There is No Klezmer Guitar, Part 7
Freak Shows
Its funny- I've been working on this thing for years and in the last two weeks that it took me to write it all down, Kristina Gaddy's book on the Secret History of the Banjo came out.
It's a great book, and masterfully written. You can tell she’s tempted to make Grand Claims That Explain Everything, even worrying that she has lost her mind in some loony conspiracy theory, but avoids overdoing it by simply laying out the evidence in a narrative context and letting the reader connect the dots themselves. The mystery is revealed, but the scope of it is still unknown, as it probably always will be.
I think that's the way to go. Klezmer guitar is not the black banjo. The black banjo was the center of an entire coherent culture and worldview. Klezmer guitar is the opposite. It never really launched, and every time it caught fire, it was snuffed out. There is no (tradition of) klezmer guitar, but I think the reasons for that tell us a lot.
Why There is No Klezmer Guitar
What does it say exactly?
The guitar's association with the female, the ecstatic, the low class (pagan), and the domestic made it suspect by Jews throughout history. You can agree that Judaism's ambivalence about those things is a good thing, like my grandma probably would, or a bad thing, like I do, but I don't think the idea itself is contentious. Certainly the guitar was played on boardwalks, and in mandolin orchestras, but it and klezmer were never merged to form a sort of domestic instrumental tradition like we have with old-time music. Apples and oranges.
You might also say, well, that was then, do those associations really speak to us today? Wasn't that all a long time ago?
As I’ve tried to show in this series, there were moments throughout history when the contradictions between the values embedded in the guitar and Judaism came to a boil. I think, especially for American musicians who have inherited the values of guitar via Worrall and other associations with “American” music, including African American traditions, we are in one of those moments again.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you don't really need culture in the same way my grandparents did. My grandmother needed a community as, what they now call, “social capital.” She could remember a time not long ago when the community was their life insurance plan, their unemployment check, their health plan, etc. We all need community, of course, but these days, money and bureaucracies take on much of that work for us, for better or worse.
Accordingly, the culture that bound that social capital together has lost a sense of purpose. No longer do instruments come with elaborate layers of symbolic significance that coded values. Now they just come with a price tag. No longer are the notes contextualized in a larger culture and earned through participation, now you just plop on over to youtube.
Hank Sapoznik references this when he talks about why he didn’t play klezmer tunes on the clawhammer banjo.
There was no way I was gonna go and work out klezmer tunes in clawhammer style. I once did it as a joke: I had been teaching for Jay Unger, he had a fiddle and dance camp, and at one point I had worked out "Freylekhs fun der Khupe" in clawhammer style, but it was a joke. There is no justification for playing klezmer music in clawhammer style. Clawhammer is about context: I wouldn't work out "Maple Leaf Rag" in that style, that had already been defined in classic style. It would have been a freak show.
I get where Hank is coming from, but the traditions of clawhammer banjo (most often in open tunings) and open tuned guitars and klezmer do have real historical connections and relationships, you just have to go back a bit further.1 Also, and more importantly, the “context,” is not written in stone but is continually created and re-created. Some would say invented. For instance, when Hank says,
I really dislike the sound of guitar in klezmer bands. I can't really say why besides just the obvious, that there's no historic precedent for it. It just ends up sounding like this folkie "strumma strumma strum.”
Once again, he’s right- there is no precedent and like Sapoznik, I dislike the “strumma strumma” style. It doesn’t capture klezmer’s rhythmic complexity and plows over any harmonic subtleties (that said, even the strumming style has historical connections with klezmer, as we saw with the zongora). But as we heard in the Mitzos recording, or the Greek open-tuned guitar players, it doesn’t need to be played in that way and historically, in Eastern Europe, wasn’t. Strumma strumma isn’t inherent to the guitar, it’s part of post-war American popular culture. Once again, you just need to go back a little further.
Invention
Mining tradition for meaning is tricky. The klezmer scene has always been stylistically diverse. But the current trend, perhaps hiding a certain insecurity about identity, is desperate for authenticity (although they’d never admit it). One doesn’t find the cirkus acts of the 80s and 90s.
“Ideas about appropriation have really changed,” adds [Zoe] Aqua. “People like Frank [London] do it really well. But our generation has a different frame of reference.”
We cling to these pre-modern traditions because, afraid we’re all assimilationist blobs, we lack the confidence to imaginatively renew the traditions. But our lack of imagination and our desire for historical accuracy unknowingly replicates the status quo of music as a static commodity devoid of any context. For instance, we can duplicate the historically-based krekht but we seem reluctant to duplicate the equally historic but much less harder to codify role of klezmer as a music that is supposed to emotionally move and speak for the “audience.” It becomes a museum piece.
An alternative is to search the past not for the Traditional, but for the Repressed. This search also takes us back- but now we see those strains of the culture that were always just out of view. These margins may belong to tradition but they don't represent the mainstream. To put it plainly, these are the parts of history that were already either weird, “immoral” or unintelligible back then (this is why ragged Charley Patton didn't sell nearly as much as, say, smooth Leroy Carr). This is the realm of the bad.
This is where we find a certain sub-strand of klezmer, and this is the sort of guitar Segovia detested. The repressed is also where we find bad folklore- in the sense that the self-conscious, artistic, internationally-minded, historically-based inventions that we found in the music of Kostis Bezos and Henry Worrall were not the product of the collective folk, but of individual bohemian visionaries. In other words, freak shows.
All this to say, I think we have to take a stand at some point. Playing it safe ain’t cutting it, as the current klezmer scene grows ever more insular and smaller.
We want participation. We want relation. We want, however briefly, the Social. To take the first step we need to be creative enough to depart from moldy literalism, but we have to know enough history so that our first steps towards the social don’t fall into the traps laid out for us by the current cliches, which instantly try to turn our needs for the Social into money or status.
Our goal is not to weave guitar into current understandings of klezmer, but to let their mutual history and their clash of values destabilize klezmer itself, revealing how desires for domestic and democratic sociability were marginalized and repressed, and showing the way to how they can be rebuilt one more time.
“The thing I like about old-time and Yiddish music is that it's social music. People get together and play.” Hank Sapoznik
“Jewish music is very social music… I didn’t realize how important [the community aspect] was.” Josh Horowitz In a discussion on the community role of klezmer and Jewish music.
This is what I find inspiring about Gaddy's book. In the last chapter, she discusses how the black banjo movement has been percolating for no less than 70 years, since librarian Dina Epstein had a hunch that there might be something there!* Now, it has truly blossomed into a coherent culture, one that doesn't simply replicate the old 78s but one that is creating new situations and renewing itself.
The End
*in the documentary on Epstein, well worth your time, there is a short clip of klezmer banjo, provided by the late Shlomo Pestcoe.
Acknowledgments
I dedicate this 7 part series to the late Elliott Mills, whose yarzheit is upon us as I write. He was a living embodiment of these ideals, a tireless fighter for the best in culture, and his help in forming these ideas was invaluable. He was also a lot of fun to play with. Joshua Horowitz was incredibly (incredibly!!!) generous and his insights are so vast and thorough that I’m absolutely terrified to share any of this with him. Marty Schwartz is similarly a living encyclopedia of musical and linguistic knowledge without whom none of this would be possible. Joel Rubin, looped into some conversations by Josh or Marty, provided valuable analysis on occasion. Mark Rubin has been a wonderful encouragement and offered important early feedback on an old version of these ideas. All mistakes mine, acknowledgements are not meant to imply that any of these fine people have read or approved any version of any of this craziness.
See Peter Van Der Merwe’s Origins of the Popular Style for more of this “going back a bit.”