Tsakismata, Jaleo and Klezmer
Ghosts of Antiphony
You want a guaranteed way to electro-shock your audience? Try tsakismata.
Tsakismata is a Greek term that refers to the vocal interjections and exclamations that occur around the music. The classic example is an audience member moaning “Opa” mid-performance to express their pleasure, but there are many more varieties, including other single word expressions as well as entire sentences or even brief conversations. Example, about 18 seconds in:
Marika Kanaropoulou. Take Me Into Your Embrace
In the world of amanes and rebetica, it is a vital part of the genre but one you’ll never find on any sheet music.1
Other cultures have their versions as well, notably flamenco. There it is called jaleo (one theory poses that the word has Hebrew origins, part of the never ending debate about flamenco and Judaism, addressed in my series on lament.) Interestingly, in flamenco it is also related to gestures as much as vocalizations (see our discussion on phrasing and gesture).
The roots of flamenco’s “Olé” may lie in Sufi North Africa, if we believe Lorca,
In all Arab music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous
cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether
they are not the same? And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the
duende is followed by sincere cries of: ‘Viva Dios!’ deep, human, tender cries of
communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real, poetic escape from this world.
This is more poetry than folklore (See Nonsense is Real) and there are those who disagree. If it’s true, it might not be hard to imagine the same phenomenon at work on the other side of the Islamic empire. Rebetica’s origins lie in Smyrna (Izmir) with tendrils that dig into that town’s fascinating Sufi and Jewish history. But this is conjecture and probably always will be.
Here’s an example of flamenco jaleo (jaleo is confusingly also the name of a genre of flamenco):
Manuel Vallejo; Niño Ricardo. Jaleo Extremeno
Rebetica and flamenco share another attribute: they have terms to describe the heightened emotional state that is acheived by their listeners. In Spain, they have duende, in Greece, kefi (throw in Portugal while we’re at it, whose fado performances grant saudade). These terms are notoriously hard to translate and they are related though not at all equivalent. Emerging from the oppressed classes in all these regions, each term describes a subtly different shade of bittersweet ecstasy.2
In our discussion of lament, I pointed out that one thing that separates klezmer from, say, American fiddle tunes is the emotionality of klezmer.3 This is not to say klezmer is better or worse or anything, only that klezmer tunes are expected to impart some semblance of complex affective state whereas fiddle tunes are mostly about energy and drive. As I’ve described at length, this insistence on the emotionality is the why behind the ornaments. This crucial difference to klezmer relates directly, or so I believe, to the old female-led laments that linger in the shadow of Jewish culture (the role of women as key architects of the aesthetics in flamenco, rebetica, fado and blues as well as the role of the lament in these cultures should be noted, as well as the presence of bones/idiophones in the above recordings, an instrument associated with women and mourning). This influence has long had an ambivalent role in the music and has been made complicated by the Hasidic influence, which will be discussed below.
Perhaps the most important practical aspect of the lament is call and response. Indeed to lament without getting anything back from the audience is deadly and makes no sense, a dynamic we find identical to with flamenco and its jaleos.4
Which leads me to a second floor room above the Abssyinnia Ethopian Restaurant last weekend. I played a show with some local musicians who were interested in klezmer. Our brief practice before the show didn’t leave us with a ton of tunes to play, but we sounded pretty good when improvising, so I suggested we just focus on that. In the middle of one of the solos, played over one minor chord in the taxim style, I found myself saying “Oy tate!” A little corny perhaps, but I couldn’t resist and the comfortable minor third vocalization seemed to send just a little ripple of electric shock through the room (if I do say so myself).5
Does klezmer have its own tradition of tsakismata? Is it like jaleo, with its connection to gesture, which Zev Feldman thinks is the missing link to the klezmer dance tradition? I can find nada written about it anywhere. While it’s on a ton of rebetica recordings, it’s only on a tiny number of klezmer 78s (none come to mind right now and I’m too lazy to go through all of them now hunting for them but you can hear a real klezmer do it around 3:40 seconds in here: )
It’s rare on 78s, but every now and then if my memory is correct, you’ll hear a little voice pop in with “Lebedig, lebedig!”, “Ot azoy” or “Oy Tate!” said in the same cadence as tsakismata.
Here’s another one. This is clearly a theatrical re-enactment (as are the Greek 78s, but this is really putting it on) but the patter plays a distinct role in animating the “instrumental music.”
Klezmer is emotional, but not in the same way as rebetica or flamenco. The Hasidic element in klezmer has funneled the ecstatic impulse in very specific directions. There are no drug-smoking criminals singing about having their heart broken emerging from the klezmer tradition. Or at least, not since Jacob Frank. (Maybe Odessa?) That’s fine, but for those of us who aren’t Hasidic, identifying this dynamic may be useful in teasing out how we want to approach and reproduce this tradition.
We should be wary of rebeticizing klezmer too much. There are important differences. However there is much in the Eastern European sensibility that is lost in translation. For instance, in the Jewish doina, an emotional and “Oriental” genre that is quickly in danger of becoming unheard in America, there is often a subtle call and response dynamic between the melody player and the chordal accompaniement. The chordal accompaniment responds to the melody exactly where one might expect an “Opa.” I don’t think this means folks were saying anything there, but I do think older folks may have heard that ghost of antiphony, while modern folks might not.
Another interesting dynamic is that such interjections are directed towards the musician, encouraging them further. In American music, the most common interjection is a masculine whoop of sheer excess that is directed to no one in particular. It has that same electrifying effect but the electric current is dissipated, like a shotgun blast. In the Eastern European context it is laser focused, softer and instead of relieving tension, builds it. Compare the harsh American whooping sounds to the soft mediterranean “O”s (Oy, Opa, Olé). A whoop can work anywhere, but the tsakismata requires a bit more intimacy. Both are “rude”interjections and derive their power from their status as anti-music. They are like black holes whose vacuum forms the shapes of galaxies. They are essential to the performance and without them, the music is in danger of becoming simply a bunch of notes.
Completing the loop between audience and musician has been a consistent focus of this blog. It’s the difference between a showy performance meant to simply wow a sedate audience desperate to escape from its over-stimulated boredom versus creating a real situation based on participation. As musicians, our bias is to search for the answer inbetween the notes on a page of sheet music or in just one more archive, but as we saw with lament, the answer may lie not with the musicians, but the audience.
[Psychic Courtyardists will also appreciate the Tsakismata Auto-Generator. We lend our support to the demands of the Radical Movement for Rebetiko Dechiotification and Bouzouki Detetrachordization]
People often try to shoehorn the blues into this family. It fits on some levels, although we don’t use the term blues to describe a desired end goal of the music. A closer comparison might be found in the gospel tradition, where vocal interjections and gestures (very similar to Sargent’s painting) accompany rapturous states.
Beregovsky spoke of the “deep emotionality, expressivity, and the ability to affect the listener” associated with the best of klezmer musicians, who were always able to move their listeners deeply and bring them to tears. (Rubin) see this post
“It’s strange to watch flamenco and remain silent. Giving some jaleos is a must! Whether you dance, sing, play guitar, or play cajón, you must also give jaleos.” You can also read many accounts of dancers or singers angry that they weren’t given more jaleos. I’ve never been to any klezmer performance where audience members interacted in anything but hollerin’, however, I do remember an excited woman who approached me after a gig and said, “I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what!”