Phrasing and Descent, Part 5
Conclusion: Irony and Jest
In 1944, Ben Hecht mourned the loss of the dialect comedian. Gone, he said, was "this genius for fun- the half mad capering of irony and jest that is the oldest of Jewish tradition." In this post, I’ll show how those strains survive, although to do so I’ll need to venture even further away from the normal sources.
I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz.
That's James Baldwin writing 14 years after Hecht. Now I know klezmer is not blues or jazz, but I think his observations get to the heart of the matter. In his opening paragraph we find, first and foremost, the "we." This is the alchemy that happens when the social sum is greater than its individual parts. Music, along with food and dance, are serving a powerful psycho-social function. He continues:
In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about….
The "way" a song is sung, or played, is as efficient a definition of phrasing as you'll get. And Baldwin has a lot to say about it. The difference between the way that, say Led Zeppelin plays a song and the way Robert Johnson might, is that, in the rush to see blues as raw, unmediated expression, many white interpretations miss the important role of restraint and irony. This is very similar to how Zev Feldman, as we saw in a previous post, realized that "the way" he was playing a tune was too straight after seeing Tarras dance:
...[Dave Tarras'] whole performance had a restrained, but vaguely comic effect...[I realized].. our performance was too earnest and aggressive to fit this kind of dance.
"Restrained but vaguely comic" is a cousin to Hecht's "mad capering of irony and jest." And Baldwin will add his own brilliant term for this: "ironic tenacity."
White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
L'chaim. The tendency to see this music as a cliche of eroticism is a way to avoid sensuality (blues and klezmer can be erotic, as we've seen with Brandwein, but that’s for the advanced class.) It's a way to quickly rush past that anxious moment when we are between things and simply feeling.
This is not the same as the current trend of postmodern irony that is always trying to de-center things and disprove feelings. This irony is a deeper way of knowing, where contradictions that others can afford to ignore are conjured, however briefly, to coexist amongst us.
He then switches gears and tells us why this matters:
It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes.
Beautiful, but what are the implications of this for klezmer revivalists? If ever there was a group renown for their labyrinths of historical attitudes, 'tis us! Who are we when we can relax and "have no need to pretend to be who we are not?" What comes out of our horns then?
Personally, my most favorite musical moments have not come from either self conscious mashups or perfect reproductions of 78s. Unlike Hecht's beloved dialect comedians, they didn't come from limiting our voices into 2-D caricatures. They came from rare times, usually in basements or porches, when “the need to pretend” was lifted and I was able to be honest about my ambiguous outsider/insider relationship to the music (and respond to musicians doing the same).
Nothing too weird, in fact just the opposite. Not adding things, just allowing things to be that we are already there. By “not pretending” that we aren’t internal tourists in this territory, we can be honest about our relationship to the idiom and, by approaching it from the outside, occasionally transform or transcend it in performance (as we also saw in the Klezmer Guitar conclusion). Use it in quotes, as it were, with some ironic distance.
But this approach has dangers. As Psychic Courtyardists insistent upon using the music for communal purposes, we need the idiomatic form, and we need to study it and be able to play it competently. For other genres, like old-time, playing shoulder-to-shoulder in the idiom is sufficient, but with klezmer, that interpersonal face-to-face, social function that is so important is not served by the idiom alone.
This doesn’t mean our entire performance should be blues/klezmer or jazz/klezmer or blahblah/klezmer. We want less pretending, not more. It is not reduced to one hybrid, because we are not ever one hybrid. We switch, we float, we wander (see Walter Benjamin Arcades Project). We make the idiom, we break the idiom. We make the collective, we break the collective, we make the collective again.
You can tell something is happening because suddenly, there is a sense of risk and vulnerability. And when it works, that feeling is transformed into "openheartedness” ([Brandwein] “would take the heart out of you…” (Epstein 1991, interview). It feels like something that usually is between us is dissolving. More like unveiling or descent. But its equal parts funny, and is often accompanied by laughter.
I know this sounds woo-woo, and I’ve been light on practical suggestions, but it’s real! It’s about real courage and the very practical techniques of creating situations where this sort of thing can happen. Academically, this is just a more complex form of the idea of “participation” that we saw earlier, and the role of it in klezmer is, as I hope I’ve shown, every bit or more as historically accurate as any krekht. Instead of participatory discrepancies happening just within the arena of the musical idiom, we put cracks in the idiom itself, because we insist, like Baldwin, on the touchstone of the self. What looks like the subtlest of little nothings opens into an unexplored continent.
This requires a lot of intention and attention to creating the sort of spaces, audiences and situations that make this possible, but musicologically, it leans not on melody or ornament, but on this thing called phrasing.
Next: Timbre & Twilight, Part 1
Afterword: After writing this, Josh Horowitz sent me some amazing work he’s done for his Rocky Rhythms class. Those interested in a very practical and deeply historically-informed approach to phrasing should pester him into doing this class again!