>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Hello, everyone.
My name is Betsy Peterson and I'm the Director
of the American Folk Life Center here at the Library of Congress,
and I want to welcome you on behalf of all of our staff,
welcome you here today, for the first concert
of the Home Grown Concert Series for 2013,
here in the Coolidge Auditorium.
Just a word about the series, the series is an opportunity for us
to present to folks in D.C. and folks who are visiting D.C. some
of the best traditional music and dance from around the United States.
To produce the series we work with folklorists
and state folk arts coordinators from all over the country
who help us identify artists to bring here and present to you today.
So when we do this we also work with other organizations,
we work with the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center,
and actually I think our artists here today will be performing there
later on.
And in the case of this concert we are also working
with the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival.
Which will begin tomorrow out on the mall.
So if you all either live here or visiting, please go down
and you'll be able to hear lots of wonderful music
and meet a lot of wonderful people.
So today we have a very special treat, a very special concert,
the An-Sky Yiddish heritage ensemble,
which features renowned Yiddish folk singers Michael Alpert
and Ethel Raim, tsimblist Pete Rushefsky
and violinist Jake Shulman-Ment.
The group is a special group, celebrating the 100th anniversary
of the historic An-sky expedition.
The expedition is named for its leader, the Yiddish writer,
folklorist Semyan An-sky, best known as the author of the Dybbuk.
and the An-sky expedition of 1911
and 1914 systematically documented Jewish folk culture of dozens
of communities in the Ukraine.
The An-sky materials stand alone as an unparalleled record
of a preindustrial Jewish society,
and all of the field work was carried out in the Yiddish language.
Inspired by An-sky's work and affiliated
with the New York-based Center For Traditional Music and Dance,
the An-sky Yiddish heritage ensemble, excuse me,
is a super group, if you will, for leading performers
and researchers all in their own right of Yiddish folk songs
and exciting Klezmer instrumentals,
collected through field and archival research.
So without further ado, I want to turn it over to them,
but I first want to actually ask you
if you haven't turned off your cell phone to do so now.
We also do record these concerts, and you will be able to hear them
on our web site -- on the American Folk Life Center web site --
shortly.
So without further ado, the An-sky musical heritage ensemble.
[ Applause ]
[ Background noise ]
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
>> Michael Alpert: Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you very much for coming out to hear some post-
and pre-industrial music from the Yiddish
or East European Jewish tradition.
We are from my right to my left Jake Shulman-Ment on violin,
Pete Rushefsky on tsimbl, which is this wonderful Yiddish version
of the hammered dulcimer, and Ethel Raim, a towering figure in folk song
and folklore for many years.
I'm Michael Alpert, and we're presenting today music
and other performance traditions, instrumental music, song, and --
and something else -- that come out of once again out of the traditions
of Jewish Eastern Europe.
This is -- much of it, basically all of it, is music that comes
from a time, from either the time or the genres that were before --
that preceded the Jewish-American experience or were common at the --
at the beginning of that time.
This sort of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Although have continued into the present day, too.
This is not just a revival of music, and we'll hear something about it.
This tradition is continuity as we go on too.
We're going to continue now
with a song called [Yiddish song title] "Outside It's Raining."
It's a love song, its message is basically you promise --
the message is basically trust me,
and you said I should trust you, actually.
>> Ethel Raim: We know what that means.
>> Michael Alpert: Yeah, in the great spectrum
of the Yiddish tradition and a lot of other traditions of love songs,
this is not a sad song at all.
It's mainly unresolved.
So -- [Inaudible] --
[ Music and singing in Yiddish]
[ Applause ]
>>Ethel Raim: So that one ended really nice, as two doves.
This one ends not so nice, and it's a --
oh, young woman who takes a walk into the forest with her sweetheart
and the weather is cold and she gives him her scarf,
and then all of a sudden they encounter some robbers
and she says oh no, you can kill me, not him.
And then they come back and he takes another.
And she says as soon as she hears the plates breaking,
which is the celebration of the wedding, she will do herself in.
Beautiful song.
Learned from Ita Taub.
How does it go?
[ Singing in Yiddish]
[ Applause ]
[ Background noise ]
>> Ethel Raim: Okay, a satirical song.
What does the Rebbe [Rabbi] want?
Hm? Luck is "mit schmaltz" -- with goose fat.
So he and his wife will be well in the throat.
What else would the Rabbi -- the Rebbe -- want?
To be pleased, of course.
How about a bowl of soup?
Chicken soup, of course.
So he and his wife will be well in "boykh" -- in the stomach.
And the third is a plate of fish so he
and his wife will be well in the feet.
It rhymes in Yiddish.
>> Michael Alpert: In this dialect it rhymes so well
that it's exactly the same word.
[Laughter]
[ Singing in Yiddish ]
[ Applause ]
>> Pete Rushefsky: Okay, I -- normally my voice is loud enough
to carry, but we're being documented today, so --
but thanks so much to the Library of Congress, it's really a thrill
for us to be here and be part of the all
of the wonderful, amazing festivities.
We'll be at the Millennium Stage
at the Kennedy Center tonight, it's really a thrill.
So I'm Pete Rushefsky back home we're all from New York City
and we have this organization called Center
For Traditional Music and Dance.
We're in our 45th year, which we can't believe.
So -- and as Betsy mentioned, talked a little bit about it,
it's an organization, we work to preserve, present,
nurture the continuity of performing arts
of immigrant communities in the city.
And a person who's been there for just about all
of those 45 years is our co-founder and artistic director,
Ethel Raim [Applause] who some of you might actually know from one
of her previous careers either at Sing Out magazine, with Alan Lomax,
or as the leader of the Penny Whistlers,
which was a really important group in the folk revival.
>> Ethel Raim: A long time ago.
>> Pete Rushefsky: So thanks, Ethel.
And of course Michael Alpert, many of you know has been
for 40 years almost, a really pioneering --
almost 40 years, Michael, a pioneering figure
in this renaissance and revitalization
of Yiddish culture around the world.
Around the world.
And we have the best darn Klezmer musician under age 30.
Jake, you're still under age 30 for the next few weeks.
Jake Schulman-Ment right there.
So it's a real treat for us.
I want to just say one thing, it's wonderful also to be here
at the Library because back
at the center we have this wonderful archive for over 45, 50 years Ethel,
her co-founder Martin Canig
and the staff have been collecting incredible music in New York City,
documenting amazing traditional performing arts
across immigrant communities.
And so the importance of archives is
in the folklore field is so important.
Not just for preserving something that existed in the past,
but ideally having something that contemporary artists can use
to inform contemporary practice of artistic traditions
and be sure they continue to grow and thrive and things like that,
and that's something we really want to do.
And a prime example of that happened right here at the Library.
I don't know if it was about a year ago, the Yiddish radio conference,
about a year ago where our good friend Henry Sapoznik collection
of old Yiddish radio programs was donated to the Library.
And as a celebration for that they had a symposium.
And one of the staff members here at the Library, Matthew Barton,
really kind of surprised all of us in the Klezmer world
because he found a track by Joseph Moskowitz.
Now some of you might not know that name, probably most of you.
But some of you, anybody here from New York, grew up in New York City,
especially about the '40's, '50's, it you ever hear
of a restaurant called Moskowitz and Lupowitz's?
I see a lot of nodding heads.
This was a big time lower east side establishment.
It was a restaurant, it was frequented by --
you'd see the mayor there, movie stars,
second avenue theater stars, and folks like that.
And one of the proprietors was this guy named Joseph Moskowitz
who was a world-class tsimblum player.
So the instrument I'm playing in Hungarian it's tsimblum,
in Yiddish we call it the tsimbl,
it's the traditional hammered dulcimer of the Yiddish world,
and across Eastern Europe, really.
So -- but this man Moskowitz was very interesting.
So Matthew came and played this fragment of a radio program he found
from 1936 on Edwin's --
Edwin's nationally broadcast show (Edwin was a comedian)
of Moskowitz performing.
It's a real treasure because so little recorded examples
of what traditional Jewish tsimbl playing sounded like.
There's really only a few tracks of Moskowitz
and some other traditional tracks from Europe
and America of tsimbl and violin.
So that's really a gem.
so I'm going to actually present this piece.
Interestingly, Joseph Moskowitz, born in 1879 in Galati,
which is just south of Bessarabia, now the Republic of Moldova,
kind of where the Danube flows out to the Danube --
Danube delta -- into the Black Sea.
That's where the city of Galati is.
So that's where this Joseph Moskowitz came from.
He immigrated to this country in I think the second decade
of the 20th century, and he opened up -- he was a restaurant --
he realized he couldn't make it alone as a musician,
so he became a restauranteur, opened up a bunch
of restaurants on the lower east side.
But he finished his career right here in Washington, D.C.,
in a place called Michelle's Restaurant.
Anybody Michelle's?
It was on Vermont off of DuPont circle?
I'm glad we have a lot of foodies in the audience tonight,
it really helps the shtick.
And interestingly enough, we've recently --
I've recently learned from Scott Rosenthal,
I don't know if Scott is here, he's a descendant of Moskowitz's wife
that one of Moskowitz's biggest fans, I kid you not,
when he would play at Michelle's a young congressman
from California would come, back in -- this is the early '50's,
and he would always come when Moskowitz was coming.
And he would kind of sit by himself and you know,
pay his respects, spend a nice time.
Turned out it was Richard Nixon.
He was a big Joseph Moskowitz fan.
So it's an amazing piece of knowledge we learned
from this recent discovery of this tape.
So I'm going perform this tune that Matthew performed --
Mathew played -- as part of this 1936 program.
It's Joseph Moskowitz, an original tune called "Oriental Motif.
"
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]
>> Ethel Raim: A lot of the early,
early Yiddish song tradition is unaccompanied,
and of course, lullabies for sure.
And the lullabies are so varied.
So we put together three, and one is about a father who's going to go
and get a bird for his child and a flower for his child.
And the second one is curious, and it's about the Dreyfus--
it's about the Dreyfus case.
And she says this is a song I heard when I was growing up in my crib,
and she says "Don't be afraid, don't worry, Dreyfus was killed
because he was a Jew, but don't be afraid just because you're a Jew."
It's a very sweet -- and I learned it from Lifshe Schaechter-Widman,
a fantastic reservoir of songs,
probably well over 300 songs in her repertoire.
And this is a song she actually learned from a hurdy-gurdy player,
so it's really nice and fast which is unusual for a lullaby.
And the third lullaby is one again from the repertoire of Ita Taub,
a wonderful singer who lived in New York and who used to come
to the singing, zingerei, at the Gottesman household,
Lifshe's daughter was Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
and they would have zingereis, people would come over,
they would have some food and they'd sit around and sing unaccompanied.
And those are really -- I didn't attend much of those,
but I attended camps where that happened.
And I would sneak out to hear the adult camp, and they would wait
around till they went to dinner and they would just sit and sing.
And it was just so beautiful.
Society first one, B flat, maybe?
B, B.
[ Singing in Yiddish ]
[ Applause ]
>> Michael Alpert: You can keep clapping.
Every time you see someone put on an accordion.
>> Ethel Raim: It takes a while.
[Applause]
>> Michael Alpert: I mean, you didn't have to clap for that.
Just kind of fill the space.
Careful, he's got an accordion.
[ Music ]
[ Music and singing in Yiddish ]
[ Applause ]
>> Michael Alpert:
Jake Schulman-Ments, Pete Pete Rushefsky --
[ Applause ]
>> Michael Alpert: I'm going to sing an old-time ballad now that I know
from a remarkable woman, of [Inaudible] the late Bronya Sakina
who came from southern Ukraine, south western Ukraine,
the area called Podolia, which is part of the area of the --
Jewish Eastern Europe, that was really -- by the time of the --
the aforementioned Jewish ethnographic expeditions
in 1911 and 1914.
It was really a kind of -- it was like the southern mountains
or Appalachia in terms of its richness of Yiddish traditions,
musical traditions and otherwise.
And Bronya came to this country from the Soviet Union in 1980
and spent the rest of her life in Brooklyn.
She came from a small town, a small shtetl, called Obanisk [phonetic].
Anyone here from Obanisk?
It's known as [inaudible] the Ukraine, in Russian.
And she was, like many of the individuals we refer
to was just an incredible volks mensch [spelling?],
as we say in Yiddish -- someone who carried the whole culture
within them in terms of songs, dances, virtuoso cooking
in the Yiddish tradition, folk remedies, et cetera, et cetera.
And so this is --
>> Ethel Raim: And a beautiful dancer.
>> Michael Alpert: Right.
Including dance.
Which is subsumed normally in under culture.
So the -- so this is one of her ballads.
The -- the love ballads of -- particularly of Jewish women,
which is very much a women's tradition, men also sing but they --
a lot of them -- almost all of them revolve around the travail
that resulted from the institution of what's called
in Yiddish the shidech, the arranged marriage, and all kinds of hell
that broke lose as a result of that, not being able to marry
who they wanted to, parents meddling in their children's affairs, right,
not only an old story, but maybe it's -- So this is a --
it's a story that's kind of like a Russian novel, and I won't --
it would take a long time to explain everything that happens.
But the basic gist of it, it has to do with a young man
and a young woman who fell in love with each other.
But because of their class differences that's the other --
that often is a big part of these ballads,
that that's what gets in the way.
Because of -- he was rich and she was poor,
his parents wouldn't let him marry her.
So years go by and he is coming as a beggar asking for alms from people,
and he comes, he's standing on the street asking for bread.
And she recognizes him.
He doesn't recognize her, in the meantime, she's become rich
and at the end of the song he says you don't have
to tell me what I've done because I know very well.
Everything I did to you was my undoing,
and therefore from my eyes there are rivers of tears that are running
when I think of what I did to you.
Which is the only example in folklore we know of,
of a man actually apologizing to a woman.
It's -- you're right.
>> Ethel Raim: All down to that.
>> Michael Alpert: It's sweet in that sense.
[ Singing in Yiddish ]
[ Applause ]
>> Jake Shulman-Ment: So as Michael kind of alluded
to towards the beginning of our set, what we're doing and what we're kind
of all about in exploring this culture and this language
and this music is continuing it, which means in the case
of a tradition I think if it doesn't move forward it dies,
so a very important aspect of what we're doing is creating new songs,
new melodies, new works in Yiddish in this long line of a tradition.
And sometimes it sounds like old music, sometimes it sounds
like it could come from the roots of this tradition, but it's new.
So what we're going to do now is kind of present a sort
of a somewhat abbreviated wedding suite.
The kind of different songs or melodies or dances
that would be used at a Jewish wedding.
But a lot of the melodies we're going to play are new compositions.
A couple of mine, one of Michael's, sort of following in this tradition.
And Michael is going to be a badchan.
You want to maybe say a couple of words about a badchan?
>> Michael Alpert: Yeah, the traditional wedding potent, MC,
jester, often, although who makes --
improvises or improvising along a formula of rhymed couplets that --
but in this case traditional weddings in a lot
of societies are not necessarily just the kind of flowers and smiles
that we're used to with the, quote, "American weddings."
And it's -- Ethel Raim: It's June, it's June.
Michael Alpert: Right.
That was -- I was getting to that, indeed.
But yes, though it's June, when are --
as those of you who have gotten married or are kind
of witnessed people getting married know there's a lot more to weddings
than just having a good time, although that's part of it.
In traditional Jewish weddings, like in many cultures,
there's the first part of the wedding,
the ceremony is often very solemn, often.
Because it's a serious occasion, it's a major rite of passage,
and traditionally young people are leaving their --
their parents homes, or at least one of them is,
and going on to a whole new life.
And with a certain amount of uncertainty attached to it.
So what the badchan, traditional wedding poet, does is to --
to improvise couplets that talk about this transition,
and often bring the wedding guests to tears
by saying what a monumentous occasion this is.
So we'll -- there's some of that worked in there too, here.
>> Jake Schulman-Ment: I think there's some kind of saying
out there that means a good violinist can make a bride cry.
>> Michal Alpert: Not just the bride.
The groom too.Everyone.
And everybody else, too.
>> Jake Schulman-Ment: So I'll see if I can do that.
[ Music and singing in Yiddish]
[ Applause ]
>> Pete Rushefsky: Thank you.
That's our badchan Michael Alpert.
Our ershte fiddler, our first fiddler, Jake Schulman-Ment.
On vocals the lovely Ethel Raim.
[Applause] I'm Pete Rushefsky.
I do want to thank a couple of folks who support the Center
for Traditional Music and Dance, the An-Sky Institute for Jewish Culture,
we get a lot of support from the Atran Foundation
and the Keller-Shatanoff Foundation, as well as your National Endowment
for the Arts, which we should all be very proud of.
So thanks so much for that support.
Thanks so much to Betsy, the American Folk Life Center,
and the Library of Congress.
We're going to do one more tune, right?
And we'll feature Michael Alpert on this one.
>> Michael Alpert: This is a tune
for leading people home from the wedding.
>> Pete Rushefsky: I do want to mention one thing.
At least one of us CD's which I'm not allowed to say you can --
but they're available if you're interested,
you can find out more after the show.
>> Michael Alpert: If you would like to take this music home
with you, let's say that.
See us after.
>> It's late.
Take me home.
Take me home, but don't let anyone see us.
So with that, yeah.
Come and see us afterwards.
Thanks a lot for being here.
[Applause]
[ Music and singing in Yiddish ]
[ Applause ]
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