DukeCity

There's a whole bunch of Verve reissues that do this: Like reproducing the LP cover in a smaller CD package isn't frustrating enough...

Article here in the NYT from '06 gives a little background/context to this project. The comparison to Minstrelsy is inevitable, and brings up a similar mixture of reactions. At once interesting/fascinating and inescapably repulsive as a piece of cultural history. The fact that the music was originally produced and performed at least in part by Jews, and this project being researched and produced by Jews, only adds layers of mixed feelings for me. Love ‘Springtime for Hitler’? Then Here’s the CD for You By ALEX WILLIAMS Published: October 29, 2006 SACHA BARON COHEN, meet Irving Berlin. Skip to next paragraph Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Hip musicologist Courtney Holt, a founder of a label of odd Jewish-theme music. FUNNY THEN The sheet music of a 1922 self-parodying song, partly by Eddie Cantor, on the new album. This mammy’s “cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.” Jokes that compare Jews to cockroaches have left some viewers of Mr. Cohen’s farcical new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” shifting uncomfortably in their seats. But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Mr. Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat’s ill-fitting suit — in fact, long before the 1929 stock market crash — Berlin, the songwriter behind “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was reeling off satirical songs about Jews that might seem dodgy on the “Borat” soundtrack. One such Berlin number, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” from 1916, concerns a businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over his unrepaid i.o.u.’s. This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface,” which is aimed not at the History Channel crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history — perhaps justifiably. “It’s like <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitler/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Adolf Hitler.">Hitler’s playlist, but it’s not, because it was actually Fanny Brice’s playlist,” said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre. (Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.”) “It’s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.” In spring 2005, Mr. Rosen, who is the author of “White Christmas: The Story of an American Song” (Scribner, 2002) and has also contributed articles to The New York Times, joined forces with Courtney Holt, a former Interscope Records executive, who now runs MTV digital operations; David Katznelson, a former Warner Records executive; and Josh Kun, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. They turned a shared obsession into “Jewface,” an album they hope will turn the MySpace generation on to a form of music that offended many even in their great-grandparents’ day. “Jewface” is the fourth album released on Reboot Stereophonic, a nonprofit record label devoted to unearthing odd Jewish-theme pop recordings from earlier eras, which Mr. Holt, Mr. Kun and Mr. Katznelson founded a couple of years ago. The CD will soon be available at record chains like Virgin, as well as on Amazon.com and iTunes. Coarse, yes. Consider the very title “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band,” from 1906. The four collaborators acknowledge that these playful vaudeville ditties could function as hate speech in the wrong context, and they carry particular power in a politicized climate where newspaper cartoons can cause riots, and Mel Gibson has risked his career with a drunken outburst. But to the project’s partners — music professionals typically associated with the likes of the Beastie Boys (for whom Mr. Holt produced a music video) and the Flaming Lips (whom Mr. Katznelson signed at Warner), not Eddie Cantor — this forgotten genre serves as a window into American Jewish heritage for people just like them: young secular Jews weaned on kitschy pop culture, abrasive rock and irony, as much as on the Torah. “We’re all kind of disaffected American Jews, who aren’t particularly religious, don’t really practice and don’t really lead very Jewish lives at all,” said Mr. Kun, 35. “Digging up these recordings was really about figuring out who we were in this world.” Many of these lost recordings spent nearly a century buried under dust on wax cylinders, the canister-shape phonograph records that predated discs. To contemporary ears the songs are camp, much like a previous Reboot Stereophonic release, “God Is a Moog” — a 1968 rock-opera reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service, performed on Moog synthesizer by the electronic-music pioneer Gershon Kingsley. But they also fit with a growing tendency among Jews of Generations X and Y to embrace, and even have fun with, stereotypes that might have made their parents squirm. It is the same impetus behind Heeb magazine, an irreverent publication about Jewish culture, and the proliferation of hipster Hanukkah parties in Manhattan each December, when fashionable young clubgoers bat around inflatable dreidels as house music blares. The “Jewface” tracks may soon find their way onto the dance floor. Adam Dorn, a Manhattan musician and producer who records under the name Mocean Worker and has worked with Bono and Elvis Costello, recently cut a trancy remix of “Under the Matzos Tree,” a 1907 song performed by Ada Jones, complete with blips and beeps and a thudding drum machine laid over lyrics like “Listen to your Abie, baby, Abie, come out in the moonlight with me.” “I just said, let’s take this woman who would probably be 116 now and give her a backbeat,” explained Mr. Dorn, 35. But even the original versions of the old tunes rock, in their way. “There’s an ethereal quality” to the music, said Mr. Katznelson, 37. “It teleports you to another time. It’s almost psychedelic.” Mr. Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted country. But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock. “My Yiddisha Mammy,” a 1922 riff on Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” written by Eddie Cantor and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with lyrics like these: I’ve got a mammy, But she don’t come from Alabammy. Her heart is filled with love and real sentiment, Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement. The “Jewface” project, however, does have historical as well as musical value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for a century,” said Dr. Magee, who explained that this music was generally ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews, who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes, not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own vaudeville self-parodies.) “Some generations had to come and go,” Dr. Magee said, “before younger people could listen with fresh ears, say: ‘Hey, let’s listen to this. It’s not us, but it’s our predecessors.’ ” Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Mr. Rosen writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such Hebrew comedy was “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined,” and that same year it was denounced by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that a project like this “gets very complicated.” It is on the one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its impact. Still, he said, “our experience in this kind of thing is that inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.” Mr. Rosen discovered the genre in the mid-’90s, while working on a master’s degree in Jewish history at University College London. One day, while doing research at the British Library, he ran across the sheet music for a song called “I Want to Be an Oy, Oy, Oyviator” — a comedy song about a Jewish aviator. Digging deeper, he found sheet music for hundreds of such songs, usually decorated with insulting caricatures of Jews as Shylocks, nebbishy immigrant greenhorns or schlemiels (like Levi, the Jewish wrangler in “I’m a Yiddisher Cowboy,” from 1908, who falls for an Indian maiden, then runs afoul of her father, the Chief). Fascinated, Mr. Rosen set off on a quest to track down actual recordings of this music. He trolled dusty junk shops, record-collector conventions and, inevitably, eBay, looking for wax cylinders, which cost $10 to more than $100, and 78s. His search, he said, “took roughly 10 years on and off.” Mr. Kun heard Mr. Rosen speak about the genre at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle last year. Within weeks, they said, they were planning an album. Mr. Kun recalled: “I would get e-mails at 6 in the morning: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of this guy?’ I remember one night he found the personal stationery of one of these old vaudeville performers, and it was as if he had found a brick of gold in the pyramids.” While the collaborators hardly expect “Jewface” to become a commercial smash, their industry savvy does increase the chances that the music will be heard. Mr. Holt, who worked on the iPod deal between U2 and Apple while at Interscope, is trying to organize a concert and eventually an album, with established rock and folk acts doing covers of the old songs. He’s making calls, he said. So far no one is getting back to him. “It’s a hard sell,” Mr. Holt acknowledged last week over a Scotch at SoHo House, the private club in downtown Manhattan, declining to name the acts he has been in touch with about the concert. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, there’s this lost Jewish music, recorded by Jews, making fun of Jews for non-Jews to be able to enjoy, in order to assimilate!’ That’s not a great elevator pitch.” Even family members can be skeptical. Mr. Rosen said his in-laws were taken aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some, culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture’s distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the same culture. “To some extent, people like to see themselves represented,” Mr. Rosen said, “even if they are badly represented.”

If we further expand the saxophone chair to include baritone, there's a Ronnie Cuber date. "Live at the Blue Note" ProJazz 629, rec. 1985 Ronnie Cuber, bari Randy Brecker, trumpet Lonnie Smith, organ Ronnie Burrage, drums

"Pfrancing" yeah, kinda sounds like that.

On this site Obama answers a questionnaire including his favorite musicians, and personal heroes. Trane makes it onto both lists. Of course, the next question should be "What are some of your favorite Coltrane albums?" It's one thing to know enough to say that Trane or Miles are important musicians; it's another thing to know enough to be more specific (hopefully something besides KOB ).

Great photos! Thanks for posting those.

George Carlin has passed. Man! The seven words, the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, A Place For Your Stuff, and all of those twisted observations. R. I. P.

And the style is fraught with problems... http://youtube.com/watch?v=YQtE4e7iIH8

R.I.P. Ron. Unfortunately, Ron was not doing a whole lot of playing when I was in Chicago back in the early '90s, so I didn't get to hear him. I sure heard a lot about him, and it was always with great admiration. And such beautiful copy work! There's something comforting about reading hand-written charts done by somebody who really new how to do it. It's really a disappearing craft. Here's to a master!

Does that mean that American jazz musicians are no longer American when they settle permanently in Europe? If so, then we can put Sidney Bechet, Kenny Clarke and others on the list as "European" jazzmen who happen to be of American descent.

Good Work! Congratulations!

I was at one of our great used record stores today in Ann Arbor and found this cut on Jr.'s first album, "Young Love for Sale." It's on Reprise and the billing is "Frank Sinatra Jr. and the Sam Donahue Orchestra. A line credits Walt Stuart and Chuck Slagle with the arrangements but doesn't say who did which ones. Never heard of these guys before -- anybody know anything about them? Big Band/Studio journeymen? I've seen tons of Walt Stuart charts in various dance bands. Some of them are record lifts that Walt did of other arrangers, some are his arrangements. I remember playing medleys called "Salute to the Mickey Bands #1" etc. Seems there was a benefit concert in April '08 in Daytona Beach (FL?) to help Walt with medical bills. His website is under construction, but still has a phone number for those interested in purchasing charts.

May 27 we celebrated our first anniversary by finally going to the photographers and ordering some pictures. Our wedding was more like just a big party with an extremely brief ceremony in the middle of it. We got married (and partied) in the warehouse of the local food bank, and instead of gifts, we invited our guests to make donations to same. The photos are great reminders of how fun it all was!

It really is a nice chart, and I've had the pleasure of playing it with FreeForAll several times over the years. Paul has the gift of being able to write charts that are fun to play, make bands and soloists sound great, and "lay" really well (meaning that it never feels like a struggle to get through your part). I'm teaching at a summer jazz workshop in Texas next month, and Dick Oatts will be there for a couple of days as the "hot dog". I just got an email with a list of charts that we'll be doing with him, and Paul's chart on "Beautiful Love" is on the list! Our local big band did a concert last weekend and performed Paul's chart on Nat Adderley's "Old Country". Another great chart!

Yeah, man. Nice chart.

I don't know about "successfully", but a guy playing "Satin Doll" on a Theremin. The model? It's a B3, of course!!! And a rather painful version of Monk's "Ruby, My Dear". Tough melody to play on any instrument, and this version is woefully out of tune.

This thread reminds me of the joke about the guy who starts taking bass lessons: He goes to his first lesson and the teacher gets him all set up in the correct position, then they work on plucking the E string. Next lesson they spend the hour just plucking the A and D strings. The guy misses his third lesson, and when the teacher asks him where he was last week, the guy say, "Oh, sorry man. I had a gig."

Not mentioned in the article is that the background of the ad is the Oregon state capitol building. The gold figure on top is an axe-wielding pioneer. Clearly meant to incite violence...

Crazy weather here in NM. Parts of ABQ got snow yesterday! Got out to play today and got rained on off-and-on for 12 holes, then finally had to bail when the heavy rain came in and the "lightening in the area" siren sounded. A couple of pints of Newcastle helped a bit...

Belated Birthday Greetings, Chuck! Sounds like you had a busy day, rewarded by the Johnnie Walker Red! I've been enjoying the two Charlie Rouse discs I got from you the other day. They're so great, I hope you don't mind that I've burned copies for a bunch of friends...

mmmmmmm......pi!

I got the digital run-around a few times using Firefox. Not crashes, but the file wasn't downloading. Finally got it to work.

I don't know of any others. A quick Google search turned up a site that takes pop songs and converts them to haiku, but not much else.

Thanks for the heads-up! That was fun! Very nice, indeed. Slightly off topic: I'm compelled, at the mention of "Moonlight In Vermont" to point out that the lyrics in the "A" sections are in the form of Haiku- Pennies in a stream Falling leaves a sycamore Moonlight in vermont Gentle finger waves Ski trails down a mountain side Snowlight in vermont (Bridge is non-Haiku) Evening summer breeze Warblings of the meadowlark Moonlight in vermont