Joshua Jacobson on Jewish Jazz
In 1925, Samson Raphaelson wrote The Jazz Singer, a play that dealt with the essential conflict of the immigrant experience: the choice between maintaining the traditions of the old country or assimilating into American culture. In the preface to the first edition of his play, Raphaelson wrote, "In seeking a symbol of the vital chaos of America's soul, I find no more adequate one than jazz.... I have used a Jewish youth as my protagonist because the Jews are determining the nature and scope of jazz.... Jazz is Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker. These are Jews with their roots in the synagogue."
In our JaZZamir concert, we will explore some of the wonderful music that arose out of that creative tension between old world and new, that irresistible synergy created when the ba'al tefilloh met the blues, when Jews encountered jazz.
Between 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to America. For many of these immigrants, jazz was an important marker of American culture, to be embraced by those who wanted to become real Americans. Moreover, African-American musical idioms--jazz, blues, spirituals--held a special appeal for Jews with roots in Eastern Europe. The blues scale was nearly identical to the synagogue's selicha mode. Its free rhythms and improvisation resonated with the art of cantorial recitative. And Jews who had just escaped Russian pogroms, Jews who had yearned for centuries to return to their homeland, could relate to the African-American longing for freedom, for relief from suffering and persecution.
So Jacob Gershowitz, under his new name, George Gershwin, became one of the greatest American songwriters of the twentieth century, fusing jazz and blues with European classical models in hit songs such as "I Got Rhythm" and his masterful jazz opera, Porgy and Bess. German-born Fred Fisher, who composed popular hits such as "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" and "Peg o' My Heart," also had a hit with the Jewish market with his "Yiddisha Charleston," a novelty song whose optimistic lyrics depicted "the Cohens and the Kelleys doing it everywhere" and an egalitarian dance floor on which "millionaires of all nationalities meet the Israelites."
A few decades later, jazz even made its way into the synagogue. In 1946, Cantor David Putterman of the Park Avenue Synagogue commissioned the great Kurt Weill to write a setting of the Friday night Kiddush. Weill (1900-1950), descended from a long line of distinguished German rabbis and cantors, had found his calling in the expressive world of satirical theater. His collaboration with Bertolt Brecht produced the provocative opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927) and the acerbic musical The Threepenny Opera (1928). After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Weill fled Germany, eventually settling in New York in 1935. The Kiddush that Weill wrote for Putterman is drenched with the blues, but also breathes the French perfume of Debussy. Twenty years later, Cantor Charles Davidson (b. 1929) created an innovative and controversial work, an entire synagogue service in the style of jazz and blues. The title, And David Danced Before the Lord, is derived from the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel 6:14), and describes the jubilant music and ecstatic dancing that accompanied the return of the holy Ark to Jerusalem, with King David himself leading the festivities. In this work, Davidson transposed the musical soundscape from Ancient Israel to twentieth-century America.
In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz was America's most unique cultural product, and may have been our country's most popular export. Eventually, jazz even reached the shores of the Middle East. Israeli songwriter Moshe Wilensky paid tribute to the popular music of Latin America in his humorous 1959 hit satirizing Israeli youth, "Venezuela." To the rhythms of the samba, the kids argue whether Venezuela is the dreamy land of chocolate-colored girls in skin-tight dresses dancing the "mañana" dance in the jungle under the coconut trees, or a nightmare where a giant Anaconda serpent can kill you in two seconds flat.
And more recently, Israeli conductor/arranger Tzvi Sherf has been translating the strains of North American vocal jazz into a modern Israeli idiom. His "Kafe Bekef" is an ingenious transposition of the American hit "Java Jive" into a Middle Eastern context in which "I love java sweet and hot" becomes "ba li kos kafe turki" (I feel like a cup of Turkish coffee). While it may have been overshadowed in the past 60 years by rock, jazz remains a vibrant idiom, quite sophisticated, while never completely abandoning its roots in African-American folk music. Of course, for our performance, we're mixing things up and adding a few tasty roots of our own--so be sure to join us on June 6 for JaZZamir!
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