zentrum ->” and “Policia <-.” One in particular caught my eye however it as says “Synogauga ->.” Hmmm. Well, by golly, it is Friday evening, shabbes, and all. How cool would it be to daven with the locals in little ol’ Trencin Slovakia?

It has been a long-standing custom of mine that when time in the touring schedule allows, I’ll seek out the local schul and at least get inside it and look around. On the odd occasion, and depending on the Jewish calendar, I have actually been able to daven (pray) with the local Yidn. Like the time in Utrecht Holland where the rabbi there knows my local own Chababd rebbe well and even lived at the Chabad House in Austin for a time. Every now and again I have in fact been the 10th man required for a minyan (a religious quorum,) like at the amazing Sephardic temple in downtown Bordeaux France. Such an occurrence is quite an honor among my tribe, and at the very least you’ll be sure to meet some interesting new folks.

No doubt my Rebbe back home will chuckle aloud when he reads this, as getting me into his services usually require a bribe of paying gig or some such, but even he will know what I mean when I say that I am often more at home with strangers, especially when they are Jewish strangers. Moreover it our collective practice of Jewish ness is all that is required to bind us together. My feeling is that my job after all, out on the road as a traveling Jewish musician from Texas, is to represent Jewish culture and I came quite a long way to do so. The very least I can do is at least behave like a Jew while I’m doing it. Thus, I trot off in the direction of the helpful sign, hoping in my mind they have a siddur (Jewish prayer book) I can make sense of.

Quickly I locate a large white Moorish building at the end of the small triangular public square. From it’s position and layout in relation to the square one can imagine that was the center for the Jewish district of this little provincial town. Viewed from a distance, it is beautiful; but there is no indication that this is a Jewish house of worship. No stars of David, no menorah, no nothing really. There is one little spot high up where you can see the outline of the traditional tablets of the Ten Commandments, and there is a lovely Tree of Life bas relief above one door way. But you get the feeling that there was once so much more adornment. It appears to have had a fresh if slap dash white wash in recent years, but the doors are all shut and looking in, it seems to be completely empty. Some of the windows are broken as well. All I can find is a Soviet era looking block letter plaque attached to the wall that from my clumsy translations refers to the “White Synagogue of Trencin” and notes simply its “historic oriental architecture.”

There indeed is a fine synagogue in Trencin, but there will be no shabbes here. There are no Jews here. The stark, sudden and complete realization that though this building may still stand and from the outside is beautiful and all, there are no Jews here to pray with. Not tonight, and probably never again I imagine. A wave of depression and sadness flushes over me. I mean what was I thinking? Jews must have prospered here, I mean why else would you have such a grand house of worship? Sure, as if after all the pogroms, the harassment by fascists from within and without, and then the gentle graces of the Soviets and their labor camps that there would be anyone left? These are the kind of things I see every time I head into the Eastern parts of Europe and this is just the sort of internal conversation I have with myself nearly every time. Much like a child finding out over and over again that there is no Santa Claus, I have to tell myself yet again; “Jews used to live here.”

Where many of them have gone was laid out perfectly clearly for me in a confirmation class years ago at Temple Emmanuel in Oklahoma City. In our Bar Mitzvah year our teachers decided that by then we were old enough to be introduced to the grim business of Holocaust studies. We started with the notorious documentary “Night and Fog,” a French collection of Nazi state archive footage of the Final Solution in vivid action. As I stare up at the plaque bolted to the side of this abandoned schul, situated just yards away from a strip of lively cafes filled with noisy patrons all safe and secure in their surroundings, all I can think of are the flickering grainy images of open pits filled with naked, lifeless bodies presented to me in that small darkened class room. It was hard not to actually. Just today on the plane to Bratislava I read in the English language newspaper the Prague Post that the new Jewish cemetery there has once again been abused and vandalized. “Authorities are considering installing video cameras and other security measures” it reports. No Jews left around to kick it seems, so a tombstone will have to suffice I guess. On my walk back to my hotel I make special note of the “White Power” spray painted on the side of the dilapidated, but still utilized, old Soviet era soccer stadium. It’s written in English, in my guess so that foreign travelers like myself will be perfectly clear of the message. “Just so you know, you (insert gypsy, Jew, any brown skinned person, ect..) are still not welcome. Have a nice day!”

It’s strolling the rustic cobblestones of these streets I think about Native Americans and Israel strangely enough. I mean as a young Okie Jew it was mighty hard to wrap your head around the concept of people locked in a seemingly never ending death grip, even taking to killing each other over a lousy strip of land actually smaller than the entire county I grew up in. A window to my perspective: Every Sunday we’d load up the car and the family would make the 100 mile trek down I-35 from Stillwater to OKC so I could get at least a modicum of Jewish education at the conservative schul there. The temples in Tulsa were a much a shorter distance, but as the old Jewish joke about the man stranded on a desert island that built two synagogues: one to pray in and one I wouldn’t set foot in, my dad insisted we make the longer car ride south every week. Truthfully I was never fully integrated into this community either, these “big city” Jews (only the start of a long, seemingly never ending pattern of outsider status for me as it turns out) as I was singled early out as the country bumpkin who spoke with a drawl and didn’t show up for Hebrew School on Tuesdays after regular school like everybody else. Thus, my Hebrew is still appalling and I still don’t feel too comfortable around city folk.

Passing by to the right of the windshield of the old VW van were mile after mile of gently rolling open Oklahoma country side, famed for it’s deep rich soil that produced corn, wheat, alfalfa and all manner of fresh foods. As well as vast areas open to grazing for sheep and cattle. It was hard to reconcile the experience of my weekly journey through great patches of open farmland with the instruction in my Sunday school noting the small Israeli Army’s taking of relatively tiny patches of arid desert like the Gaza Strip as great victories for the Jewish People. A Jewish People which as was made very clear meant me too.

But here’s another window of perspective: all that prime land that I admired from my car seat was actually at one time a reservation for the Iowa, Sac and Fox, Pottawatomie, and Shawnee peoples, “Civilized” Tribes who were given their “Indian Territory” in perpetuity by the Bureau of Indian Affairs after they had renounced violence, abandoned their native religions, acquiesced to the introduction of enforced Christianity and “proper” western morals and education, sending their children off to “Indian Schools” where any semblance of their culture was systematically and quite literally beaten out of them. But even after playing ball to such indignities from1889 to1906 the US government decided to rip up their contracts with the locals (again.) It was easy work to kick out the last remnants of a beaten down brown people now entirely debilitated by cheap whisky and small pox infected blankets, and then gleefully give out their land free to whatever freebooting white person decided to “stake his claim.” “Boomer Sooner” is the battle cry of the University of Oklahoma I was taught in college in homage of these “settlers.” But take some time to look it up and see just what kind of person these “Sooners” (creeps who snuck across the borders early to steal claims) and "Boomers" (big money financiers of poorer, soon-to-be-indentured white folks) actually were. And then consider carefully about how much honor we should bestow to such ilk. The history books trumpet this event as the “Great Land Run of Oklahoma,” but it looks like yet another wildly successful round of ethnic cleansing to me, no matter how rosy the victors wish to paint it.

I was raised in up close proximity to the decedents of this extra-special and long running New World Holocaust (1690 to present.) And thus I had been witness to the myriad levels of degradation and devastation that these actions had wrought. And how tragically and heart achingly they manifest themselves even today. To my pre-adolescent way of thinking, Jews and Native peoples seemed to have quite a bit in common; disempowered underdogs who only ever wanted to left alone to live in peaceful co-existence and who are still around despite everyone’s attempts to destroy us utterly simply for being unlike them. It was the very image that Israel worked to present to the world when I was a kid as well. This became one of the cornerstones of my personal Jewish identity in many ways.

While writing all this down, I recall the experience of being dis-invited from a youth exchange program when I was 14. My father had wrangled hard for me a chance to spend a semester in South Africa with a family from his Rotary Club sister city. But I was yanked out of the running during the lengthy interview process; I’m pretty sure, all because I proffered the opinion that it was a terrible idea to have an oppressive and authoritarian White minority rule over so many un-empowered native people. And that I wasn’t interested in changing my opinion, no matter how fun an overseas journey might be. Mandela was still imprisoned and the nightly news showed scenes of the savage beating of protestors who only simply wanted a voice in their own affairs. It all looked too much like Kristalnacht to me, and I readily identified with the folks on the business end of the Police truncheon, rather than the well-fed white man clad in black riot gear. “You here can’t possibly understand the situation, it’s so much more complex as you imagine, I mean, the blacks are in no position to rule today.” I remember the young Afrikaner-Rotarian saying quite clearly in his genuinely honest attempts to dissuade me of such notions. “Yes, I’m not there and I can’t possibly know all the details.” I recall telling my advisor “But Apartheid is wrong. Period. It’s just wrong.” Needless to say, some less politically informed son of an Oklahoman Rotarian had a blissful few months outside Johannesburg away from his family, tucked in a safe white enclave far from the troublesome Blacks. Meanwhile, I stayed put and went noodling for Catfish with my Boy Scout troop in Lake Thunderbird instead.

It was much later that I came to a very troublesome juncture in my though process about identity both personal and collective. When people wanted to debate things Israeli, and boy do American Jews like talking about Israel, I slowly began to realize that I as a Jew had more in common with a displaced and disempowered Palestinian than with an Israeli. You know, the un-empowered and disenfranchised folks, the people getting their doors kicked in and pulled out into the street at gunpoint. I could not, and can not, cotton the idea that a Jew could ever be the one in the riot gear, wielding a truncheon or leveling a weapon at a kid throwing rocks. And this, friends, is a very strange and uncomfortable place to be. (I take no joy in sharing the notion, though it will most likely outrage a great many folks I know. I only pray they will be able to see the situation from the filter of my own experience.)

Those who know me well understand that I have my whole life struggled greatly with the romantic notion of a “Jewish State” contrasted with the messy realities that the living, breathing, politically and socially complex place like what Israel has become. I was raised in a fairly Israel centric household for an Okie. Long ago, my mother had been a kibbutznik, picking oranges and working on her tan for a summer before she even met my father and often said she had the time of her life even though she wasn’t herself Jewish. As the Hillel director at the University of Oklahoma my father was a 24/7-full time Israel booster, a professional Zionist if you will, and seriously considered an Aliyah (the act of returning to the ancestral homeland) with the whole family in fact, though the constant threat of everyday violence in the Holy Land eventually nixed it the notion.

But the dichotomy of political realities of Nationhood mixed with the practice of a particular religion is a tough road to hoe as we say on the farm. And it’s made all the more complex when framed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the entire world’s collective shame in allowing such to happen, by golly, it all makes for a often sordid and mostly confusing conversation. It’s not a conversation many people, Jews especially, like to be open about in fact. Through my experience and and over time I have formed an opinion that the mostly assimilated Jews of America have in many ways made the idea of Israel their new "Temple," and by extension the repository of their own Jewish identity. Any conversation that includes an unfavorable review of that country’s day to day political policies then can be read as an attack against the core of one’s faith, rather than say, a respectful interest in world affairs and the struggle of Human Rights worldwide. It’s especially troubling when those policies seem from a distance appear to run contrary with the very practice of Judaism that someone like myself was raised with.

Trust me on this one non-Jewish readers, it’s a very prickly path to tread upon. I learned this the hard way once. In a lively post performance conversation on a long country drive with a completely assimilated, non- identified Jewish fiddler colleague of mine, I tried to debate as the devil’s advocate by criticizing a particularly churlish internal Israeli policy that I had read in the paper that day involving the bulldozing of Palestinian suicide bomber’s family homes, which sounded like an awful idea to me no matter how you sliced it. So upset by this stance of “betrayal” of “our people” they actually haven’t spoken a word to me this day. In an ironic twist that illustrates I think the complexity often involved with Jewish identity today, this very musician recently even changed her professional last name to be more palatable to the goyische market (and to be gentlemanly I won’t out them here.) To me this is a sign of ashamedness of not only personal family history but a clear signifier of the deepest level of Jewish self-loathing. But should you hold something other than the party line on absolute correctness the Jewish State and suddenly you’re “against us.” In the question that is Israel, even the conflicted and deeply self-loathing can magically answer as a Jew.

Ok, I must add that it’s all fine and well for a thoroughly assimilated Galutnik like me, make that an unreconstructed, tattooed, married goyische, happy-as-the-proverbial-Pig-in-a-Slop-trough Galutnik in fact, to sit in my air conditioned central Texas home and come up with my comfortable notions about what is and what should be is mighty easy, if not cowardly. But neighbors, let me tell you that a night walking the hot streets of Trencin Slovakia gave me yet a new perspective on what it really means to be Jewish in place where you are very much not welcome and makes me deeply reconsider a lot of the notions I have formed for myself up to this point.

I live in Texas and I truly believe that it is Gan Eden for me. It’s a wide-open land where anything has been possible. That there among these goyim, my culture and creed have never stood in the way, long enough albeit, of any opportunity that I ever desired. Bare in mind that last sentence was written by a man born into Payne County, Oklahoma: the shinny silver Rodeo buckle of the Southern Baptist Bible belt. I had been refused entrance into a public swimming pool on one occasion, black balled unceremoniously from a popular Fraternity (DeMolay,) and subjected to direct proselytizing nearly daily in the course of my public school education, all simply because I was a Jew, and maybe even more threateningly, quite comfortable in owning up to it. I have run the barbed gauntlet of small town, dumb as dirt and proud of it, cracker-dom my whole life (Toby Keith lived right up the road from me to give only one obvious example.) But I did it so effectively I might add that today I am faintly nostalgic for the attention it brought. That in a strange sort of Stockholm Syndrome, I am completely protective of my bygone hillbilly tormentors and will defend them, quite loudly, and speak to the nobler aspects of their (and to a great extent my own) culture of family, God, honor, respect, good fiddling, proper BBQ, hot biscuits, ect., against my Jewish Yankee buddies who would dare disparage my beloved South.

What I realize quite depressingly in my walk tonight is that I’ll bet there was a guy just like me right here in Trencin who said pretty much the same thing about his little hick hometown. Like me, I’ll reckon he couldn’t even conceive of living anywhere else, so rooted to his happy life surrounded the goyim who for the most part left him alone. “Sure, they don’t let us in all the way, and true enough sometimes around Easter some of the lummoxes will get hopped up on Jesus and vodka and beat somebody up” he would tell his buds in some other village ‘But business is good here, and we make a good life.” But almost imperceptibly one fine day, his situation started a downhill slide. The beatings got a bit more regular and a bit more vicious; the public indignities began to pile up, and the business not so good anymore. But it was better than someplace else, he kept telling himself. Much like a frog that is set into a pot of water doesn’t jump out, you can keep adding fire to the pot little by little until the water is completely boiling and the frog is then dead, completely unaware of its impending doom. So on one not so fine day, the trucks rolled in, the locals pointed out his apartment and that was that. He’s not around anymore to defend the positive aspects of Slovakian country living; of its jaunty brass bands, the beer halls filled with fine Pilsners, and of the rugged country folk who were his neighbors. Jews used to live here.

Israel, I note on a map, is a whole lot closer to Trencin than Texas. And with all its issues and complexities I reckon it would have looked like Gan Eden from that cat’s perspective. “History” as a wise man once said, “is a bitch.”

So here I am now, playing with a Gypsy brass band from Serbia in conjunction with a Jewish ensemble from NYC at a music festival held on the grounds of an old Soviet era airfield. Not without being painfully aware the irony, for the last few years the only paying work I have had a musician has been over here, in those places where we used to live. The only way I’ve been able to explain why so called “klezmer” music is so marketable to Europeans, and even East Europeans in fact, is to think of myself like an act in Bill Cody’s touring Wild West Show. I actually have to visualize myself as a musical Sitting Bull if you will, propped up in my native finery and prancing across the concert stage singing my Sacred Chants for a public that is only fascinated by the appearance of the proverbial “ones that got away”. I like to call it the “hospitality of the return ticket,” you can be nice just about anybody if you’re certain they aren’t here to stay. The vibe on the street is Happy, dancing Jews onstage, fine and dandy. But less than happy Jews coming back and asking for their families’ apartment and business, not so much.

Germany, which until recently was the biggest market for this music, never ever had this music there in the first place. But the collective guilt of the butcher’s children and grand children has brow beaten a public acceptance of, even a demand for, Jewish music such to the point where most performers there today aren’t even Jewish. (This is a whole other conversation actually, which gets it’s own muddled essay later.)

But here, like Krakow and Budapest and Beograd, I am now presented much like my Cherokee and Seminole classmates as the “noble savage” that can be accepted now up to a point simply because I no longer pose any threat. Lucky for the local toughs, they still have gypsies here that they can safely kick around, so finally the heat is off us Jews for once.

I’m chatting about these various observations with my good friend Brighton based clarinetist Merlin Shepherd who is on the bandstand with me tonight. Beating the heat, we stroll into the city square and find a seat at a pleasant café under the shadow of the great Orthodox Church. Speaking maybe a little too loudly in English, and being the only men with any facial hair that we have seen anywhere in town, we are certainly not from around here. Our young waitress brings us our coffee and inquires in her best English if we were here for the big festival. We said yes and that in fact we were performers, which seemed to excite her a great deal. “What do you play”” she inquires. Merlin responds matter-of-factly “Jewish and Gypsy Music.” To which our waitress literally recoils, whipping her hand over her mouth to cover her obvious shock. I can’t make this stuff up. “Is that a bad thing?” Merlin asks. “Oh no…” she says as she hurriedly shuffles away. “Was it the Jew thing or the Gypsy thing that got her?” I asked Merlin. We agree. It doesn’t really matter, does it?

Jews used to live here.

Blogging for some other Blog...

2010-11-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

It's a funny world now.

I used to contribute articles for publications (Old Time Herald, Bass Player, Austin Chronicle, Sing OUT!, No Depression, ect..) Now I just write of my Facebook page all the time and don't really add much here.

That's why I was so surprised when I got an email out of the blue asking if I'd be interested in blogging for the Arty Semite, an arts and culture blog on the Forward website. The Forward, the English wing of the Yiddish Forverts and is the oldest continuously published paper in America, has gotten into new media big-time and they seem hungry for content. Even from writers like me, way far away from the Jewish cultural main steam.

Okie doke then, the Okie Kike is here to oblige (for the right price!)

Follow this link to my report on the International Accordion Festival and my performance there with Montreal based Yiddish-Hip-Hop phemom Josh Dolgin aka SoCalled.

Enjoy!

The Other Europeans on YouTube

2010-11-02T17:28:00.001-07:00

Here's a collection of videos of the "Other Europeans" project which took up a big chunk of my last 3 summers. Watching these videos, I can hardly believe I was actually there when this all happened.

I'll start with this snippet of the documentary film that has been following the project over several continents.

(Additionally, I guess I should mention that they are still shy of funds to complete and release. Contact me offline if you'd like information on how you could help.)

Here's the band in Furth Germany, March 2010.

Same show, different angle:

Here's a smaller version of the band at KlezKanada, August 2010.

This is a shockingly great performance from Marin Bunea and Petar Ralchev. It was my birthday that night and after his solo, Petar leaned back to me and said "For you, happy birthday!" Happy indeed!!

Here's the cats jamming backstage (with guest Sergui Popa.) They just can't stop playing.

There is talk of this band coming back to the States next year and if it does happen, you all here will be the first to know!

From the Jewish Outlook (Austin TX:)

2010-05-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

Not my best interview, and edited a tad clumsily. I'm usually a little more politic in my thoughts, but for some reason I took the gloves off here and am making no apologies; I spoke from the heart. If I seem disappointed in the lack of support my efforts have received in my own community, is is simply because it so starkly contrasts my experience as a guest in other cultures.

(Can't wait to see how this article compares to my good pal Robbi Sherwin's interview next month. She comes from a much different place than I do, but she encounters the same lack of enthusiasm for her music as well.)

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

2010-04-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

You may have missed this, but I strongly recommend you take the 20 minutes out of your day and read this article from last months Atlantic Magazine, "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America".

We as a nation and a culture are moving into some very precarious times and few of us have taken the time to stop and consider the long term effects that our financial crisis, ultimately a moral crisis in my opinion, is going to have on not only my generation but the generations of Americans to follow. This is the first thing I've read that encapsulates many of the streams of thoughts and conversations I've been having with my contemporaries in recent days, especially the culture which actively promotes and rewards the absence of character and common decency.

Locally the culture is so degraded, disconnected and self referential that the only thing you can get anyone together on to create social action is keeping a nightclub open or rescuing a fetid pile of junk. By contrast, I don't even want to think about how many children went to bed hungry last night here in Austin or how many people here have died from treatable conditions simply because they lack the insurance, to name but only two reasons we should be marching in the streets, enraged. Ignoble doesn't begin to describe such a culture. If that's the best we as a community can muster, then frankly we deserve to suffer.

(A tad judgemental? Sure. But I'd love to hear any argument to the opposite. As talk show host Bill Maher once asked a guest on his show "So, how to you feel about living in a country where we make a buck off of breast cancer?" How indeed.)

Truthfully I'm not as down about it as some of my friends, I still have a job for instance. But I'm only 43 and I don't have 3 kids to put through college nor did I watch my retirement disappear into thin air. There is a whole generation of people I know who worked hard for all their lives and now find themselves in a life that does not resemble anything they were lead to believe it would be like. And though in the last 2 years I've seen my profession become nearly completely devalued, my marriage collapse and my home foreclosed, I remain pretty optimistic about the future. My future at least.

But when the phrase a "Cultural Dark Ages" comes up again and again and from folks independent of one another I can honestly say that I am very glad I have no children who will have to exist in such a time and place as we are now collectively entering. Maybe now, Lord willing, folks will do the introspection required to adjust a very skewed set of priorities and enter the future with honor and dignity. Baruch Hashem.

Embarking on a new Adventure (Bassists take note!!)

2010-04-06T16:01:00.000-07:00

A new adventure begins...

I honestly cannot recall when it struck me, but I leapt out of my hotel room bed and wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it. I was once again out on tour, this time across Europe, schlepping a BBb tuba and my Eminence Bass. I was headed to the airport in the morning and I’d had a flash of an idea.

It had been almost 15 years since I’d responded to some guy named Gary’s posting that I had put up on a bass players chat list. I’d asked if anybody had come across a travel electric upright bass that was really worth a damn. My band had reached the sort of level where air travel was going to be the mode of transport and I had nothing but expensive horror stories shipping my $600 bass in a $3G flight case and paying extra for the pleasure of having it arrive damaged. Gary noted from my tour schedule that I was passing by a shop that had one of his basses for sale and bade me to check it out. I did, and I was completely knocked out by it. (And if you are reading this, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) I gladly bought it and made it my main traveling ax. However, I was still getting hit with oversize and overweight charges, which kind of nullified the very reason you get a travel instrument. From talking to baggage porters and airline counter folks, I realized that the only way to get your gear on a plane safely was to not stick out - to have it look just like the normal kind of bags they see every day. I found that golf bags fly with no oversize charges. If the Eminence could be made to fold up somehow, it would handily fit in a stock hard sided golf bag carrier.

I shared these ideas with Gary who was, as it turns out, very happy to get feedback from actual touring musicians and recognized the problem immediately. After batting back wacky ideas and much independent brainstorming, Gary came up with the detachable dove-tail joint neck block that makes the detachable Eminence possible. Now the bass flies for free and incognito. I played the hand built prototype for many years and then was lucky to beta test the production models manufactured by Christopher. After quite a bit of initial static (and quite a few snickers), the sound, playability and ease of transport of the detachable Eminence won over nearly every serious bassist I ran into. Bluegrass legend Marshall Wilborn played mine at IBMA’s conference and promptly put in an order, as did globe-trotting Stu Brotman of Brave Old World who commissioned a 5 string model. The detachable neck Eminence Bass is now ubiquitous on stages around the world and in every imaginable style of music where a string bass is found. It is the most influential product, besides my music, that I have ever been lucky to be involved with and it literally swells my heart every time I see one onstage.

That brings me back to my jumping up out of bed. You see, it’s many years later and the nature of air transport has changed here in America quite a bit, becoming less musician friendly all the while. Further cash strapped airlines are looking for any way to boost the bottom line. It would just be a matter of time before they started charging oversize on the golf bag carriers too. And I had heard anecdotally about guys getting charged when TSA inspectors revealed, right in front of the ticket counter, that there was something other than golf clubs in the case. It was time to think proactively.

Was it possible, dare I even think it, that the Eminence could fold up even smaller? Small enough to fit in a standard hard-sided piece of luggage? Can the - it’s hard to even write - can the fingerboard come off? That’s what I wrote down on the hotel envelope. When I called Gary, he didn’t even blink. “Let me think on this.” Which is, not coincidently, precisely what he said to me when I commissioned a detachable neck. Just recently he called me to say “I’ve got it.” I can’t wait to see what he came up with.

Details to follow soon, so check back often.

Old Jews Telling Jokes

2010-03-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

My cousin Freddy used to earn his coin as a gag writer for TV sitcoms, and this particular website is known to me. But I had no idea that he actually got a joke in, and I still can't think of him as "old." Here goes:

On "Saving" the Cactus Cafe, or anything else for that matter...

2010-03-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

Found in my in-box today. (How I got on this mailing list is anyone's guess, but I'm used to being left out of the vast majority of positive events that occur locally and am only called upon when somebody wants something.)

"Dear Mr Rubin:

I am a volunteer with the Save the Cactus Cafe campaign (www.savethecactuscafe.org.) This historic venue you have played at is threatened with closure this August. I am hoping you would be willing to contribute a few words about the Cactus Cafe on our "Artists Say...." page (www.savethecactuscafe.org/artists-sayhellip.html).

One thing we are doing to show the support this venue has is to try to get the music community involved. We are collecting quotes (around three sentences) and video interviews/testimonials from artists who have performed at the Cactus.

If you are not familiar with the Save the Cactus Cafe campaign, please check out our website where you can learn how we are a grassroots campaign which grew out of a Facebook page in support of the Cactus (it now has over 24,000 members). The Facebook fan page was in response to the University of Texas' announcement to close the Cactus Café this August. We are all volunteers trying our best to organize, get the word out and keep the Cactus Café open.

We would really appreciate anything you can do to help with our efforts - sending in your quotes and videos, donating your time to the campaign, performing at benefits, writing to the university administration, newspapers, blogs, tweeting, etc.

Please consider being a part of our "Artists say...." page. I look forward to hearing back from you! Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I can be reached at 860-XXX-XXXX (phone) or at XXXXXXX@gmail.com (email)

Thanks so much, XXXXX XXXXX"

There's so much that could be said to this fellow. Like why is a guy with a Connecticut phone number so worried about an "Austin" institution, or did I wake up in a socialist country where the arts are supposed to be supported with public moneys, or if the Cactus was valuable then it would stay open on it's own, ect...

But in a fit of trying not to be a jerk, I could only respond thus:

"Hello Mr. XXXXX,

Thanks so much for thinking of me, but I really have nothing to offer one way or the other. I was taught that everything that lives must surely someday die, no matter how much we love them. At some point you just have to let go.

Has anyone considered focusing this kind of attention to our culture pro-actively, rather than pay attention after it is already a fait accompli? Then there might not be a need to "save" anything. You can look for my complete support in that sort of endeavor.

Best,

MR"

That's really all I have to say on the subject.

The Miracle of Mardi Gras...

2010-03-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

...and of modern technology.

I'm very lucky to be a member of the Carnival Season brass agregation, the Panorama Brass Band. Essentially a enlarged version of the amazing Panorama Jazz Band with some wacko out-of-town ringers (like me.) This year's parade season was the best yet, in my opinion and this particular version of the band has a really wonderful and sweet vibe all week long. I produced a CD for the Jazz Band just a few months prior to Katrina hitting, and you should try and find yourself a copy.

What's also amazing is the fact that cell phone technology has advanced to the point where nearly every moment of parade is available for viewing on YouTube. So, I have compiled here quite a few little snippets of the parades, up to and including rolling with the St. Anthony Ramblers on Mardi Gras day.

I must say one of the most moving and tender moments I've had all year was performing a chorale in honor of one of the Rambler's who passed over to glory in the last year, while we were introduced to brand new Rambler's who just recently came into this world. All on a Mardi Gras Day, in the Marginy in New Orleans. (Makes a big boy like me pretty weepy. And yes the sound is awful, but I hope you get the spirit that was created in the moment.)

We actually took a couple days off between rolls and recorded a CD, which I hope will be all wrapped up and out soon. The 2010 version of the Panorama Brass Band was:

Patty Farrel, alto horn

Don Godwin & Mark Rubin, tenor horns

Charlie Halloran, slide trombone

Ben Schenck, clarinet

Aurora Nealan, alto sax

JR Hankins, truba

Jack Pritchett

, trumpet

Dan Oestreicher, bari sax

John Gross, sousaphone

Boyana Travanova, spinning drum

Greg Mervine, bass drum

Sean Clark & Ritchie Barshay, percussion

Bon Mardi Gras, y'all. See you next year, for sho!!

Required Veiwing for American Citizenship

2010-01-02T11:47:00.001-08:00

Ok, maybe not all of you were film majors in college and it's possible you don't process your thoughts through art like I tend to. But I was recently amazed at how many folks I run into these days aren't hip to some mighty amazing, socially conscious, thought provoking and genuinely entertaining films.

What follows is a little recommended viewing list from me. I'm not going to cloud your experience by telling you why they were important or meaningful to me. I'm sure I've left out quite a few biggies as well, but these are what popped into my mind almost immediately.

Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd”

Orson Well’s “Citizen Kane”

“Patton,” screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola

Norman Jewison’s “Rollerball” (1975)

Carol Reed’s, “The Third Man”

Sidney Lumet’s “Network”

Arthur Penn’s “Little Big Man”

John Carptenter's "They Live"

Documentaries:

Spike Lee’s "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts"

For the Bible Tells Me So

International Voices:

Fassbinder’s “Fear Eats the Soul” (Angst essen Seele auf)

Kurosawa’s, “The Bad Sleep Well” (悪い奴ほどよく眠る)

Kusturica’s “Time of the Gypsies” and “Underground”

Maybe you could load up your Netflix and check 'em out at your leisure. I'd be curious to see what resonated in these stories for you.

Klez Kamp turns 25 this week.

2009-12-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

Living Traditions, the parent organization of the annual "Klez Kamp" Yiddish Cultural retreat, is celebrating it's quarter century mark with this weeks' events in the Catskill Mountains. I myself first made the pilgrimidge to what I joking refer to as the Yiddish Brigadoon in 1996 and have been on staff for 13 susequent years (including the ill-fated Klez Kamp West in Petaluma CA.) My participation with this bunch of folks, both staff and students, has gone a long way to shape my opinions and attitudes about music and and culture, the very sorts of conversations I addressed in my recent interviews with the Steam Powered Preservation Society, parts one and two, for instance. In 2007 I wrote an article, "The KlezKamp Mitzvah: reviving reconnecting with a vanishing culture," on the event and it's influence for Sing OUT! Magazine, which is archived here.

I was asked to write a small rememberence to be included in the Klez Kamp "Zhurnal," the information booklet handed out to the participants. As per usual, I delivered my piece a few days too late to be included in the printing, so I share it with you here now:

Man, it was cold, colder than I could ever remember with snow everywhere. Sure it got cold on the Oklahoma plains where I was born and raised, but I had been living in Texas for a long while now and tonight I stood shivering in my cowboy boots there in the foyer of the Paramount. Just as unfamiliar to my experience was the great bus-load of little old folks and precocious little kids streaming into the old resort, all a ruckus with big hugs and joyful reunions, chattering away in this strange Germanic tongue. Up to that point, the only Yiddish I had heard was my Godfather Morris Katz calling his milk cows into the barn for the night back in Stillwater. Frankly, I had never around this many Jews before, not even at High Holy Days. My head was swimming.

“Oh good, you made it!” said the guy who invited me as he bounded towards me in the lobby. I had never met Henry Sapoznik in person but we had corresponded for years and for just as long he had been cajoling me to come up to “Kamp.” Though technically a stranger (heck I didn’t know a soul there really,) he hugged me like an old friend. “You’re just in time! The dancing is starting. We need a bassist.” He led me down into the Tanzhall and bade me onstage. I took of my coat, inquired about a key from the amiable clarinetist, and proceeded to clam my way through a thrilling set of dance tunes with Merlin Shepherd and Loren Brody.

Back home in Texas I play for dancing quite a bit, it’s one of the reasons I live there in fact. But here for the first time in my life I was actually playing Yiddish music, MY people’s music, for room full of Jewish dancers dancing Yiddish dances. Not a concert, with lifeless music set in amber, distant and removed. Tonight, here at this place music had sprouted legs, was drinking a bit too much and was tearing up the dancefloor. I don’t know if I can properly express how huge a thing that is, how music literally comes alive when it’s simply just a part of a greater function, in a living context. 13 trips back to the Catskills over Xmas week later, I am still in awe of that first of what was to be many, many “Klez Kamp Moments.” If only for this one gift, dayenu.

Truth is I’ve got quite a lot of stories I could tell you; of the musical relationships that formed here, of the people I now call my family, how these experiences have in many ways made me who and what I am not only as a musician, but as a person and as a Jew. Of the deeply moving naches of watching the same little pischers who were running around wild when I first came here mature in the adults that we now look to continue our work. I could tell you about the time I was down with no one to turn to and how this community, the Yiddish Culture family that Klez Kamp gave birth to 25 years ago and nurtures to this day, lifted me up with love and support.

I don’t know if I can properly express how huge a thing that is. - Mark Rubin, Austin TX, 2009

(You can read many more dispatches from the front of Yiddish Culture at the Klez Kamp Blog as well.)

Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa and see you kids in '10.

Now available: a handy Mark Rubin FAQ's

2009-12-07T23:06:00.000-08:00

In all the years of my public life as a performer, a radio and television host, music supervisor for motion pictures and television or even as a journalist for print and web, not once had anyone asked me to share my basic philosophies about music and culture. Sure, I get a good jab in once and a while, like my quotes in Barry Mazor's "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" or in the odd print article like Josh Alan's profile of me for the Dallas Observer. But ultimately, there's some kind of editor or agenda at play that somehow muddles the point I hoped to make. (Most notably the "Rubin v. Jimmy Sturr" non-controversy of several years ago.)

What a gift it is then to be allowed a platform, outside of this little blog here, to let folks in on some of the concepts that I have been working with, struggling with and trying to make sense of for the entirety of my professional life. They are the ideas that have defined me and, by extension, all the things I create.

Writer Sarah Hagerman of the Steam Powered Preservation Society web site sat down with me last month, asked some really great questions and let the cassette recorder roll. (Yes, a glorious Radio Shack cassette machine!) In essence, she has provided me with a handy FAQ for me and I am very grateful for the opportunity.

If you are even mildly curious about what motivates my work, then read this two part interview and know quite a bit about me. Probably more than you'd like, I reckon.

Part One: A wide ranging talk including growing up Jewish in small town Oklahoma, the real purpose of music in culture and how the legacy of the Bad Livers was so misunderstood.

Part Two: The power of nomenclature, language and how it effects music and culture, why Bluegrass Nashville is a closed shop (for Jews at least,) my travels across Europe with Rroma musicians and the story of Fat Man & Little Boy.

The Other Europeans - an Inquiry and my responses

2009-11-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

What follows is a questionnaire I filled out for the Other Europeans Project. I was unaware that my responses would end up published, even posted publicly on a 7 foot by 3-foot poster stock much less! But, I meant what I said. Maybe you'd be interested too, so here it is. It’s in German, so the English translation follows.

Questions are by photographer Frank Burhadrt:

The Other Europeans - Inquiry

Identity

Where were you born?

Stillwater Oklahoma

What does „homeland“ mean to you?

It’s where I’m understood. Where the food tastes best and the rhythm of the language is familiar.

- In what ways do you think of yourself – musically and beyond – as an „other“ or different kind of European?

I am an exile. A galutnik (in Yiddish,) living happily and feeling welcomed in someone elses home. I am a Rootless Cosmopolitan, to quote Stalin’s pejorative, invited to many parties, but not a member of the club.

- Until now, have you had any really surprising experience in The Other Europeans project, or has everything gone more or less as you expected?

I tried to enter with no expectations personally. But I have been genuinely surprised at the level of synchronicity and unspoken communication that exists between these groups of musicians.

- When you consider the nations and ethnic groups of Europe politically, socially and culturally, do you see more things that divide them or more that unite or connect them? And: in your opinion, is Germany more „European“ today than 15 or 20 years ago?

As an artist I feel that it’s our inherent job description to help people identify not only with each other as members of a common family, but also our attachment with the ineffable. Like any great truth however, these “National characters,” the identities which help to bind groups of people together for a common good can conversely be manipulated by petty and vindictive persons for agendas of great evil and inhumanity. One of the saddest elements of human nature is that we seem to be able to work together most effectively when we are gathering against some other Tribe: Bosnia, Darfur, Sri Lanka, the news tells the same old story nearly ever day. As an artist I feel very strongly that we are to step into that breach of history before it becomes toxic and harmful. There is a reason why the arts are either suppressed (or go unfunded) in oppressive societies; these divisive leaders know too well the power a single musician can wield as a force for the promotion of goodness and courage to create change.

Germany, among the Nations of Europe, I feel can speak authoritatively to this point having taken the path of destruction and then reconciliation, not only for the communities of Europe that it ravaged in war and conquest, but also with it’s own people in reunification with the East. I can’t really speak to how European Germany is now compared to 15-20 years ago, as I first arrived here in 1991 when the country was attempting to reconnect with half of it’s population after 50’s years of an awkward separation.

Vision

- Do you believe that in Europe in 2025, the supposed cultural „differences“ and „otherness“ will be naturally seen as an enrichment, reflection, addition to, self-recognition of one’s „own“ identity, even outside of concert halls?

Well that’s the plan isn’t it? If that isn’t the goal of this endeavor, then why are we even bothering?

Difference

- At the beginning of The Other Europeans project the goal was to discover the difference between Yiddish and Roma musical styles and eventually to combine them. What results or insights have you achieved by now, just before starting the last project phase in Summer 2009, following your travels through Central Europe, and after intensive shared rehearsals and performances? From your current point of view, is the question about „differences between Yiddish and Roma musical style“ still the right question to be asking?

Sure it is, but only in the way you note different ingredients that different people use to make the same meal. I’m not certain I’ve been able yet to process all the insights that I have been exposed to. Working through these thoughts and concepts are the fuel for creativity and expression and for me that is best accessed in the moment.

- At the beginning of The Other Europeans project, Alan Bern considered that Jewish musical identity might not be as clear as that of the Lautari Band musicians (we were then using the term „Roma-musicians“ in general for the group).

I agree with Mr. Bern’s assessment. I feel that we Jewish musicians and particular we American born players are fairly well far removed from a cohesive and readily identifiable culture. Half of my struggle in this project has been to clarify what exactly is the Jewish musical identity in fact.

- A): Do you identify with any ethnic community - its daily traditions, customs and culture - so strongly that you can directly draw from it energy and inspiration for your musical work, your sense of identity, your virtuosity and stage presence?

I do indeed. I am a Texan and we present ourselves and interact in a very particular way. I am a product of my surroundings every bit as I am a product of my heritage. At our best, Texans are outsized in contribution and quality. We speak truth to power and do our best to remember we were not descended of fearful men. And, very importantly we dance with women, in public places. OK, it’s a nationality then and not so much an ethnicity. On a serious note my musician friends like to say about my approach to music and culture, “It really is true, that Texan trumps Jew…” (It rhymes in English.)

Consequence

- For you, is The Other Europeans project more of a (possibly unique) theoretical musical experience or will it have a direct, concrete and audible affect on how you actually play in the future?

Well, all I can say for sure is that my musician colleagues here at home consistently remark that there is a profound change in my performance and musical attitudes since I began my participation in the project.

Transcendence

- Are belief, spirituality, religion a source of energy and inspiration in your daily musical life?

In every respect. These beliefs are strong and strongly personal.

- Do you have someplace that is your own, private place of peace, of retreat, of contemplation?

It happens, but only fleetingly and very infrequently. Only when I stripped away my conscious and material form and am allowed access to the ineffable. This occurs most frequently when I am lost, completely involved within a musical moment.

Outlook

- To finish, let’s risk taking a look past The Other Europeans project, its musicians and musical styles. Suppose you could have anything and anybody you wanted for a new musical project – with whom and in which country would you like to stand on stage and what would we (the audience) hear?

For me, I would very much like to visit Moldova and if I was very lucky, maybe I could get a chance to play with the lautari there. Both in Edinets with the rustic brass bands and in Chisinau with Marin and Adam in the more modern Lautari style. I think in some ways, I have been preparing my whole life to do so.

For my own musical projects, this may seem strange given this forum, but I am resolved to approach my own American musical traditions of late, but with a new set of ears that I have gained from this project. I am after all, not European myself.

Identity: the Other Europeans. Jews, Gypsies and beyond...

2009-11-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

For the last 2 years I was fortunate enough to be involved in the “Other Europeans,” project based in Weimar Germany with side trips to Vienna and Krakow. You can visit the website set up for the project and it’s attendant seminars and there’s even a site dedicated to the band The Other Europeans itself. Follow the links for back round.

But all you really need to know is that pianist/composer Alan Bern has assembled an amazing collection of some of (can’t be all of, as I was involved so that sends the curve down a bit) the planet’s greatest “Yiddish” and “Lautari” musicians. Those were the terms that we came up with to describe the musical traditions of the east European Jewish and Rroma communities for our working purposes. Truthfully, the monikers “klezmer” and “gypsy” are a mixture of inaccurate, mal-abused and frankly racist so it was important to name ourselves and control the conversation.

The first year was all about defining within our two separate groups just what was it that made our music either “Yiddish” or “Lautari,” and that was easier said than done. Jewish music had been recorded commercially in Europe since the earliest days of recording technology. But then there’s that “difficult period” as they call it in Germany between 1933-1945, where we lost direct connection to the context in which all this music functioned. Whatever tattered bits that remained was stitched together after wards, Dead Sea Scroll-like had further had to contend with the twin towers of devastation: assimilation into the American fold and the active replication of Hebrew and Israeli culture. Yiddish life fared much worse in that air than anyone could possibly imagine ("That language grates in my ears," Ben Gurion on his mother tongue.) Our Rroma buddies, as devastated as they were too in the fascist roundups, had the meager benefit of a continued context (like, it’s just as bad today for Romani people in Europe as it ever was, for instance,) but were ignored by the recording industry entirely.

Thus we have a decent window on what Jews sounded like a long time ago and we know what Rromanis sound like today, so finding the “core” sounds and repertoire was mighty difficult to say the least. At first we did our separate workshops and put together 2 very fine representative ensembles of each tradition that performed to much acclaim at the KlezMore Festival, the Festival of Jewish Culture and along with 2 concerts 2 weeks of intensive workshops and panels at Yiddish Summer Weimar.

I came home with quite a few of my basic conceits about Jewish music challenged, in a good way I think. I also arrived with a whole new approach to not just Jewish music but music and further, life itself not to be too awful melodramatic about it. There’s just something so positive and edifying to be sitting in a room with some of the no-shit best musicians working on the planet. Being in the musical sphere around Petar Ralchev or Kalman Balogh alone should be life changing if you are paying attention. But then to meet the Moldavian contingent, and to be able to lock in so well both onstage and off WITHOUT ANY COMMON LANGUAGE OTHER THAN PICKIN’? The mind boggles actually.

It pains me greatly, embarrasses me really, that I was unable to find a sponsor to fund my participation in the field work trip to Edinets Moldova, the home of many of the finest Lautaris and one time home of Jewish Clarinet Giant Dave Tarras. Why Edinet, you ask? Well, submitted for your consideration are the two following recordings with roots there. The first, a very well known tune called “Hangu lui Nicu Chitac” by the Edinets based Lautari band Ciocarlia. The second, Dave Tarras recorded in the about the same time (late 1950’s) with the Abe Ellstein Orchestra called “Lo Mir Freilachsein.” Hmmm. What do you think? A connection maybe? (oh, can't post the mp3's. email me offline and I'll send them to you.)

For reasons I still cannot properly reconcile, my own Jewish community here in Austin feels not even the slightest connection to this endeavor. And in fact my attempt to raise interest, and hopefully funding, has been met either complete indifference or even open hostility. “How can we talk even about Eastern Europe right now when there’s so much anti-Israel bias going around…” was a direct quote from one of the folks I solicited for funds. This prevailing attitude in American Jewry belies a further discussion, and we’ll get around to eventually I’m sure. But suffice it to say when even the local Yid’n are not one bit on board with your version of Jewish Life and Culture, then you have a very tough road to hoe indeed.

On a more positive track, this years Other European project, ironically funded by the EU no less, included a Winter rehearsal in Weimar where the two ensembles attempted to meld into some kind of cohesive orchestra and explain musically our research. The sessions, in the middle of a frozen German February, were grueling and difficult. But the end result, highlighted by an amazing concert, was more than I had hoped for.

We gathered again in Vienna in July to further rehearse and then share our research if you will with concerts at the same three festivals we played last year. If it was even possible, these concerts were way beyond what I think any of us could have anticipated, and the performance in the Reform Synagogue in Kazimerz (Krakow, Poland) was one for the books; possibly a personal best thus far. Luckily for all of us, the concert was broadcast on television and is archived in streaming format here.

What are we to gather from all this?

I’m still processing it I must admit. Searching clumsily for analogies at a seminar, I proffered that the Yiddish and Lautari music’s were at one time drinking from a very similar well, with our communities close in both cultural and physical proximity. Marin Bunea reminds us that these music’s exist devoid of a required nationality or religion. In Edinets, he relates, the finest regarded Lautari was in fact a Jew and vice versa. But much in the same way that Bluegrass* music took off as a hyper-charged, polished and citified version of it’s more unsophisticated Old Time Country roots, Lautari music exists today in the same sort of context: concertized, virtuosic and harmonically advanced. Poor little Yiddish music remains stunted, attached more to the simcha and dance traditions and much like Old Time played today, devoid of it’s life giving context played by musical recidivists as if it’s a Jewish "Civil War re-creationist music." Or worse still, used only as a name checked home base of style and repertoire, used to create some kind of clumsy admixture using Yiddish melodies as a Tabula Rasa for whatever the artist (usually someone unable to enter the music business any other way strangely enough) wishes to project. Insert one of literally HUNDRED’s of acts in either slot. It’s OK. We have plenty of time…

That all said, I think that now is as fine a time to note that I’m pretty much done with attempting to make people agree with my take on Jewish music anymore. It's tiring and evidently ineffective. I’ll take a gig when they come, but my personal identification as a “klezmer” (oh how I do despise that term!) musician has thus concluded. I walked away from a popular and commercially successful music group almost a decade ago, in no small part to better devote myself to the reconstitution of Yiddish and other traditional music’s. But as anyone who has been working in this field could tell you, it’s not a parnossa. I reckon I made more scratch playing my own music for 90 minutes last week than Michael Winograd banked all last year. And he’s friggin’ great. And he’s only one of about three dozen amazing cats I know who have done the hard work and play the good music, with wit and skill. But what they didn’t learn, as they were way too busy learning music and culture correctly, was how to hustle a a good paying gig and write a grant that appeals to the current version of mainstream Jewish thought.

But that’s the environment we find ourselves in today, and I feel that I’m personally unable to in my opinion degrade this music, any music actually, to the level that is currently required to operate effectively. Frankly, I feel the same way about Bluegrass, the music of my upbringing as well; I just can’t reconcile what it has become today with what I know to be my own experience.

Ultimately, I think we get the culture that we deserve. I have no children, so ultimately I have no dog in this hunt. And I plan on having a much more care free life now that the "why don't you to think like I do" portion of my career has now thankfully concluded.

*I wish to go on record that Zev Feldman called my analogy “brilliant,” but only after he amended it.

Henry Sapoznik: "Youngers of Zion" CD sales to benefit Mark Rubin

2009-10-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

From Ari Davidow's Klezmer Shack:

This just in: Hank Sapoznik has announced that all sales of the "Youngers of Zion" CD will be earmarked to Mark Rubin's rehab fund. For those of you who missed my post on the Jewish-Music mailing list about YOV (perhaps more truthfully named "middle aged agents of Katz's deli" or somesuch) being a great place to get a Mark Rubin fix, here's what I wrote back in 2005:

I don't even know what to say about this. The album cover says it all, but you'll have to read the review to know how I heard it. Henry Sapoznik, with Austin's musical ambassador, Mark Rubin, and the absolutely stunning fiddle of Cookie Segelstein, teamed up to bring us the one and only Youngers of Zion / Protocols. Listen or else.

Since you are here, now, let me encourage you to purchase this delightful CD from cdbaby.com before you go elsewhere. Or, if you already have the CD, you can help the Mark Rubin fund, directly.

From the Archives: review of the George Jones re-issue "The Grand Tour"

2009-10-17T19:40:00.003-07:00

From No Depression Magazine, Issue #70 July-August 2007

George Jones – The Grand Tour

What I really should have said...

2009-09-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

Seems a lot of folks have been approaching me lately about Eastern European music here in Austin. I can see why too, as I've been playing Jewish Dance music (aka "klezmer') here and abroad since I first moved here in 1989. I don't wish to sound entirely discouraging about it, but a person's intentions completely speak to the end product. And my life in folk music has been shaped by the people who I learned from. Who were, trust me, far less amiable in expressing these concepts that I.

As I return tonight from a weekend of work in NYC with Jewish clarinetist-Bluegrass mandolinist non pareil Andy Statman, the ad hoc Balkan Brass Band Veveritse and others, I'm starting to formulate a handy FAQ on why maybe I'm not the guy you want to talk to.

a) I personally have no interest in playing music outside of its intended context.

As much as I enjoy listening and playing, lets use simply as one example, Romanian Lautari music, the simple fact is that there isn't anyone here in Austin TX who wants to hear it. If there is no wedding, no christening or restaurant gig, then why take the time and energy to crank out a low grade version to play in front of audiences that wouldn't be able to discern the difference between no good and no, good! Submitted for evidence: What I've found in my many years in this community is that the Jews of Texas, a mighty fully assimilated bunch of folks, don't much care for the kind of Jewish music I play. It's attached to Yiddish speaking culture that they either can't remember or in the case of fervent Zionists, reject entirely. Thus, I don't get any calls to play simchas here, even though after over a decade of study the musicians I work with locally are as competent and fine as you'll encounter anywhere. There's just no demand for the service I provide here. I do get work every where else there is a culturally active Jewish community, say like the East Coast (who would have thunk?) and without much irony, parts of Europe where it never existed in the first place.

Many years ago, I became entranced with the Oud and the sounds of the Magreb and points East. I sought out a teacher, which is what you are supposed to do when you wish to really learn something. But he wouldn't show me a thing on the instrument, not how to tune it, nothing, until I explained myself. Why, he inquired, do you want to play the Oud? It is not your music. There is no possible way you will ever understand the music it makes, he explained, as it takes the study of a lifetime to comprehend not only the tonalities but the purpose and context in which the instrument exists. It was not until I had outlined my goals completely, and to his satisfaction, that he started my instruction. (For the record, I told him I was interested in the Oud only where it intersected with Western cultures, in the form of the Greek Oriental Rembetika tradition which has historically informed the Hassidic and other Eastern European Jewish music's of which I had made a decade long study at that point.) I have a feeling most of these young kids playing folk music today have never been challenged in that way. And more's the pity.

b) "Coals to Newcastle"

Here in Texas we have AMAZING living music traditions, with Tejano, Tex-Polish, Tex-Czech and French language music’s all indigenous to the region. Shuffle blues, honky tonk, Texas swing, white folks got some great music here too.

Who, really, moves to Austin TX to play Balkan music? Someone who wants to be as far away from the Balkans, and anyone who could call out a charlatan as possible, that's who. What possible explanation can you conclude?

There's a whole tribe of "New Orleans" jazz musicians who reside and work here in Austin simply because they possess neither the skills or stomach to actually go to New Orleans where, strangely enough, there is a built in demand for New Orleans Jazz. It's far more comfortable to sit 8 hours to the west and not ever have to see if you really could “make it” in the proper context. Bluegrass lives in Tennessee. Be-Bop and Free Jazz in Chicago and New York. Balkan music lives in the Balkans and when you drink this far from the well, the water is mighty foul indeed.

Conversely, Texas music has changed the world, and people leave their homes and lives elsewhere every day to come here and take it in. Personally, it's idiotic not to soak it all up, as it flows from the tap here. If, that is, you have the ears to hear it.

c) Personally, there are few things more ignoble than a cultural dilettante.

I won't go into the whole flaming screed, but I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of Hank Bradley's amazing essay "Counterfeiting, stealing, and cultural plundering
A manual for applied ethnomusicologists." He makes my argument, but without the bitter recriminations that I am famous for. Suffice it to say that when someone not of a culture approaches me about playing music of a culture, the only thing I could think of is "what is it about yourself and your own people that you find so distasteful that you feel the need to suck off some one else's'?" Over the years, I've been shown some amazing examples of historical dissonance that has tempered my tone quite a bit. But I think you get my point.

d) Play "with," not "like."

Music is fun. It's amazing and wonderful and healing and a conduit to the ineffable. But music is simply just one small facet of a greater diamond that represents a culture, and thus can also be precious and fragile. I don't begrudge anybody a gig; if you want to call yourself "gypsy-punk-klezmer-balkan-circus" whatever all you like. It's a free country. But I prefer to play Lautari music with actual Lautari musicians in situations where they expect Lautari music to be played. And the simple truth is: you could too. All you have to do, as LBJ famously remarked, "is everything you have to do." Life is WAY TOO SHORT to be screwing around, people. Get out there and do it, not some lame half-assed version of it.

Playing a watered down, second rate version of a beautiful musical tradition far removed from its context and community with like minded hobbyists isn't going to get you anywhere.

Not ever.

(See my Manifesto for a New Year, dated 2007 for even further context on music and intention.)

BTW: there are these planes. And they fly everywhere, nearly everyday.

A note on success in the market place from Danny Barnes.

2009-08-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

In the last year or so I have kept up a daily communication with my old business partner and "Fearless American Weirdo" Danny Barnes. It's been a wild mix of medias: iPod pics, tetxts, emails and YouTube links. We hardly speak in fact except at the odd Bad Livers reunions (next one and last one on the books, Novemeber 20, Old Town School of Folk, Chicago IL, double bill with the Hot Club of Cowtown.)

Here's a typical chestnut of wisdom from him:

"the stanford research institute says that the money you make in any endeavor is determined only 12.5 percent by knowledge and 87.5 percent by your ability to deal with people."

later another quote is "what you will become in five years will be determined by what you read and who you associate with."

Frankly, that explains a lot to me!!

Here's one of the many bands he's been hipping me too as well:

Danny's got a new CD coming out in the fall, and it's a breathtaking master work. No foolin'. Check it out.

Brian Marshall delves into Texas Polish-Jewish Connections

2009-07-30T23:39:00.000-07:00

"If it had not been for a Jewish merchant we could have ended up in New Jersey or some other God awful place!!!!!!"

That's the email title I got from Texas Polish Dance Band Fiddler Brian Marshall, and it's meant as a compliment. Evidently he's found that his kin folk, along with most of the second wave of immigration of Texas Polonia were encouraged to move to Texas by one James Meyer Levi, a Polish Jew and Confederate Civil War Veteran.

He continues: "New Waverly, Texas, is located thirteen miles south of Huntsville on State Highway 75 and Interstate Highway 45 in southern Walker County. The Houston and Great Northern Railroad Company founded it, after the residents of what became Old Waverly refused to grant the railroad a right of way through their community. A group of Walker County cotton planters met in a general store at Old Waverly, Texas on September 19, 1866, to discuss their problems in securing workers. Meyer Levi, a merchant who had various holdings in the state, owned the store.

There were twelve planters who gathered at the meeting for the purpose of recruiting laborers from Europe. The members established themselves as ‘The Waverly Emigration Society” and commissioned Meyer Levy to travel to Europe to recruit 150 “foreign laborers” to work on their lands. Each planter requested a certain number of workers with specific skills. The planters agreed to play for the passage of the immigrants to Texas and to play the men $90, $100, and $110 for their work in their work in their first, second, and third years in America. The women would receive $20 less for their labors each year. Meyer Levy agreed to go to his native Poland and recruit workers. Forty-five families totally 143 persons arrived in New York on April 9, 1867. After a short difficulty with travel funding, they then traveled by ocean from New York to Galveston, Texas.

In 1870 the Great Northern Railroad Company laid its’ tracks ten miles west of Old Waverly and set aside a town site know as Waverly Station. The new community attracted many residents of Old Waverly, and the new town’s name was soon changed to New Waverly. Because so many of the original group of Polish immigrants followed to New Waverly it was called the “Cradle of Polish Immigration” in this part of Texas. While most of the first Polish immigrants made their homes in New Waverly, many eventually migrated to the surrounding counties."

Visit Polish Texans website for more information about this fascinating Polish Diaspora community.

There's Way Too Much On YouTube...

2009-06-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

..that you may have missed. I find it, and share it with you so you can have a productive life.

Here's a collection of music in it's most natural state, in context and live. Hope you enjoy.

From a Serbian bar, here's Aca Nikolic Cergar:

Serbia again, looks like a backstage rehearsal at the Guca Festival with Demiran Cerimovc Orkestar, that year's winner:

Another Guca favorite, Vranjski Biserli playing a very upbeat Edersedzli on a morning talk show

Here's an inpromyu street jam with some out of towners in Vranska Banja, home to many fine brass band players in Serbia. Come with me now to old Mexico, the State of Sinaola in fact, home of the big brass Bandas. Sit in on this rehearsal of Banda Libertad de Guamichil (and dig the tuba player who kills it!)

Follow me down to the beach with the Buccaneer Band of Mazatlan.

Here's a Son Jarocho band tackling one of my all time favorite numbers, El Cascabel! In my heaven, harps sound like this:

Well, I think this is what happens when two ditsy French chicks pick up a couple of Romanian Lautari and head back to the hotel. I think...

Here's what looks to ba a social gathering of some sort in Romania, street music provided by the Fanfara din Toflea.

Further East, at least I think, here's the scene at a Moldavian Wedding. Screw the band, let's see those dancers. Sirba!!

Ah, the mariachis of Romania. A little table music?

Here's as fine an example of a Romanian a village taraf as you will find. This could have been filmed 100 years ago.Cristi Geagu Catâroiu on lead violin.

Welcome to the living room of the Pavlovic Family, where daddy Branko plays the hell out of the brac!!

We all owe a great debt to these folks wwho are giving these little glimpses into their world. Hopefully with technology like this, we can put aside the lie of otherness between peoples and we can finally recognize everyone as brothers in the family of man. That's my dancing prayer.

Today we speak of Gabi Lunca.

2009-06-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

It's a well documented fact that I'm totally nuts about Lăutari Music from Romania and points east. As I prepare for another adventure to Europe with the Other Europeans project, I have been diving back into that rich repertoire for yet another listen. Marin Bunea, the legendary Moldovan fiddler on our tour, is like me entirely entirely enraptured in the music of singer Gabi Lunca.

There's a fine biography of her posted here, noting all the amazing musicians (the Gore Brothers, Toni Iordache, ect..) and of her rivalry with the equally amazing, if not more rough and tumble sort of singer, Romica Puceanu. But watching how she looks at her accordionist when she drops the mic down to his bellows when he solos, you don't need to be told that she was married to him!

Enjoy!

This one was a mind blower. Fans of the music of Dave Tarras will note the melody and form is identical to his tune "Gypsy" from the the amazing Columbia LP TANZ!

Here's one of those amazing "lazy 3/8ths" tempos that Romanian musicians are world famous for.

Please be my "Fan."

2009-06-04T22:42:00.000-07:00

How pathetic was that, huh?

Please be so kind as to visit my new Reverb Nation site and sign up as a fan. While you're at it, maybe sign up for my mailing list too?

Many thanks in advance!

From the Strad magazine:

2009-03-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

“I am not such a fanatic as to say that the occasional indifferent performance (of music) leads directly to mental or moral ruin, but I do assert that the frame of mind induced by habitual indifferent performances of music, or of any act whatsoever, and which leads to the uncritical acceptance of the same by a number of slack and devitalized intelligences is verily, a forcing house of mental and moral disease.”

Excerpted editorial, The Strad Magazine, London UK, March 1909.

What could I possibly add?

"Austin's King of Jewish Bluegrass Tuba"

2009-03-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

I awoke this morning at the historic Anglican rectory just north of U. Cal Berkeley, to be shuttled to the Elmwood Elementary for a school program with Kosher Gospel singer Joshua Nelson. (Not to be confused with the lame Israeli rock singer of similar name.)

It was a wonderful bunch of kids asked probing and sensitive questions for the musicians.

Then it was a short cab ride into Southwest Berkeley to the workshop of master ukulele builder Mike DaSilva. Mike made a uke (the "Lucky Lady") for my buddy Pops Bayless and it’s quite possibly the finest constructed, sounding and playing string instrument I’ve ever encountered. And I have some mighty fine custom instruments myself. Mike took time out his busy day slicing tone woods to show me around the shop and talk ukes. I’d only ever communicated with him via email and phone and I was gratified to find such a kind and thoughtful gentleman.

Modest and quiet in person, he really does let his instruments do the talking. I’m a big fan of his historical instruments, which he had several in the pipeline and are as fine as you will encounter. But he also showed me an amazing semi-cutaway tenor he was building for James Hill, designed to accommodate his playing style. And we discussed at length his experiments with carbon fiber tops and I even put in a tentative order for a concert model (allowing funding!!)

While there, I got to see his latest line, a low cost, hand made entry-level uke. It’s an all solid Koa box in the Hawaiian style with PegHed tuners and one of his amazing new uke cases, all at $650.00!! An AMAZING value for a hand made instrument I assure you. It plays and sounds to my ear in no way appreciably different from and custom made instrument. Put in an order now.

Then it was a long stroll on an uncharacteristically warm summer day back to the rectory. On the way this caught my eye and I checked out one of the many Indian import shops on University Ave.

So here’s what’s way in the back: and that’s just a few pics. There was every imaginable bell, shaker and tambourine, and hand pump organs and stuff I couldn’t begin to identify.

After a running a short errand I was dropped off at the festival director’s house for a shabbes meal. I had arranged to meet my old pal Djordje and it seemed we were both early, so we sat down on the stoop and caught up. After a short while, a nice lady across the street called out to us a bade us come into her house. As it turned out, she was married to another musician pal of mine, John Schott and they got a call from the director telling her she was running late.

They served us tea and snacks and John’s wife (so sorry to forget her name) is a writer and had a story about he trip to Belgrade, Djordje’s hometown, back in ’89. John accompanied the story with a wonderful minstral style, 6-string banjo made by a local maker and one that I coveted immediately.

Soon enough, the director arrived along with Joshua and some of his singers and other local Yid’n, and after the barruchas we sat down to eat. Chulent, asparagus, and some of the finest BBQ Chicken I ever had. No pictures, too busy eating.

But after a cognac or two, the honored guest took to the keyboards for a few tunes.

Then off to bed. They pick us up to play on KPFA at 8am and then we go to KALW for a live broadcast on West Coast Live. Then it's the big concert tonight! It's important to note that now that it has been in print twice, I am formally "Austin's King of Jewish Bluegrass Tuba."

Sunday morning I magically turn into a Bad Liver and do shows out here Sunday and Monday. Hard to believe sometimes this is my profession.

Jewish Self Loathing, music edition....

2009-02-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase William S. Burroughs, much like the man dressed as a woman to board the last life boat leaving the ship Titanic, we now have a new measure for deeply ingrained self loathing.

Can it be that we, the comfortably assimilated Jewry of America, have drifted so far from our roots that we must now tear down anyone who chooses to cling to them?

Submitted for your review and comment is this article from the Jewish Chronicle (UK,) entitled "Turn off the klezmer and turn up the Ramones" by Paul Lester.

(Besides being poorly written, an important affectation of "Rock" writing in England in the new post-Modernist world, it could be the very first time I've ever had an occasion to ever read the rag.)

Dig this chestnut:

There are plenty of musicians who today play very little other than the music of past centuries. Some play it for its eternal qualities. Others, however, are more concerned to convey “authenticity”.

Such musicians peddle klezmer as though it were the truest expression of the Jewish experience. They perhaps even imagine that, if there is a Jewish “voice” in music, klezmer captures it best.

But, for me, the best Jewish music — or rather, the best music by Jews — reflects the moment and is somehow a response to the times in which it was made. And if there is a “Jewish voice”, it is not to be heard in klezmer, maybe because it is being drowned out by all those clarinets, violins and accordions.

Right.

Tell Frank London that to his face. Or Aaron Alexander, or Alex Kontorovich, or... I could go on and on. Here's an authentic Jewish voice for you: Are you high?

Well, lets be honest here, there are some mighty crappy bands that "peddle" pap as culture. Yale Strom's clumsy horror show is a fine example of poor scholarship wedded to poor musicianship and presented in a an overly precious package. And there's a whole genre of low-brow, low-rent"klezmer" acts out there: Maxwell Street, Yiddiche Cup, Best Little Klezmer Band in Texas, ect..I was in one of these dog-and-pony-shows for a time (Austin Klezmorim) so I know of what I speak. I'm sure if all you had heard was that, I reckon the article's thesis would ring true. As Earl Scruggs once famously remarked when asked why Bluegrass music wasn't as popular in the 70's as it was a generation before, "It because of the lousy Bluegrass bands playing today." Emmis.

This reminds me of a similar polarization in criticism in the African American community when discussions of "jazz" and the sort of expressive musics of the avaunt guard. To my mind, this essay, like those critics, reject anything that smacks of "plantation" (or concentration camp) and promotes only those art forms which reflect the values of the dominant culture. And much like our African brothers, we kikes routinely beat the pants off the goyim even playing by their rules (see author of "White Christmas," and "Easter Parade.") Accomplishments to be rightly proud of. But here it sounds like the rant of what Black writers would call a "porch nigger" (or my favorite curse, a "kapo.") Mr. Lester has chosen an "either/or" scenario that doesn't exist in the real world.

I'm guessing too, and this is simply a guess, that Mr. Lester has never been denied admittance into a public pool for being Jewish. Nor has he has a swastika painted on his door, or a cross burnt in his lawn. Nor was he regularly quizzed about his personal association with the death of Jesus in English class. Like many today, he displays an attitude born of a life of complete enfranchisement, comfortable and safe in his identity. Nu?

And I guess I should note that I myself, a Yiddish music musician, the very kind that this writer rails against, has spent a life engrossed entirely reflective of the modern music of the culture around me. I have roadied for the Flaming Lips, provided a PA and a crash pad for Black Flag and Husker Du. My bands have opened for the Butthole Surfers, sold out shows at CBGB's and No Doubt once opened for me. I have played honky tonks across Texas with Dale Watson, Wayne Hancock, the Derailers and Don Walser (Google 'em, yankees.) I recorded a Grammy nominated CD for Tex-Mex accordion legend Santiago Jimenez, and have played festivals with members of the Savoy Family of Eunice LA. I am a first call musician in the Czech and Polish dance bands around greater Houston.

Not bragging folks, just try to explain that those of us who choose to listen to and respect the cultural gifts of our heritage generally live entirely in the here and now. And we love accordions. And clarinets. And we aren't one bit ashamed to say so. Oh, and by the way we rock out better then anyone too.

With "writers" with this sort of agenda supported by the mainstream Jewish press, it seems what I feared for many years really is true: my own community actively rejects me and my work. Why else then is it that to perform Yiddish music, I must travel back to old Europe, sometimes standing on the very spot of my extended family's destruction, to find an appreciative audience? Conversely, I have performed for my local JCC a total of 3 occasions in 15 years. How sad can it be that the children of the murderers find meaning in my culture when the children of the murdered actively despise it. I'll let Mr. Lester (ne' Lowenstein, maybe?) work that out on the couch years from now when the vacuousness of the Goldyne lands shallow consumer culture finally leaves him flat. By then, there may not be anybody left to say a kaddish. ("It doesn't really reflect the true Jewish sentiment of today" one imagines they might be heard to say.)

Once, I was told by a nice little old lady (and one time guest of the nice folks at Bergen-Belsen) once that "who needs Hitler? We have plenty enough Jews eager to end Yiddish life."

Mark Halata in Richmond VA

2009-02-03T15:42:00.000-08:00

Some musicians will disagree with me I'm sure, but one of my favorite aspects about presenting and performing folk music is when you're doing so for kids. Here Tex-Czech band leader Mark Halata and I played a couple public schools while we were in Richmond to perform at the Richmond Folk Festival back in October.

Yeah, that's me singing Czech and playing a borrowed guitar on the tune Czervena Ruzika aka Red Rose Polka.

Bad Livers w/ Darol Anger @ Pickathon X

2009-01-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

A personal appeal for support of Yiddish Culture

2009-01-14T07:24:00.000-08:00

From world reknown klezmer fiddler, and single mother of 2, Marlene Segelstein:

To all of our friends, students and fans;

As you know, musicians and other self employed folks are getting socked in today's trying economic times. We've been hit really hard with tours cancelling, gigs drying up, and performance series being cut short. Those of us who make our living playing and teaching our instruments (including voice and dance!) travel the globe to play concerts and teach at workshops, and to pass along our knowledge of this music and dance that was almost wiped out in the last century. We form collaborations, sometimes with those from other cultures, to keep this art alive, and find new ways to keep it vibrant. When you see us at Klezkamp, Klezkanada, Klezfest London, Weimar,we are always happy to give as much as of our time, energy and knowledge. When possible, we are giving extra (free) lessons to folks; under the staircase, in a lobby, even in our own rooms, often when we are in a state beyond exhaustion. And of course it doesn't stop there.

At least once a day and often much more, I am answering a query to help someone with a dissertation by answering a questionnaire, providing chords for a tune, sending a copy of a sound file, or sheet music to students, friends of students, people who have found my name on the internet. Often the queries are very polite and filled with thanks, but just as often, they are two liners with no greeting, for example (a real email!):

I got your name from your website. I need the music for Hora Midor.
Please send asap.

And of course I have the music. We recorded it, and I transcribed it. And I sell it in a book that I self published. These little things are how I make my living. Now of course, I love what I do. I must. I struggle to pay my health insurance, live at a below the lower middle class level, and have sacrificed a MUCH more comfortable lifestyle to do what I love the most, play music with and for friends.

Think back. Has anyone in this small Jewish music community helped you by giving you a little extra lesson, even 15 minutes (the going rate for private lessons in the east coast are $75-100 an hour)? Has anyone helped you with your research? Filled out a questionnaire for your dissertation? Provided you with a chart? Spent extra time with you showing you a dance step? Sent you rare soundfile? Helped you fix your instrument? Generally enriched your musical life?

No, I'm not asking you to send money. I'm asking you to support us by buying our products. If you already have bought CD's and books, many thanks! Now think about buying more as gifts.

We appreciate all of the wonderful support we have received over the years from many of our friends, students and fans, and I never want to think twice about helping someone who emails or calls me with a query. I am just asking that you give back by supporting those of us who are your teachers, your favorite bands, and your friends.

Cookie Segelstein

On Stage with the Lautari Ensemble

2009-01-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

A trumpet feature from the student concert at the conclusion of this years Yiddish Summer Weimar. This is the "Lautari" ensemble half of the project with quite possibly the finest living Rroma musicians today (and one very lucky gadjo on bass.)

Adam Stinga leads the suite of tunes on trumpet with Marin Bunea (violin,) Peter Ralchev (accordion,) Kalman Balogh (cimbolm,)a loutish dullard (bass,) and Adrian Adrian Receanu (clarinet.)

I'll be headed back there at the end of January for more rehearsals and a little concert.

Two High String Band Article

2009-01-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

Evidently I "ravage" their material.
I'm gonna take that as a compliment.

Read on here.

Truth in Motto!

2008-12-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

From the Gambian Musician HQ:

"Better Late Than Never"

More Food from my Phone

2008-11-13T20:34:00.000-08:00

As some of you may have figured out, I really like to eat. Too much really, so I'm back on a diet which precludes sugars and simple carbohydrates. What better time to clear out the pictures of epic culinary delights from my phone.

Here's a work of literally heart-breaking genius. From a little joint in south Austin that gets enough press so I won't mention it, witness about 2 pounds of bacon, smothered with diced tomatoes and topped with a spicy chili con queso served on two pieces of thick Texas toast. I've had two of these thus far and I pronounce that quite enough for this lifetime.

I may have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. This is the finest Chicken Fried Steak I have ever encountered. At the evocatively named Johnny Reb's Dixie Cafe in Hearne TX. Great sides too. Not to be missed, I'll be breaking the diet and driving 50 miles out of my way on Saturday to feast upon this plate once again...

While in Portland OR for the Bad Livers gig at Pickathon, I stumbled across a little Arabic joint whose name I did not note. This meal, once again can't recall what they called it, is unlike anything I had eaten. It's a mixture of spiced ground beef, bulgar, rice, shredded chicken, pine nuts and raisins. Unbelievably wonderful. Anybody know what it is called?

Speaking of Arabic:
Frank London ordered this Lebanese hot sausage plate at a fine little joint right around the corner from the West London Synagogue when we were there on staff for Klez Fest UK. When a lemon is served with meat, be looking for some heat!

Back to Portland, the dreaded Bacon and Maple Frosting long john from Voodoo Donuts. I have never felt more ashamed about enjoying something I ate. Maybe the most self loathing moment of my life thus far....

With the dollar in the tank, travel in Europe can be daunting for the broke ass Yiddish musician. For reasons that I cannot fathom, there are no Turkish Ibiss's in the Frankfurt Airport, so $19 US gets you a Bitter Lemon and a pretzel covered in cheese.

And now, a clear signal to the return of the Adkins plan:

The Texas Hill Country is dotted with literally hundreds of these little meat markets and smokehouses, many founded my Czech Bohemian, Moravian and Polish immigrants. I regularly speed past these places on my way to Polka gigs in Schulenberg and honky tonk gigs in Walburg. But last week I decided to mosey along between the K of C and SPJST Halls. I was richly rewarded with this haul of dry sausage goodness.

Pictured L to R
bottom row:
Granzin's Meats, New Branfels
Kreutz Market, Lockhart
Junior's Smokehouse, Brehnam
Chapel Hill Market, Chapel Hill
Burton's Meats, Burton
top row:
Myer's Smokehouse, Elgin
Prasek's Hillje Smokehouse, El Campo
3 jars of Garlic, Pepper and Dill pickles from Chapel Hill Market

--

Great Press! Shame there was no gig....

2008-10-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

Here's an advance blurb from the San Antonio Current this week, pitching a Ridgetop Syncopators gig that isn't going to happen:

You only have to watch Mark Rubin rock his standup bass (or his tuba, for that matter) once to determine that the man is one of the great unsung gods of Lone Star music. It’s not often that virtuosity, impeccable taste, a rebel attitude, and a musicologist’s grasp of history come together in one mammoth frame, but that’s why Rubin is such a singular force.

At any given time, Rubin has at least a handful of music projects percolating, but even by his high standards, the Ridgetop Syncopators are something special: a seven-piece collective that delivers high-spirited Western swing with plenty of room for fiddle breakdowns..

I know it's true. But it's always nice to hear;-)

Sorry San Antonio, but I have yet to figure out a way to get grown men interested in burning $60 worth of gas to drive down there to play for burgers and tips. Truthfully, I LOVE San Antone, and enjoy playing there in front of a small number of music fans than in front of a big crowd of other out-of-work musicos and assorted hipsters who are the only people you'll find in an Austin club.

When a real gig opens up, I'm not ruling out such long shot mind you, I'll be able to field a damn fine team. Like I told the nice people at Sam's Burger Joint, if I could pull off a gig all by my lonesome I would do it gladly. But as of this date, I have yet to develop that skill set. (Aha! A new goal!!)

I got really great press, this time from Jim Beal at the Express News, down there last month and I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I HAD A GIG...(a long story..)

Mark Rubin & the Ridgetop Syncopators at Sam's Burger Joint (6 p.m.) Bassist, tenor guitar picker, singer, songwriter, storyteller, etc. Rubin has played everything from hardcore country to outside music, from traditional Jewish wedding selections to deep blues. He's part of Bad Livers, has worked with Steve James and knows his way around more than a few polkas. With the Syncopators, Rubin brings to bear a repertoire built on real-deal Western swing.

How come I can't get press like this when I actually have a gig? As the old Yiddish expression goes: Man plans, God laughs.

Heady stuff, but if you make music it's a interesting read...

2008-10-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

Here's an essay by Pulitzer winning American composer Milton Babbitt. It was sent to me by my old pal Danny Barnes, who knows a thing or two about making music devoid of concern of how the public will receive it. Grab you a nice cup of tea, sit back and check out this line of thinking.

"Who Cares if You Listen?" by Milton Babbitt, High Fidelity (Feb. 1958)

This article might have been entitled "The Composer as Specialist" or, alternatively, and perhaps less contentiously, "The Composer as Anachronism." For I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as "serious," "advanced," contemporary music. his composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy- and, usually, considerable money- on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value. e is, in essence, a "vanity" composer. he general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in his music. he majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow 'professionals'. t best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.
Towards this condition of musical and societal "isolation," a variety of attitudes has been expressed, usually with the purpose of assigning blame, often to the music itself, occasionally to critics or performers, and very occasionally to the public. But to assign blame is to imply that this isolation is unnecessary and undesirable. t is my contention that, on the contrary, this condition is not only inevitable, but potentially advantageous for the composer and his music. From my point of view, the composer would do well to consider means of realizing, consolidating, and extending the advantages.

The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and- most probably- not transitory. Rather, it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of "common practice," but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.

This fall from musical innocence is, understandably, as disquieting to some as it is challenging to others, but in any event the process is irreversible; and the music that reflects the full impact of this revolution is, in many significant respects, a truly "new" music, apart from the often highly sophisticated and complex constructive methods of any one composition or group of compositions, the very minimal properties characterizing this body of music are the sources of its "difficulty," "unintelligibility," and- isolation. In indicating the most general of these properties, I shall make reference to no specific works, since I wish to avoid the independent issue of evaluation. The reader is at liberty to supply his own instances; if he cannot (and, granted the condition under discussion, this is a very real possibility) let him be assured that such music does exist.

First. This music employs a tonal vocabulary which is more "efficient" than that of the music of the past, or its derivatives. This is not necessarily a virtue in itself, but it does make possible a greatly increased number or pitch simultaneities, successions, and relationships. his increase in efficiency necessarily reduces the "redundancy" of the language, and as a result the intelligible communication of the work demands increased accuracy from the transmitter (the performer) and activity from the receiver (the listener). Incidentally, it is this circumstance, among many others, that has created the need for purely electronic media of "performance." More importantly for us, it makes ever heavier demands upon the training of the listener's perceptual capacities.

Second. Along with this increase of meaningful pitch materials, the number of functions associated with each component of the musical event also has been multiplied. In the simplest possible terms. Each such "atomic" event is located in a five-dimensional musical space determined by pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration, and timbre. These five components not only together define the single event, but, in the course of a work, the successive values of each component create an individually coherent structure, frequently in parallel with the corresponding structures created by each of the other components. Inability to perceive and remember precisely the values of any of these components results in a dislocation of the event in the work's musical space, an alternation of its relation to a other events in the work, and-thus-a falsification of the composition's total structure. For example, an incorrectly performed or perceived dynamic value results in destruction of the work's dynamic pattern, but also in false identification of other components of the event (of which this dynamic value is a part) with corresponding components of other events so creating incorrect pitch, registral, timbral, and durational associations. It is this high degree of "determinancy" that most strikingly differentiates such music from, for example, a popular song. A popular song is only very partially determined, since it would appear to retain its germane characteristics under considerable alteration of register, rhythmic texture, dynamics, harmonic structure, timbre, and other qualities.

The preliminary differentiation of musical categories by means of this reasonable and usable criterion of "degree of determinacy" offends those who take it to be a definition of qualitative categories, which-of course-it need not always be. Curiously, their demurrers usually take the familiar form of some such "democratic" counterdefinition as: "There is no such thing as 'serious' and 'popular' music." There is only 'good' and 'bad' music." As a public service, let me offer those who still patiently await the revelation of the criteria of Absolute Good an alternative criterion which possesses, at least, the virtue of immediate and irrefutable applicability: "There is no such thing as 'serious' and 'popular' music. There is only music whose title begins with the letter 'X,' and music whose title does not."

Third, musical compositions of the kind under discussion possess a high degree of contextuality and autonomy. That is, the structural characteristics of a given work are less representative of a general class of characteristics than they are unique to the individual work itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness, upon which depends immediate coherence of continuity, are more likely to evolve in the course of the work than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the listener.

Fourth, and finally. Although in many fundamental respects this music is "new," it often also represents a vast extension of the methods of other musics, derived from a considered and extensive knowledge of their dynamic principles. For, concomitant with the "revolution in music," perhaps even an integral aspect thereof, has been the development of analytical theory, concerned with the systematic formulation of such principles to the end of greater efficiency, economy, and understanding. Compositions so rooted necessarily ask comparable knowledge and experience from the listener. Like all communication, this music presupposes a suitably equipped receptor. am aware that "tradition" has it that the lay listener, by virtue of some undefined, transcendental faculty, always is able to arrive at a musical judgment absolute in its wisdom if not always permanent in its validity. regret my inability to accord this declaration of faith the respect due its advanced age.

Deviation from this tradition is bound to dismiss the contemporary music of which I have been talking into "isolation." Nor do I see how or why the situation should be otherwise. Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else? It is only the translation of this boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that seems to me indefensible. After all, the public does have its own music, its ubiquitous music: music to eat by, to read by, to dance by, and to be impressed by. Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity? The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields. But to this, a double standard is invoked, with the words music is music," implying also that "music is just music." Why not, then, equate the activities of the radio repairman with those of the theoretical physicist, on the basis of the dictum that "physics is physics." It is not difficult to find statements like the following, from the New York Times of September 8, 1 957: "The scientific level of the conference is so high… that there are in the world only 120 mathematicians specializing in the field who could contribute." Specialized music on the other hand, far from signifying "height" of musical level, has been charged with "decadence," even as evidence of an insidious "conspiracy."

It often has been remarked that only in politics and the "arts" does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard. In the realm of politics he knows that this right, in the form of a vote, is guaranteed by fiat. Comparably, in the realm of public music, the concertgoer is secure in the knowledge that the amenities of concert going protect his firmly stated "I didn't like it" from further scrutiny. Imagine, if you can, a layman chancing upon a lecture on "Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms." At the conclusion, he announces: "I didn't like it," Social conventions being what they are in such circles, someone might dare inquire: "Why not?" Under duress, our layman discloses precise reasons for his failure to enjoy himself; he found the hall chilly, the lecturer's voice unpleasant, and he was suffering the digestive aftermath of a poor dinner. His interlocutor understandably disqualifies these reasons as irrelevant to the content and value of the lecture, and the development of mathematics is left undisturbed. If the concertgoer is at all versed in the ways of musical lifesmanship, he also will offer reasons for his "I didn't like it" - in the form of assertions that the work in question is "inexpressive," "undramatic," "lacking in poetry," etc., etc., tapping that store of vacuous equivalents hallowed by time for: "I don't like it, and I cannot or will not state why." The concertgoer's critical authority is established beyond the possibility of further inquiry. Certainly he is not responsible for the circumstance that musical discourse is a never-never land of semantic confusion, the last resting place of all those verbal and formal fallacies, those hoary dualisms that have been banished from rational discourse Perhaps he has read, in a widely consulted and respected book on the history of music, the following: "to call him (Tchaikovsky) the 'modern Russian Beethoven' is footless, Beethoven being patently neither modern nor Russian…" Or, the following, by an eminent "nonanalytic" philosopher: "The music of Lourie' is an ontological music... It is born in the singular roots of being, the nearest possible juncture of the soul and the spirit…" How unexceptionable the verbal peccadilloes of the average concertgoer appear beside these masterful models. Or, perhaps, in search of "real" authority, he has acquired his critical vocabulary from the pronouncements of officially "eminent" composers, whose eminence, in turn, is founded largely upon just such assertions as the concertgoer has learned to regurgitate. This cycle is of slight moment in a world where circularity is one of the norms of criticism. Composers (and performers), wittingly or unwittingly assuming the character of "talented children" and "inspired idiots" generally ascribed to them, are singularly adept at the conversion of personal tastes into general principles. Music they do not like is "not music," composers whose music they do not like are "not composers

In search of what to think and how to say it, the layman may turn to newspapers and magazines. Here he finds conclusive evidence for the proposition that "music is music." The science editor of such publications contents himself with straightforward reporting, usually news of the "factual" sciences; books and articles not intended for popular consumption are not reviewed. Whatever the reason, such matters are left to professional journals. The music critic admits no comparable differentiation. We may feel, with some justice, that music which presents itself in the market place of the concert hall automatically offers itself to public approval or disapproval. We may feel, again with some justice, that to omit the expected criticism of the "advanced" work would be to do the composer an injustice in his assumed quest for, if nothing else, public notice and "professional recognition." The critic, at least to this extent, is himself a victim of the leveling of categories.

Here, then, are some of the factors determining the climate of the public world of music. Perhaps we should not have overlooked those pockets of "power" where prizes, awards, and commissions are dispensed, where music is adjudged guilty, not only without the right to be confronted by its accuser, but without the right to be confronted by the accusations. Or those well-meaning souls who exhort the public "just to listen to more contemporary music," apparently on the theory that familiarity breeds passive acceptance. Or those, often the same well-meaning souls, who remind the composer of his "obligation to the public," while the public's obligation to the composer is fulfilled, manifestly, by mere physical presence in the concert hall or before loudspeaker or- more authoritatively- by committing to memory the numbers of phonograph and amplifier models. Or the intricate social world within this musical world where the salon becomes bazaar, and music itself becomes an ingredient of verbal canapés for cocktail conversation.

I say all this not to present a picture of a virtuous music in a sinful world, but to point up the problems of a special music in an alien and inapposite world. And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism

But how, it may be asked, will this serve to secure the means of survival or the composer and his music? One answer is that after all such a private life is what the university provides the scholar and the scientist. It is only proper that the university, which-significantly-has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the "complex," "difficult," and "problematical" in music. Indeed, the process has begun; and if it appears to proceed too slowly, I take consolation in the knowledge that in this respect, too, music seems to be in historically retarded parallel with now sacrosanct fields of endeavor. In E. T. Bell's Men of Mathematics, we read: "In the eighteenth century the universities were not the principal centers of research in Europe. hey might have become such sooner than they did but for the classical tradition and its understandable hostility to science. Mathematics was close enough to antiquity to be respectable, but physics, being more recent, was suspect. Further, a mathematician in a university of the time would have been expected to put much of his effort on elementary teaching; his research, if any, would have been an unprofitable luxury..." A simple substitution of "musical composition" for "research," of "academic" for "classical," of "music" for "physics," and of "composer" for "mathematician," provides a strikingly accurate picture of the current situation. And as long as the confusion I have described continues to exist, how can the university and its community assume other than that the composer welcomes and courts public competition with the historically certified products of the past, and the commercially certified products of the present?

Perhaps for the same reason, the various institutes of advanced research and the large majority of foundations have disregarded this music's need for means of survival. I do not wish to appear to obscure the obvious differences between musical composition and scholarly research, although it can be contended that these differences are no more fundamental than the differences among the various fields of study. I do question whether these differences, by their nature, justify the denial to music's development of assistance granted these other fields. Immediate "practical" applicability (which may be said to have its musical analogue in "immediate extensibility of a compositional technique") is certainly not a necessary condition for the support of scientific research. And if it be contended that such research is so supported because in the past it has yielded eventual applications, one can counter with, for example, the music of Anton Webern, which during the composer's lifetime was regarded (to the very limited extent that it was regarded at all) as the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition; today, some dozen years after the composer's death, his complete works have been recorded by a major record company, primarily- I suspect- as a result of the enormous influence this music has had on the postwar, nonpopular, musical world. I doubt that scientific research is any more secure against predictions of ultimate significance than is musical composition. Finally, if it be contended that research, even in its least "practical" phases, contributes to the sum of knowledge in the particular realm, what possibly can contribute more to our knowledge of music than a genuinely original composition?

Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing. Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live.

In Case you missed it, Ralph Stanley on Barrack Obama

2008-10-20T15:06:00.001-07:00

A YouTube Peek from the stage in Cracow

2008-10-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

Courtesy clarinetist Christian Dawid, here's what it kind of looks like when you're playing in front of 20K Poles during the Festival of Jewish Culture, in Cracow Poland

In this clip, I'm playing a little Besson Bb Tenor Horn that I borrowed from Sanne Möricke, trying to hang onto the brass band skronk of Konsonans Resto:

And here I am playing a borrowed tuba backing up a solo Jewlia Eisenberg on an old Negro Spiritual

(??!! Yup, this is what happens at this thing...Seems like the less Jewish the music, the happier the crowds...)

One well placed RPG round and a fairly large chunk of the modern Jewish music scene would be history. Just thinking out loud, mind you.

Obligitory Political Blog Posting 2008

2008-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

OK, here ya go.
I took some minor ribbing from some of my musical pals who tend to lean somewhere Right of Reagan when they spied my Obama bumper sticker written in Hebrew (or Yiddish if you like) letters. "I thought your Jews were for Israel? How can you push for a Muslim?"

Ok, kinda depressing on many levels. But trust me, this is actually pretty sensitive and informed discussion in relation to the normal fare of the great importance of a Defense of Marriage Bill to the Constitution and When Are We Gonna Get Rid of All These Katrina Refugees...

So for them, and anybody else, here's my singular politically motivated posting for the next election.

You have only 6 days left to register to vote. Please take time and get registered so your voice may be heard.

Independent Film: the next generation's "garage band."

2008-09-03T20:02:00.000-07:00

That's a phrase my pal Danny Barnes coined when we saw the live music scene start to fall apart and the technology to make films became cheap. Luke Hill, one of my favorite local musicians put down his guitar, picked up pen and camera and jumped into the fray. (I think he's done some cool stuff, but I still think he's a wonderful Django style guitarist.)

Here's a little short horror film he co-wrote and stars in, called "Coffee with David." Check it out and give it a "thumbs up" if you like it.

Truth to tell, Luke cast me in one of his films and when that comes online I'll share the link as well.

A work of heart breaking genius....

2008-09-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Forwarded to my by Frank London, I give you Carl Orff's Carmina Burana with an alternate and in my opinion far more plausable libretto.

What's the Carmina Burana you ask?

My computer is dead

2008-08-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

My battered Apple PowerBook 12" G4 has finally decided to die.

The battery stopped being useful years ago, but now the power cord won't give her any juice and so she's dead in the water. I'm gonna haul it with me to Toronto and see if I can find another power cord, but I fear that it's screwed up on the inside, as this poor box looks like Army Surplus after all my travels.

Hence, you might just want to call me if you nee to get ahold of me. OK?

Bad Livers @ Pickathon X

2008-08-23T22:49:00.000-07:00

The tune "Dallas TX," with Bad Livers, just outside Portland OR.

..

Listen to the whole set here, simply click on a tune and listen in.
(Fiddler Darol Anger sits in on the last 2 numbers.

More on Danny Roy Young

2008-08-22T13:48:00.001-07:00

The condolences are coming in form every quarter and every continent. The American Statesman's obituary features words of sympathy from US Congressmen to club booking agents. It seems there wasn't a person who met the fellow who wasn't made better by the experience. There's a wonderful gallery of Danny posted here, pictured on stage and surrounded by friends. Dig the smile, it was always there. I'm sure this is how he would like you to remember him.

Funeral services will be at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the First United Methodist Church at 12th and Lavaca streets. A reception will follow at Antone's, 213 W. Fifth St.

Danny Roy Young, 1943-2008

2008-08-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

Restaurateur, rub board player with the Cornel Hurd Band, and bon vivant Danny Roy Young passed away yesterday.

To me, Danny was one of the last "good guys" here in Austin TX. Cut of a different cloth than they make folks from these days, he was always generous and kind, respectful and respected. To my mind he was a walking embodiment of the contradiction of Texas Good Ol' Boy and Hippie, displaying only the best aspects of each backround and none of the flaws, the very sort of person that made Austin the unique place it used to be. They called him the "unofficial Mayor of South Austin" and that was no idle honorific. His sudden and untimely passing marks the further erosion of Austin's creative culture, and creates a void I don't see anyone stepping up ti fill.

In happier times, I used to gather with Cornell, writer John Morthland and a rogues gallery of old honk tonk musicians for a weekly lunch at Danny's Texacali Grille. I would listen in as these old salts would trade war stories and tall tales over plates sweet potato fries and other comfort foods, with Danny's homemade root beer flowing all the while. It was a finishing course in music, show business and the manly arts, all of which Danny had a wise word for.

I've been going over it in my head since I heard the news and I cannot recall anything other than a smile on his face and a hearty laugh on his lips. We should all be so well remembered.

Here's his Obituary and notices of his passing in the local press.

The drive from Denver to Aspen and back for Andy Statman

2008-08-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

So my pal Andy Statman calls and offers me a date with his amazing trio. Just so happens it's a day before I head to Pickathon to play with Bad Livers, and on the map Colorado is half way there from home.

After some frantic Skype phone calls from Kracow to the Southwest Airlines customer service desk, I make it happen. All I have to do is snag a rental car in Denver and head the short 156 miles to Aspen, right?

Ok, I travel quite a bit and thus really I should have known better. What Mapquest neglects to mention on the route map it prints out for you is that you have to CROSS THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS to get there. That's a 15 MPH crawl for the last quarter of the journey.

Look ma, no guardrails!

The mountain top in the center of this pic is the pass at the GREAT DIVIDE.

I had to split Aspen right after the gig at midnight to make the 6am flight to Portland and a highly anticipated Bad Livers gig, so the original plan was to retrace my steps back to the Denver Airport. After making the white knuckle trip in a wonderly sunny day, I decide to drive 140 miles out of my way to avoid doing these cliff hugging turns on the way home.....

Yes, it is too loud and I am too old.

2008-08-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of another calendar year of chronological advancement, I share with you this little video gem of the Rockbusters, caught live at Emo's maybe around 1991.

It's not my favorite tune from their cannon, (I lean towards "Stop the Bus") but it is the only song in the world that I am aware of that mentions me by name. The lyrics of "Last Friday Night" sprang from an epic gig Bad Livers did opening for our pals the local death metal act Agony Column. To return the favor, we named an instrumental medley on our first single to the Rockbusters front man ("Jeffro's Dream,") and guitarist "Dicko" Mathers did the cover art, along with our first poster and t shirt design.

The "stage dive" in question was captured on film and ended up on their video which then made it to MTV's Head Bangers Ball. (Now there's something you won't see on my resume at Klez Kamp...)

Enjoy.

Oh and here's the video in question, "Ultra Violent Rays," shot at the Liberty Lunch. Note big boy with base ball cap on backwards making the leap about 2:26 into the tune...

A Milestone of sorts...

2008-08-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

In a review of the recent Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow, I was listed as a "ususal suspect."

I'm going to take that as a compliment as I don't rate such an honorific even in my hometown of Austin....

The future I was promised, continued

2008-08-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

Every now again I stumble across some little by-water outpost on the Internet that reminds me that this is indeed the future I was promised. OK, no flying car or pill that makes you lose weight yet.

But we do have this: Excavated Shellac, a site devoted to ethnic music issued on 78 rpm from around the World. Dive in, download and tell a friend. Big props goes out the cat with too much spare time who provides this service.

Notes From a "Jewish" Europe

2008-07-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I have been mighty quiet on this blog thing here.

It’s not like there hasn’t been a lot to tell you about. For instance a vicious car wreck nearly a month ago that I have been advised by counsel not to discuss. Then there’s the upcoming Bad Livers show, the first in nearly 8 years, which surprises me as much as the next guy. Then there’s a one-off date in Aspen CO with Andy Statman coming up the day before which I’m really looking forward to. Next month finds me involved in major events in London and Toronto, so the ball is getting moved down the field as we say back home.

But the real reason I haven’t written anything is simply because I have not had the time. For the first time in a very great while, I am actually being utilized to my capacity with nary a free moment to reflect. And boy, does it feel good.

Many months ago, Alan Bern, who among a great many other things is the artistic director of Klezmer Summer Weimar (that’s Germany, not the town of the same name just down the road from Columbus TX, BTW) asked me to participate in a two year project funded by the European Union and several European Jewish music festivals (Festival of Jewish Culture Krakow and Klezmore Vienna along with Weimar) dedicated to the sticky topic of the similarities and differences between the “klezmer” and “lautari” communities of musicians that once lived, worked and very often partied together for many generations prior to WW2. To be clear we’re talking about Jews and Rroma (ne “gypsies’,) both hot topics with confusing histories in Europe, both east and West. I came into the project with my own cloudy conceptions of just what it is that makes Jewish music “Jewish,” and as it turns out, the same questions get asked among the Rroma as well.

The conceit is to form two groups, one Jewish (“klezmer” well call it,) and the other Rroma (“lautari” for our purposes here.) Each group is made up of musicians from wildly divergent back rounds and locations sharing only their professional proficiency in the culture they work in. Thus, the “Jewish” band features a Sephardic Jew from London, a couple goys, one named Christian, a Jewish confirmed atheist, an apikoros-in-training Texan, and a Lubbovich Chasid from Ukraine. The Rroms have Hungarians, Moldavians, the greatest living accordionist from Bulgaria and a gadjo Romanian living in France to contend with. The klezmers were given a mammoth amount of recordings and transcriptions, mostly of the earliest recordings of Abe Schwartz, Harry Kandel and the Bobriker Kapelye, attempting to divine just what is it in these recordings that a) makes these performances Jewish and b) why has nobody in the entire span of the “klezmer revival” been able to come close to that sound. As anybody who has followed my writings on this topic will tell you, I have some pretty clear ideas on the subject (see “There is no Klezmer Music” for instance.) But I guess simply because of that stance and my willingness to dive into these questions with an open mind (and get to hang out with some of the finest living Lautari to boot,) I was the right guy for the job.

(For the record, the "Jews" were Alan Bern (project leader,) Stas Royko, Paul Brody, Matt Dariau, Christian Dawid, Dan Blacksberg, Guy Schalom and yours truly. The Rroma were Kalman Balogh, Czaba Novak, Peter Ralchev, Marian Bunea, Adam Stinga and Adrian Receanu.)

Here's video snippets from the first day's rehearsal of each group:

We gathered in Krakow for 4 days of intensive separate rehearsals, culminating with a performance at the Festival and a joint appearance at the big Shalom on Szeroka party that concludes the event. From there, we traveled by bus to Vienna to do the same there, only with one day to rehearse. Then it was off to Weimar for two weeks of symposium, performances and workshops (the later of which we are right in the middle of.) These weeks of close quarters and twelve-hour bus trips have done much to bring the two groups into a single outfit joined with a common purpose. Language has been a bit of a stumbling block, with French, Russian and Hungarian translations running nearly constantly at all times.

And then for the week of intensive workshops we’re all teaching the Germans in English. (Can you imagine Germans coming to America and pulling that off the other way around?) For your edification Alan noted that there was only one continuous complaint during the four symposium days. He told me many people had a common complaint, “we’re certain Mark is an very interesting person. But what is he saying? No one can understand a word he says.” Evidently Texan English is an unknown dialect here in the Eastern part of Germany…. To that point, I am going to have to become bilingual, by hook or by crook, if I am going to continue these dialogs. I’m with Obama on this point: it’s a crying shame we Americans are so language deprived.

Did I mention we were followed the entire time by a film crew documenting the whole thing, all the time? That's a whole other blog posting....

Hanging out, drinking vodka in the street and sitting down for a few meals in Weimar with Bob Cohen remains the highlight of the trip for me. He’s one of the last real Human Beings; unafraid and fully empowered in beauty and light, 24/7. He's a bit like that crazy uncle who your father likes well enough to have come visit for a little bit, but is so honest and fearless that everyone seems just a little embarrassed by. (I'm talk about you Fred...) We even got about 20 minutes of old-time picking in. One day I predict Hungary will put up a statue of him, but only after he is safely long dead and not available to call them on their bullshit fakelore. He headed back to Budapest all too soon, but returns with his mighty ensemble, Di naye Kapele, to be the house band for the Dance Week, sadly after I split for the states. (Why is dance separated from music workshops? There’s a long debate in the making…)

The symposium itself was mighty damn interesting, even if the palaver was a mite high falutin’. I met and hung out a bit with Bulgarian Rroma rights activist Ivan Ivanov who is a complete hoot. But my favorite parts came from the juxtaposition of Yale Strom and his work, followed that by Bob Cohen and his. One fine example; Bob screaming out “BULLSHIT” at the top of his lungs at several moments during the screening of Yale’s movie. And folks, that was just the tip of that iceberg. There is so much to say about Mr. Strom and his version of anthropology, but I just can’t bring myself to even take the time to type it out. He’s about the nicest fellow you ever met. And mores the pity. Buy me a beer when you see me I guess and I'll spill all the beans.

By incredibly great contrast, the next night I saw possibly the finest documentary I have seen yet, and even got to meet the director. It’s called “Who’se is this song?” by Adela Peeva, and it’s a humble little film asking simple question and getting a series of complex answers. She’s a Bulgarian married to a Serb with a son living in Romania, so she considers herself Pan-Balkan. She was at a dinner party at Greek restaurant one night when the little folk band struck up a familiar tune form her childhood, (“Uskurara” in fact.) Everyone at the table, all from different nations, claimed the tune to be strictly theirs. Curious about a simple song and peoples attachment to identity and culture, she then travels all through the Balkans playing the tune for people and listening to their reactions. Not to be missed is the scene where this very gutsy lady plays a Bosnian version for a room full of drunken Serbs. It’s an amazing document that I heartily suggest you find (it is on DVD I’m told.) She will be screening the film in my old hometown of Norman Oklahoma in the fall, so you Okies don’t miss it.

It’s been completely gratifying work on all levels, musically, socially and spiritually if I don’t mind saying so. I have come to know nearly all the members of both ensembles quite well, and Mr. Bern is to be commended for pulling together what appear to be the nicest guys I’ve ever met in all my years in the music business, no foolin’.

This is some mighty deep work we are into, but it’s not all seriousness. In fact, this has been a tour of non-stop joke telling. We have come to find that it is yet another character Jews and Rroma musicians share. Nearly everyday, in every situation, someone in this project has told a joke, most of them terrible. The Black Belt Champeen Joke Teller belt goes to violinist Stas Royko, who translates all his jokes from Russian moments before he tells them and really deserves his own website. He has told so many tall tales and funny stories that I literally cannot keep track of them.

First up, Bob Cohen:
3 people are sitting in the dreary rain at a bus stop in Berlin; a Polish laborer, a former school teacher from Dresden (in the former DDR,) and a native born West Berliner. One of them notices what looks like a little bottle sticking up from the ground, and all three reach down to dig it up. When they pop the cork on the ancient glass, a Genie magically appears and announces: ‘for releasing me from my bondage, I will grant you each a wish. What is your command?”

The Pole thinks to himself, life is not what I expected here in Germany. I was much happier back home, so he says “I wish to go home!” POOF, he finds himself in downtown Gdansk, happy as a clam.

The East German thinks ‘this reunification has been a crappy deal for me. Under the Commies, I was a professor; I had a great apartment, and assured wage and security. In this new Europe, I have to hustle for a living and toil as a bricklayer. It’s just awful. He says, “I want the wall back up, I want my old life in the DDR.” POOF, the wall is back up and he finds himself in front of a class of students.

The Berliner watches all this go by. He thinks, “Let me get this straight. The Pole is back in Poland. And the Wall is back up.”

He tells the Genie, “I think I’ll have a cappuccino….”

Now, here’s one from Kalman Balogh:
When a man starts to age, he begins to loose a bit of his virility. For him, he becomes very sad the first time there isn’t a second time.

For his wife however, she becomes even sadder the second time there isn’t a first time….

Introducing Csaba Novak

2008-07-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

In my opinion, Hungary's greatest dance band bassist, a regular collaborator with Cimbolm master Kalman Balogh. Csaba and I were to "team teach" the bass clinics at Klezmer Summer Weimar which have to date basically been Csaba doing the following while I stare blankly in awe...

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. The bass? He made it. He builds basses in his "spare time." This particular model was as fine a soundsing and playing bass as I have yet encountered, and remember, I work at a bass shop. I'll be putting in an order soon.

Golem DVD Reissued

2008-06-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce the re-issue of one of my favorite projects that frankly didn't get much notice when it originally came out. The Klezmer Shack gave it high mentions as did the Austin Chronicle when it was first released (see review below.)

You can order or even download yourself a copy at my Film Baby site. Please do as I'm mighty proud of the results (and have yet to pay for the expenses incurred making it!)

Austin Chronicle Review
BY DARCIE STEVENS

"The Golem would be potter's refuse without its soundtrack. Set in 16th-century Prague, this 1920 silent film was written by, directed by, and starring Paul Wegener, but the German Expressionist classic, here on DVD with English dialogue cards, is brought to life like its titular clay monster by local music-scene veteran Mark Rubin and his klezmer posse. Scoring silent cinema live for an audience at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse is no small feat considering the breadth of instruments interspersed throughout. Somehow, Rubinchik's Yiddish Ensemble pulls it off. Their traditional songs are married to the picture as though it were never actually silent. In fact, the presence of five 21st-century men – Rubin, Ben Saffer, Dr. Don Weeda, Michael Maddux, and cantor Neil Blumofe – isn't even felt until the audience begins to clap along to a particularly joyous refrain, which happens several times. There's something about that tuba-accordion play that inspires energy. Rubin & Co. drive The Golem through scene after scene, displaying what a triumph this film was in its time. If that's not enough Yiddish, Rubin is also one-third of trad trio Hank Sapoznik & the Youngers of Zion, whose debut LP, Protocols, is a soundtrack for any Jewish celebration. Culture is so trampled these days, it's a blessing someone like Mark Rubin is keeping traditions alive."

The new Fat Man and Little Boy: The Atomic Duo t-shirts are in!!

2008-05-19T22:03:00.000-07:00

The new Fat Man and Little Boy: The Atomic Duo t-shirts are in!!
Bright yellow print on a 100% cotton Black t-shirt. Order yours today! Simply PayPal me (mdrubin at bga.com) $20, note your size preference, and I'll Priority Mail you one out ASAP.

SPAMMED!!!!

2008-05-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

Some intrepid spam programmer decided to use my email address (mark@markrubin.com) for the "reply to" so I have been forced to close that mailbox.

If you want to get a hold of me, well you'll have to use this new address:

mark_rubin (at) markrubin (dot) com

Please update your records.

Many thanks!

Random images from my the cell phone, 2.0

2008-05-07T22:13:00.001-07:00

Ah, show business!! The marquee for a Ridgetop Syncopators gig on 6th Street.

Best damn Gorditas, ever.
I'm am not a huge fan of the Tejano meat stuffed "Lard Cookie," but at $2.75 per I had to try 'em. It's a new joint on far East 6th street and I forgot the name, but I reckon my belly could drive straight there.

So amazing a meal at the Walburg Restaurant, that I literally forgot to stop and take a picture. I go to southern German and Austria more often than I'd like to admit, but in my humble opinion, this is the finest squarehead grub I've been served. Well, not really served, as it's an ALL YOU CAN EAT buffet. Homemade kraut and cabbage, Weiner schnitzel and local brauten. Washed down with a Warsteiner Heffe Dunkel. I play there regularly with either a bluegrass band made up of German expatriates, or a Polish polka combo lead by a guy best known for Tex-Mex and Cajun music. Its true, lead a very interesting life.

The "Hercules" plate at Niko Niko on Montrose in Houston TX. Long my favorite paper plate Greek joint in Texas, I stopped by the recently remodeled (and always packed to the gills) joint and noticed a new menu item. "We dare you to finish it.." A poor bet indeed. Besides playing killer real-deal Greek music over the house speakers, they have the best advertising graphics as well, mostly cartoon images of the owners ever increasing stomach.("We're expanding...")

OK, I have raved about Fuegos Authentic Mexican for many months. The local papers recently picked up on them as well and gave them what I can only characterize as an appropriate description of this Mom, Pop and Daughter operation. I get the same thing every time I go, but in a fit of curiosity, I went for their "Fat Burger." It is just as the review says: the best burger in Austin. (I can't believe I said that, but it really is so.) The perfect marriage of chuck and ground, I could not get my ample maw around it.

Here's a fine Polish Gorale ensemble that appeared at the Houston Polish Festival last week. They were accompanying a large folk dance dance troupe that had come down from Chicago (Góralski Zespół Pieśni i Tańca "Holni" pod patronatem parafii Św. Krzyża). The local Poles really didn't know what to make of them, as they are mostly descended from the Lowlands and share the traditional Polish distrust of the hillbillies of the Tatras Mountains. Like the dancers these boys here are are FOB (fresh off the boat in the local vernacular) and didn't speak a word of English. Brian Marshall and his boys waited patiently for them to clear out so they could crank up the Texas Lowland fiddle sound.

Me? I thought they were ASS kickingly good. What's hard to see in this picture is the "maly bassy," or small bass; a three string cello actually played with clubby underhand bass bow. The dude could rock it and along with the twin rhythm fiddle section it was a mighty. mighty skronk. You can hardly make it out but one of them is playing a regularly tuned fiddle left handed. (Follow this link for some nice pictures from the event.)

Reality - do you think maybe too much?

2008-04-23T00:43:00.000-07:00

My friend Andy Moritz, lately bassist with Cadillac Sky and a great bass educator forwarded me this little exchange with a 14 year old who wanted his advise on how to "go pro." Kids who ask me usually have to go home and find a thesarus and a history book to devine the message I give them. Andy, a much nicer fellow than me, did the following:

"A kid sent me a message on Myspace about wanting to be a pro bass player. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t resist a reality check, especially after his getting such an off-hand remark about going pro from another road guy.

From: >XXXXX< style="font-style: italic;">[he’s 14 now] and everybody says I could go pro. XXXXX XXXXX also told me this but I don’t think so could u please give some advise so I can get better? I really would appreciate...
=]

And here was my response:

Hey XXXXX,

Great to hear from you! If you just want to play for fun and profit, then work on your intonation, be familiar with the basic bluegrass keys, and work with a metronome. If you want to be a pro, certainly go for it, but you'll want to want to have a bit more backing up your playing -- such as...

TO START WITH...

Learn all your scales, learn all your keys, learn common practice theory and jazz theory and how to apply it to your playing, learn how folk music styles are different and how to apply that to your playing, learn how to play jazz standards and folk standards in multiple keys, learn about time and how to play in it and with it and around it, learn to play with the metronome on beats 2 and 4, learn how to make your bass sound like several different players, learn how to solo in various standard styles (in every key), learn as many tunes from memory as you can and then learn a whole bunch more, listen to as many records and songs from as many styles and genres as you can and STUDY THE PARTS (who's doing what, when, and how), learn how to play your way out of a paper bag so that you can save the tune if you or anyone else completely messes up, learn how to amplify or plug in and get your sound for at least two different applications with a couple of backups in case something breaks, and be able to do all of that without ever hearing yourself in case the stage sound is terrible.

AND THEN...

Learn how to do anything on little or no sleep, food, or during illness; learn how to sleep anywhere; learn how to wash your clothes in an ice bucket and dry off with a wash cloth; learn how to get along with anyone, when you won't be able to, and when you shouldn't get along with them; learn to fix your own stuff with a butter knife, string and a paper clip, and learn how to pack 7 days worth of clothes into a backpack.

WITHOUT FORGETTING TO...

Make sure you have your schedule, itinerary, routing, gig clothing, gear, back-up gear, contacts, contracts, financing, and provisions taken care of at all times.

AND FINALLY...

Learn how to listen and learn from those who have been there and done that before you. We're all just dwarfs standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before us...

Make sure you REALLY want to do it before you do it. It's an awesome and amazing job, but WILL BE your job.

Best wishes!
Andy Moritz"

No word yet if there was any response.......

"Sure, you were Jewish in New Jersey...."

2008-04-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

..but you won't find out what that means until you get out here."

- Robert H. Rubin, Stillwater OK, 1970

Seems my old man gave a good interview, so I come by it honestly I guess. Here he is in a publication called JPSP, explaining the Jewish Experience at at an Oklahoma Ag-Tech College. Those who know me well will here echoes of his verbiage in both my language and my attitudes today.

Dig it:

Bonus: My first public appearance as a Jew, age 5. And they got my name wrong, presaging my relationship with journalism and writers for many years to come.

Everybody should have a hobby...

2008-04-07T22:11:00.000-07:00

..and here is mine. Yup, that's me on fiddle, the first recorded evidence of such, Lord help us.

It started out innocently enough when a pal of mine and I both took delivery of wood bodied instruments from the wizards at National Resophonic Guitars. We got together at the house to see how they sounded played together, and then a beer or two and then a "hey, let's get a gig." It's either a band that's a very bad joke or a very bad joke that's a band. Nevermind, how can we suck less than what graces the stages of Austin these days.

Here's a sample press release:

"Introducing a rare performance by Fat Man & Little Boy; the Atomic Duo, this town's finest (and hopefully only) mildly pederastic Folk-Blues duo, featuring Austin's beloved Kike-of-the-Blues Mark Rubin and his fetching ward, Silas Lowe..." and even more extended hyperbolic folderoll.

Hard to fathom, but we've invited to play quite a few dates locally, which means something but I'm not quite sure what yet...

It bears repeating

2008-04-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

My old pal Dale Watson sent me a link for an interview he gave recently for Atlanta's Creative Loafing. As usual, he was eloquent in his assessment with what is lacking in not only Country music as it is practiced today, but music in general.

Of particular resonance with me was this observation about the singers working the cuircut today: "A lot of these guys don't even know the country standards, the songs you always heard and had to know," Watson says, calling in from his Austin home. "You couldn't get onstage anywhere in any honky-tonk and not know 'Your Cheatin' Heart,' but some don't." Watson says most of the new country boys and girls who came along during the '80s and '90s had no roots -- they just started doing country music a year before they had their record."

In the very same issue, I noticed another interview with Bob Mould, one of the small fraternity of musicians who used to crash at my house in Norman Oklahoma during the mid-80's punk rock explosion. Like Watson, he is touring behind a new release and he too spoke to the shift in culture that has lead to the state of affairs music finds itself in today:

"The current state of the business is enough to get a man all worked up, but today's Mould discusses it calmly, with a sense of humor. "Music used to be a religion to people, and now it's simply an accessory," Mould said by phone from his Washington, D.C. home.

The singer/composer recalled the sacred ritual of procuring vinyl records in his youth. First, you saved up your money from the crap job you hated, caught the bus to your downtown record shop where you frantically perused all the hip music magazines to see what was worth a listen. You took hours making your selections before working up the nerve to see if your selections were good enough to escape the disdain of the hip employees who rang up your purchases. Even then you wouldn't know if you had wasted your hard-earned money until you unwrapped the cellophane and put the platter under the needle for the first time.

Now, the journey is only as far as a keyboard. "It wasn't as easy as walking to a laptop and going, 'Look, an MP3 blog with 38 new songs that aren't even out yet,'" says Mould. "I'll just download all of those. I have no idea what the artwork is, I don't care anything about the band, maybe there's 15 seconds in here that speaks to me. If it does, I'll drag it into my iTunes library and maybe I'll remember it's there tomorrow.

Mould says he wouldn't have made it in the current marketplace. "If I was coming up now, I'd just throw my hands up and go 'This is nonsense,'" he says. He thinks he'd be better off as a graphic artist, a painter or perhaps in social work. "I think that's always a good alternative to music, to get out in the community and help people less fortunate," he says. "You're actually gonna have a much richer life than if you try to be a musician."

Now, the casual reader, a younger music fan perhaps, might think from these riffs that these guys are complaining or are bitter or even burnout. But in reality they are simply reporting accurately on the field they find themselves in. Both Watson and Mould are about my same age and experience, albeit with quite a lot more commercial success than I've had, and both are cats I respect a whole lot, though in completely different ways.

Personally I find it encouraging that even in the current atmosphere of "good-enough" that they strive to continue to make "great."

Report from Klezmer Festival Fürth

2008-03-18T20:50:00.000-07:00

Last month I had the great pleasure of joining the teaching staff of the bi-annual Klezmer Festival Fürth in Germany. It's a lot like the other Klez Kamp knockoffs that have sprung up around the world, but this one is only a weekend long and hyper intensive. Josh Hororwitz leads the staff and I was tapped by Alex Kontorovich to perform with a German Goldenshteyn tribute ensemble.

It was a LONG flight from Austin to Atlanta, then Paris, finally to Nurenburg and then a short drive (with a wonderfully pleasant driver) to the old town of Fürth. Lucky for me, the event was run with typically European efficiency; a mixture of respect, conviviality and payment in a currency that isn't tanking a little bit more every day. I was also pleased to find a bar with a fine selection of Cuban cigars, which I relished smoking at every free moment. Yup, they really are that much better than the Dominicans we poor Yankees get now.

High lights for me included playing and hanging out with the Hungarian members of Budowitz, who by the way sounded simply amazing at their Thursday night concert. Along with the estimable talents my old pal Cookie on fiddle and Christian Dawid on reeds, Josh's early music approach to Jewish music was made all the more relevant and vibrant by this "Mutt & Jeff" trio of Tanzhaus musicians. Besides being some of the finest players I've been around, and I'm referring to the rest of Budowitz for instance, these cats bring a joi de vrie to their playing, on stage and off, that is simply inspiring. I sat in on their workshop when I wasn't teaching and as per usual learned more myself than the students, maybe. (Their names are Tamás Gombai, Sándor D.Tóth and Zsolt Kürtösi in case you were wondering No, I can't pronounce them either.)

For the first day I was teaching ensemble performance along side Aaron Alexander and Dan Blacksburg who as usual did most of the heavy lifting. They had to split the next day, so it was left me to to rehearse the student ensemble. These students I found to be at turns eager to learn and techincally quite advanced not only on their instruments, but in style and repertoire. Jewish music has really made deep inroads in Germany, with repercussions I can hardly imagine.

Well, after a day of teaching from 8am-5pm, it was back to the hotel, and quick bite at the venue's own restaurant and then straight to a performance. The German Goldenshteyn ensemble featured all but 2 folks who played on his CD, and in their absence the addition of all the members of Budowitz. It was a mighty big band, but with almost no rehearsal (adhering to the Frank London school of "it's all in the casting" style of band leadership) young Kontorovich did an admirable job of intoning German's material. Hard to do when the tuba player was weeping uncontrollably between sets.

OK, so the next day it's more 8-5 teaching offset by a lovely lunch with a new best friend, Vira Lozinsky . She was born in Moldavia and raised in Israel, she came as vocal instructor. She's a "keeper" as we say back home, a fine combination of wit, skill and talent. This is deep praise, as many of you know how much I don't normally care for singers. But I hear she cut a record with Toronto's Beyond the Pale, and I'll be looking for it.

So then there was the student concert. I'll let the local press take it from here:

Ok, so it's in German and small, so here's a translation from Josh:

"The eleven teachers gave their all to take the 55 students under their wing. The spontaneously formed combos sounded as if they had already been playing for ages with each other. Perhaps the secret was to choose pieces that lay well, often ones in slower tempo, but in the completely full hall of the Klangforum (Culture Hall,) one didn’t notice that. Mark Rubin, one of the few musicians who waves the klezmer flag high in Texas, distinguished himself virtuosically amidst his students...."

The smiling clarinet player from the newspaper photo, Katrin, is who sent me the clipping. After the show, she told me she felt terrible and that she and her fellow students didn't do a good job. I assured her that nothing could be further from the truth, and I promised her I wasn't lying. I very glad to see the local reporter backed me up on that point.

With any luck I'll see some of these same folks at the Klezmer Week in in Weimar, where I'll be on staff as part of the Other Europeans' project.

Canadians at SXSW

2008-03-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

So out of the blue the other day my old buddies Katie Moore and Josh Doglin (aka DJ SoCalled) give me a ring to tell me that they at the SXSW Conference site and are literally begging to be picked up and "rescued." This is not an uncommon experience for me actually, so I have a game plan all laid out for the out of town guest who has become overwhelmed by the crush of the conference. I haven't see either of these folks since they were on the bill with me in Krakow last summer, so we have a lot to catch up on.

The enchanting Ms. Moore wrote of the evening's hi jinks at her blog at the Montreal Gazette entitled "Drive By Mariachi" and Josh at "Austin Heats Up."

For the record, it's Sam's BBQ, Mariachi Relampago, and James Invelt sat in for the ailing Dale Watson.

Bad Livers inducted into Austin Music Hall of Fame

2008-03-12T14:41:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I was surprised as the next guy. See what happens when you walk away for 8 years? I put on a clean shirt and headed down to the Austin Music Hall to pick up the honor, which is chosen by the readers of the Austin Chronicle. I'm a well documented blow hard who talks way too much on stage, so I asked Danny to craft some thank you notes which I read at the awards ceremony. Here they are:

"I would like to thank the Austin music fans and musicians that saw fit to honor the Bad Livers in this way. I just wanted to say that the band worked so very, very hard.

It would be difficult for someone not directly involved to realize the magnitude of this statement. We really believed we were changing things for the better. We were trying to infect the world with our passionate love of all things music, and our desire to make something "happen." We put in untold thousands of hours, wore out more than one van, and even endured several near death experiences.

It makes me feel proud that you guys are recognizing the efforts of the Bad Livers. I think I can speak for the band and say we always felt like we were doing something really great. Thank you for letting us know that you felt that way as well. My sincere hope is that others will come up with their own idea of music, ignore alien orders and develop the concept as far as possible. "

- Danny Barnes, 3/12/08

I do indeed agree with all that. I mean, have you ever found yourself on stage in some hopelessly crappy dive, say in Universal City Texas (thanks again Nancy Fly Agency,) grinding out a $30 a man gig in front of an increasingly hostile audience, thinking to yourself "what the hell am I doing here? Is this are there is?" Folks, we literally risked our lives daily out on the highways of these United States just trying to get from Lawrence KS to Iowa City IA in time for a sound check, (which is silly really as sound checks never help but you have to play ball and go through these silly rituals in the music biz .) And hardly anyone shows up and you break a $125 bass string, and then beg the sound man for a place to crash.

You have to really, really believe in the validity of what you are doing to accept these, and lo so many more inequities to present original musical thoughts out into the world. We toured well nearly 500 dates before we released our first CD for instance, entirely counter to accepted wisdom. We passed on crappy record deal offers from the usual suspect folk labels, and went with a wonderful punk rock label who was as surprised as us that we asked to be on their roster. Over the years we employed graphic designers and t-shirt makers, booking agents and publicists, all of whom we accepted as part of our creative team.

We didn't do it for the chicks (we were married or much like it and always loyal,) we didn't do it for the dope and beer (we were stone sober, Danny was a youth minister at his church for a time) and we sure didn't do it for the fame, which really never shone on us, even after we scored every good break an artist could ever hope for. We were passed over time and time again by big time music biz managers who took meetings with us and passed, considering us "un-manageable." We wore out 4 booking agents, 3 vans and a fiddler. And starngest we're still around to talk about it.

Year later I am proud to state that when a decision needed to be made, the answer was the one that best served our music and not "career" in the business. We committed ourselves to our music alone. It was, and seems to still be, a revolutionary concept.

For my part, I was always sure that what Dan and I were doing was important. That even if we weren't catching the ear (or the pocketbooks) of the people today, someday, maybe long after I'm dead, the body of work we created would be fully appreciated. Seems as though we had a positive influence out in the world, if only evidenced by the number of amazing young traditional musicians of every stripe which cite us as an inspiration.

But with this little gift of public validation, I am reminded that yes indeed, it is possible that my misspent youth out on the road may actually have amounted to something. I'm also blessed to be around to kvell, even just a little bit.

Oh, and what I forgot to say at the Awards show is that we have a couple of dates on the books for this year. We've been invited to perform at the Pickathon up in Oregon in August and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in SF in October. If schedule and interest allow, there might be a few more. Who knows?

I never imagined I'd be in a Hall of Fame anywhere either.......

The ugly rumors are in fact true...

2008-03-05T12:43:00.000-08:00

Bad Livers have in fact booked a couple of dates this year. Dan and I have been invited to perform at the 10th annual Pickathon up near Portland in August, and then down over to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco later in the year. Bob Grant has signed on to be the third leg (from the "popular Sugar Hill era line up" according to the Pickathon website,) and I'm going back and trying to find old copies of our recorded output to woodshed our old material.

I'll be honest with you, I'm just as interested in attending these events as playing them as the line up of acts are just killer.

And for the record, I don't really recall ever "breaking up." I just remember nobody booking us for any more gigs, and me not minding so very much about it. Its what my jazz playing buddies in NYC call it taking a "quiet time," which in our case lasted damn near 8 years. Dan's been out there busting his ass on the road ever since I dropped out, so I guess I can thank his diligence for the renewed interest in our oeuvre.

And I always selfishly thought that we had a hand in changing how people thought about American traditional music, and in a good way too. Here in Austin, and out on the road in far flung places like Belgrade and Genoa as well, I meet young musicians all the time who were influenced either by our live performances or our records. Many a nice person has dropped me a line to tell me how meaningful this gig or that tune was to them. Many of them were still in Middle School, or younger, when we stopped working in fact.

The prospect of one of these aging punk rockers out on a "reunion" tour is not my idea of fun, I am after all already fat and cantankerous. But....they did call us and ask politely. So might as well come out and see what the kids are up to these days. I like to play music. I like Dan's material, which holds up very well over the years. Bob's a fine guy to hang around with. What's not to like?

Oh yeah, and to answer the inevitable question: are you going to play my town/festival, ect..let me direct you to Barnes' blog and follow those instructions. As Danny likes to say, for nearly a decade, we held up our end of the touring-performing thing.

!Viva La Resistencia! y Viva Raul Salinas!

2008-02-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

"Jazz Hipster | Pinto | Cockroach Poet | Human Rights Activist | Xicanindio | Elder" that and much much more was Raul Salinas, sadly now departed. I'd add "street fightin' Tzadik" and "lover of the printed word" to that myself.

Now, he's gone and I can't see anyone coming up behind him to take up the banner of truth, human dignity and justice.

Find out about the man at these sites, raulsalinas.com, his wonderful bookstore, and this recent tribute. Along with the passing Clifford Antone and Doug Sahm, Austin has lost one of the strong voices that made us such a great town to live in.

!Viva La Resistencia! y Viva Raul Salinas!"

Box of Wine - Mardis Gras 2008

2008-02-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

Hours prior to the parade leaders arrest that evening (and that's a whole other story wild related here,) the Panorama Brass Band works out a litte Ornette Coleman number for the revelers.

Note the trumpet fiddle in the hands of former NO Klezmer All Stars fiddler Rick Perles.

How do get a musician to complain?

2008-02-09T20:41:00.000-08:00

Easy.

Book him for a gig.

No really, I'm just about up to my eyeballs in all these one-time professional musicians complaining about how "I can't make a living anymore, " and "there's nothing but day-job cubicle monkeys by day,rock-stars by night" no talents clogging up the clubs, playing for free to an increasingly unsophisticated crowd of patrons who think of music simply as something you do for fun.

Well boo-hoo.

To quote director Werner Herzog, "do not succumb to the culture of complaint!" Either get a job like everybody else and stop playing for beans, or go out there and eat off the plate that is offered and say thank you very much. Life be funny sometimes, and it's getting nearly comical lately.

Either way, please leave me out of it. Or at least be of good humor. I have a hard enough time remaining positive about our culture's situation as it is, and I just recently made a gun purchase.

Many thanks.