>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. [ Silence ] >> Pete Rushefsky: Okay, hi everybody. It's June 25th 2013. We are the An-sky Yiddish Heritage Ensemble. We're all from New York City and we're performing here as part of the American Folk Life Center's Homegrown Concert Series and it's part of the concert series. We also do an oral interview, oral history interview. That's what we're here to do today. Pleased to be joined with, from the far left, Ethel Raim, that's geographically not political necessarily but [multiple speakers] but Ethel is, is, back in New York we work together in an organization called Center for Traditional Music and Dance, which has been around for 45 years. Ethel is a co-founder of that organization, our artistic director. We have one of the true Klezmer pioneers, pioneer of the revitalization of Yiddish culture and Klezmer music over the last 35, 40 years, Michael Alpert, who's been a big inspiration to me and many of us who have followed in his footsteps in this renaissance of Yiddish culture internationally, and to my immediate left is a wonderful violinist although still quite young in his career; not even 30 years old. He's already internationally recognized as one of the tops in the field, Jake Shulman-Ment and so we're glad to have him. I am Pete Rushefsky, so I work with Ethel at Center for Traditional Music and Dance and as part of this An-sky Yiddish Heritage Ensemble. Just to say the An-sky Ensemble, we're sort of brought together inspired by the 100th anniversary of the An-sky expedition, which Michael will talk more about, but we try and take inspiration from that important folklore collecting journey in terms of, I guess, uncovering repertoire, preserving repertoire from the past, also you know performing music that, you know, we grew up with one way or another, and as well as Klezmer and Yiddish music as a creative medium where we're creating new repertoire, new music, new sounds, you know much of it in a sort of way that's both traditionally rooted but also very contemporary. Jake particularly has been doing a lot of composing as has Michael over the years. So with that I'll hand it over first to Michael. Maybe Michael you can say a little bit maybe first about the An-sky expedition and if you want to say a little bit about this wider sort of, you like to use the word revitalization rather than some people say revival of Klezmer music but you're a big proponent that it's a revitalization, so I'll hand it over to you. >> Michael Alpert: I'll use them all. Yes, a word about S. An-sky as he's known in, and really properly because An-sky was a pseudonym but to talk about the Jewish Ethnographic Expeditions, these were ethnographic expeditions organized in the late Russian empire from 1911, 12, 13 up to 1914 to the outbreak of World War I. Politically organized by S. An-sky who's sometimes known as, in Yiddish it's called Shin An-sky from the Jewish letter shin. It was a pseudonym that he took. His name was Solomon Zanvel Rappoport and he was born in, near Vitebsk in White Russia, Bela Russia, and he was really the, we could call him the Father of East European Jewish ethnography. He was a poet, a playwright. He is probably best known for being the author of "The Dubbuk," the great Yiddish play and which was made into a major motion picture in 1939. And under his leadership on Jewish ethnographic expeditions were organized and he really raised money for expeditions to go and collect what there was to be collected of folklore, folk life, meaning both performance traditions and material culture, in particular in Ukraine, in those years just leading up to the first World War. And so a great deal of what we know about the Yiddish world of pre-World War I Eastern Europe and the first efforts to really to document things in a modern, ethnographic sense were realized during these expeditions, and there were lots and lots of recordings of song, instrumental music and song being secular and religious traditions, as well as you know a whole host of, I mean everything pretty much that could be collected in regard to the East European Jewish world. And its artifacts and its performative artifacts, so to speak, were gathered there and became, much of it became part of the Jewish Museum that was opened in Russia, in Saint Petersburg, a national Jewish Museum for the Russian Empire. It opened in 1914. An-sky was also a tireless fighter for social justice and that was, all of this went very much together. I would say like a number of the great American figures that have been active in folklore collecting and documentation and the idea was also of the, of An-sky's work and his colleagues, was to not only just to gather this material and put it in a museum, but for it to provide the inspiration for a new Jewish art, new Jewish art form as both in music and in painting and other artwork. People like Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and others came very much out of this kind of consciousness of East European traditional, traditional culture and roots as the basis for a new modernist Eastern European Jewish art. And so, we -- we are not the only ones. There are a number of people, especially of late, who are focused on doing much the same kinds of things in a contemporary context as An-sky was, as An-sky and colleagues. And, so I guess all of us in one, in various ways are involved in both delving into traditional roots and as well as living and performing that material, in a sense that kind of lifestyle in many ways, and bringing that out in our art and, and performance and in our work both, obviously both as performers and as folklorists, ethnomusicologists, what's the word? [Yiddish word] in Yiddish, people who help transmit, transmitters of the Yiddish tradition. >> Pete Rushefsky: Now Ethel you grew up in the Bronx and Yiddish was very much a part of your life right from the get go. Could you talk a little bit about your experience? You grew up in, I guess what is known now, or even then, as a Linka [assumed spelling] community. >> Ethel Raim: Yes, it was near the Co-Ops which was an interesting experiment in living. It was owned by people who lived in the apartments and run very communally. I grew up in a Yiddish speaking home, household. Parents came from two different places. My stepmother came from Odessa and my Dad came from Lomza and. >>Pete Rushefsky: And that's Poland right? >> Ethel Raim: Poland. And I grew up going to a progressive, secular schul learning to read and write Yiddish and reading the wonderful authors. I wasn't a very good student but there I was and that was my world and out of which my world view really came. I also went to Camp Kinderland, which was again a secular, progressive Jewish camp and the singing was both in, you know, American folk music and Yiddish folk music. It was more of the choral singing actually and I didn't take that much to that aspect. I always really liked the intimate repertoire of people singing solo and sort of singing for themselves but sharing music and the music sort of being a way of sustaining themselves and also as a result sustaining a community, and that was always my orientation. And I took a big foray into Balkan music and I think, I mean its interesting when I think about what attracted me to which repertoire and why. It's really in the last -- well, I guess in the last 30 years that I've been more involved in Yiddish singing. We're very fortunate to have had the opportunity to do a wonderful tour with Dave Tarras, and I thought of Dave when you were talking about something else this afternoon and I can't remember what the association was. Oh yeah, Dave in his interview -- >> Pete Rushefsky: There's just, say Dave Tarras was probably the leading American Klezmer musician. He was really the guy who, I think, more than anybody... a clarinetist virtuosos born in the Ukraine, who really lead the development of the distinctively American Klezmer repertoire and sound. He really changed the music in many fundamental ways and at the end you worked with him to kind of spark, help spark a new revival of interest in the music. But back up to what you were going to say now. >> Ethel Raim: The piece in this story, which I think is really -- so many immigrants had that experience, especially if they're musicians, you know. They come to America and they somehow imagine that they're going to have to leave all that cultural stuff behind: including Dave, and when he came you know he wasn't playing very much and his relative got him a job as a furrier and there's one beautiful section in the interview with him and he says, "And I took out my furrier's knife and gave it back"-because he had been discovered. Someone realized not only, you know, what a giant musician, he could also do studio gigs because he could read music and he composed music and, I mean he was the whole package. But that experience, you know, with Ilias [Kementzides] another fantastic Greek musician, a lyra-player, they come here and imagine that they just have to leave all of that behind. And, I'm sorry, I'm talking a little bit about the Center and people that do work, like the Center does, where it's really to make sure that people have the opportunity to express themselves culturally and it goes back to Lomax and, you know, the idea of cultural equity, and that is, you know, the right of every community to express its culture. So, but I'll back up. So I went into this foray of Balkan music and the Yiddish was parallel to it but having the opportunity to work with Dave and doing the tour, we did a Jewish music tour with Dave. >> Pete Rushefsky: And that was 1978? >> Ethel Raim: '78 and the tour was 1980, 1981, and the audiences, you know, there were always people who, for whom Dave had played their wedding or they were the children of the people that he played the wedding. And it also gave me the opportunity to work with several singers including Beyle at that time, Beyle Gottesman, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, who is the daughter of Lifshe Schaechter-Widman, who was just an incredible repository of repertoire. And when I grew up there was like a standard repertoire and you would hear the songs over and over and over and they were beautiful and everyone knew them and it's important because that's when you can get together with a group of people and you have a shared repertoire and so you can sing together. And starting with Beyle and with Fayde Juden [assumed spelling], who also performed at the Dave Tarras concerts and was an informant for Ruth Rubin and is credited in the material that Ruth collected, sung by "Fayda Juden from Grogerneverne" [assumed spelling], and she would often talk about how Ruth wanted to be able to sing like she did because she was a folk singer. The dynamics were really interesting. And Ruth, of course, is Ruth Rubin who did phenomenal work in collecting and recording Yiddish songs that we just owe her such a debt of gratitude for the music that she has made available, and her archives, the material that she recorded, is now at YIVO and in Haifa, and...here. >> Pete Rushefsky: Here at the Library of Congress. >> Ethel Raim: At the Library. That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right. So it was really, over the last 30 years, 25 years, that my involvement increased and became different, and I began to think about the songs and the music differently and participate in a more active way. >> Pete Rushefsky: Well Ethel let me just follow up with that by asking, I mean, in Europe, I mean, my understanding a lot of, first, there's so many, there's different strands of repertoire and maybe Michael can talk about that in a minute; different strands of Yiddish song repertoire, but there was so much of it was really a woman's art in Europe, which carried over and also a lot of it was, I mean, women as they were working the fields they would be singing and things like that. >> Ethel Raim: Not, are you talking about Balkan? >> Pete Rushefsky: No, no, no. >> Ethel Raim: What fields? [laughter] >> Pete Rushefsky: Well, alright ... [Multiple speakers] What were the settings that, when you were growing up, would hear these Yiddish song participatory sessions? >> Ethel Raim: Well it's not so much what I heard, I mean, when I interviewed Fagel [phonetic], you know, she learned her songs because women would sit around -- it's sort of like work bees, you know, sit around mending clothing, making clothing and those were opportunities to just sing and share songs. Taking a walk on the Sabbath was another time. Those were the occasions, especially when the girls were together, and it's interesting, I think it might have been Fagel who said, they learned happy songs from the other girls and very sad songs from the older women, you know, of frustrations, of unrequited love, of you know of - their role as women and what marriage meant and what marriage was like and living through their children and, and you know I was a recipient of that. My parents would always say ah, for der kinder [the children]. My dad was a presser, my stepmother was a finisher, which means she sewed the finishing things on garments, which is felling on the inside, putting in shoulder pads and the lining of stuff, and she worked in a room with about four other women. And Sarah didn't sing but these other women sang. So you know you work seven, eight hours and you're just sewing and sewing, going blind, sticking yourself, you know and you sing. That was a major occasion. But the occasion, yes, so, so, so it was so important to do everything you could to improve the opportunity for the next generation and that, you know, is probably still true today, and maybe in all cultures but it was extremely true with all of the families that I knew and my own family. Als es fer der kinder [phonetic]. So the occasions are for really the social occasions, you know, family circles, getting together and of course the occasions differ once you're in this setting rather than in Europe. But Fagel would always talk about learning songs the neighbors and from her aunts and from her lover and other seamstresses, and she did a lot of sewing, and Michael can talk about the context of Bronna [phonetic] in terms of, you know, when all of her singing happened. The other thing that I found most interesting is that all of the women that I've ever spoken to, they amassed their repertoire before their 14th year. You know, it's like that's when you got all the songs, you know, and then, I guess, sometimes you sang them more than other people or less, but it's amazing that the repertoire was in place you know by 14, 15. >> Michael Alpert: Or if, yes, or 18. >> Ethel Raim: Or 18, yes. >> Pete Rushefsky: That's sort of an amazing thing to know as you think about how to revitalize this tradition and you know what... >> Ethel Raim: Yes, and that's who, yes. >> Pete Rushefsky: And what demographic you need to work on. >> Ethel Raim: We talk about how to reach younger people. Yeah, Jake! >> Pete Rushefsky: Yes, yes, totally an example of that. >> Ethel Raim: And creating new contexts which we can get into also in terms of KlezKamp and Klez Canada and you know. >> Pete Rushefsky: I want to turn to Michael. I mean Michael you talk often about your family being a bit sort of an anachronistic family given the sort of unique demographic that you were born into. Do you want to talk about that and how Yiddish was a part of your life? >> Michael Alpert: Yes, just as a kind of, you know, sort of, counterpoint to what Ethel was saying. My family and especially in particular my father's family, were not urban Jews, they were rural and so, which was not the world of the needle trades, not the world of tailors and shoemakers, and also, you know, right, other members of the sort of urbanized proletariat, but they were rural Jews; loggers, came out-this, you know I grew very strongly with the sense of the natural world very much as the part the Yiddishkeit of Eastern European Jewishness. And that was-my father and the rest of my family on my father's side came from Lithuania and northwestern Belarus. >> Pete Rushefsky: Okay so what year was your father born? >> Michael Alpert: 1906 and he was the youngest of all my aunts and uncles, so thus my immediate relatives, aunts and uncles on my father's side, go back into the, into the 19th century; pretty much all of them except my father. And, right I mean they came from Lithuania, this you know, world of forests, first and foremost forests, lakes, you know, chains of lakes connected, you know, a lot like Minnesota or Finland, Sweden, I mean the whole northern parts of the, of the Russian and East European world. And so wood was really essential, too, and wood in a literally and in a kind of consciousness of, of things wooden; fish were a big part of it. So the things that I learned at my father's knee and my family's knees were, were fishing, chopping wood, cutting down trees, I mean knowing how to fell trees, just, and again with this consciousness of like that the natural world was so important. I mean, I realized when it went-I started going to Eastern Europe when I was 16, at that time Yugoslavia. Like Ethel I took a big foray by the music of the Balkans and particularly Yugoslavia. But when I went to, first time that I really went to Poland, especially northern Poland, I realized, you know, this is what they were talking about. It was all about, it was about lakes and the woods and forests and fields and the Yiddish [inaudible] the fields and forests and that's exactly what the environment was like. I mean you've heard me probably tell before that, you know, one of my cousins said about one of my favorite uncles that he would-much later in life, I mean, really in the 80's, he said it, that my uncle Yelski [phonetic] would rather use the cheapest piece of pine over the most expensive piece of plastic, and that really kind of summed up the ethos of my family. And there was this really, you know, it's kind of, it's a world that doesn't exist much anymore of, you know, I mean of a very traditional kind of Yiddishkeit, both, both religiously or spiritually traditional and also traditional in terms of lifestyle, in terms of ethnically, culturally traditional in terms of language, cuisine, and which meant not only Yiddish, it's meant also in our case Russian and Polish and other, other local languages. And that was very much, uh, it went -- it was part and parcel of, you know, Jewishness was about, for me, the experience of the natural world was very connected with that and music was in there too and singing. Exactly, this older generation of people who, in our lives, were the immigrant generation, particularly from pre-World War I Eastern Europe that - you're right, you mentioned anachronistic, I mean we've had this conversation a lot, but that I, I mean Ethel and I each I think were, you know, especially I'll speak for myself, I mean I feel like I had the privilege, the unusual experience of being born into this, you know, like a time capsule in some ways. Not that it wasn't connected absolutely with the contemporary world of the U.S., in our case, but you know it was almost like a slice of the late Russian Empire and Jewish life on the western borderlines of that. >> Pete Rushefsky: And you grew up both in Massachusetts as well as California. I mean we've talked about sort of this boardwalk culture of California, which may be interesting to hear a little bit. I mean was your family part of that boardwalk, maybe just describe that. >> Michael Alpert: They weren't so much active participants, I mean they weren't makers of it but we partook of it. What I mean by like boardwalk culture, board walk music in particular I think I've used, was the phenomenon of older, I mean when I came along, older East European, the East European Jews of the immigrant generation here in America, getting together in, not only in homes and in more inside gatherings, but on boardwalks, like the boardwalk in Venice Beach and L.A., because I mean I really, I spent the teenagers years in New England but I really come from California. Getting together to play music and sing. Play mandolins, guitars, especially old, the Russian seven-string guitars, accordions, sometimes violins and sing. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Octophones maybe sometimes? >> Michael Alpert: I never heard of an octophone until I was 20, but you know. >> Pete Rushefsky: There's a Folkways connection to. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Folkways reference. [Multiple speakers] >> Michael Alpert: Nathan Prince Nazaroff, right. Jewish freylekhs music on 10-inch Folkways [recording]. But yes that kind of stuff. Bunch of twangy instruments and some wheezy instruments and but beautiful singing in Yiddish, in Russian, you know, especially in my world. >> Pete Rushefsky: So it sounds like for both Ethel and Michael you had this such a rootedness in Yiddish culture and you know the Yiddish song tradition was there, and then as you start to develop into professional performers, you know with in both your cases happened early on, you know, you more levitated toward Balkan music and then came back to >> Michael Alpert: I'm not sure we levitated. >> Pete Rushefsky: Levitated >> Ethel Raim: Drifted? Drifted. [multiple speakers; laughs]. >> Pete Rushefsky: So it seems like there's sort of this parallel in your, both of your early careers and I'm kind of curious about that. And sort of more widely the involvement of Jews in sort of, well want to talk about involvement of all the Jews in the folk music revival, but also specifically this, you know, interest in Balkan music and how that carried you further into more Yiddish. >> Ethel Raim: Yes, I mean I think for me it was women's voices in harmony that kind of drew me, you know, so the Pyatnitsky Choir was started in 1911 interestingly enough, with factory workers with Pyatnitsky conducting. That was men and women. >> Pete Rushefsky: And that was where? >> Ethel Raim: That was in Russia. >> Michael Alpert: In the Soviet Union. >> Ethel Raim: The Soviet Union, yes. Well, in 1911 it wasn't the Soviet Union. >> Michael Alpert: Right, right. >> Ethel Raim: So, and I grew up with those recordings and I spent a lot of time at the Stanley Theater which showed Soviet films by the time I was going. And that's a Folkways record, the Pyatnitsky Choir. But it was just compelling, you know, these women's voices not in pop style or operatic style or jazz style, but in a traditional style, which is really a very different kind of sound, and these voices in harmony and the way they latched on to each other and the expressivity and the intimacy was so beautiful and that's, that's where I went. >> Pete Rushefsky: So there was an aesthetic incentive for you to [inaudible] >> Ethel Raim: Yes and as well as you know familiarity, I mean obviously I didn't know Bulgarian, but you know I grew up with a lot of Russian folk music. You know the East European Yiddish, you know, came together. It was all one community; East European Jews that I grew up with. >> Michael Alpert: I mean that's to be stressed as you know we tend to focus these days on, you know, and for good reason, on Yiddish and you know I, well I'll get up on my soapbox here a little bit. In terms of contemporary Yiddishism to me is, again understandably, I mean it's, but it's like a lot of cultural revitalization movements or phenomena in the world today, it tends, they tend to get more and more insular. I mean it's almost a kind of nationalism and leave out, you know, very much focused on, you know inwardly to only Yiddish or only Hungarian or -- and it tends to ignore all too much the, you know, incredible interaction of cultures in general, I mean everywhere in the world. As East European Jews we come out of milieu, as you know, it's often depicted as insular and, rather than it's part of a whole intercultural network. And so I mean, Russian music especially, for those of us that were from the Russian Empire, also you know for Austria Hungarian Jews, I mean, Hungarian music was, you know, often big and or Vietnamese, German, sort of, and music was maybe a counterpart: but Russian music was really, really, it was like our music. It was, it was one of the dialects of our music. >> Ethel Raim: Absolutely. >> Pete Rushefsky: That's a good segway to what Jake has been doing, you know, this talk about sort of bring back the multi-cultural connections of Yiddish music. I mean Jake. you're of a different generation than even basically me, so artistic generation, I mean could you talk about how did you get into this old music and what have you been doing recently? >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Well, I had a, I guess I sort of, in one way I'm a very typical American Jew of my generation and in another way not so typical. The way that I am typical is that all my grandparents were born in Brooklyn speaking Yiddish to immigrant parents. So my great grandparents were immigrants, I think except for one of them, who was also born in New York, but mostly from Ukraine and Belarus. And so my grandparents, if pressed, can speak some Yiddish, but forgot it basically. You know their first language was Yiddish, but they don't really speak it anymore. It was sort of the typical story of assimilation into American industry and culture, growing up in the Depression, having, you know, to poor parents in general, except for actually, well part of my family had an ironworks business that they brought over from Kiev, so they were wealthy. >> Pete Rushefsky: Oh, my grandfather was in the iron business so we have to talk about it. >> Michael Alpert: I had a lot of blacksmiths, too... >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Well there you go. [Multiple speakers] But so you know, so, you know, the idea was you speak English, you get a stable job as soon as you can. You know, my grandfather was an accountant his whole life, you know, this kind of thing. So my parents basically speak no Yiddish, they didn't really grow up around this. It wasn't regarded as something to pay attention to, in particular, although it was there. My mother specifically talks about not really being able to converse with her grandmother because she only spoke Yiddish. But, but when I was really little I think my parents who sort of became hippies and moved to Vermont and kind of did that thing, all of a sudden they had a Jewish son and they were thinking how do we, you know, they sort of had left behind their Jewish identity a little bit, I think, which had a big, which Zionism played a big role in that. For lefty Jews they were sort of disgusted and alienated with that part of it and they were trying to figure out how do we -- it's still important to give our kids a Jewish education, what do we do? So a lot of their friends were involved in Workman's Circle schule [school] of the Upper West Side Schule, which is a secular organization and a secular cultural Yiddishist education and so that was a way, to send me there was a way of getting a Jewish education that was not Zionist, that was not religious, so they did that. So me and my sister both went there from the time we were 4, you know, singing Yiddish songs, totally Workman's Circle thing, and I guess it just caught onto me. It just, I started playing violin and I started playing Klezmer music young. I mean I was 12, you know I'd been singing these songs since I was 4, but I really started playing it on the violin when I was 12, and I never stopped and it became very important to me. But yes, in terms of the multi-cultural connection I noticed this at a pretty young age. I think I was in high school, I started listening to Romanian Gypsy music, Greek music, Turkish music, and really hearing a lot of similarity to what I knew of as Jewish music, you know, Klezmer music, Yiddish music, all this and I think I was really attracted to that connection just sort of innately because I thought it was interesting and because I love all of the different styles equally and I love to see how they interacted and the repertoire, the shared repertoire. I love the idea of, well, it's not just an idea but I love, I love the fact that Yiddish is sort of, Yiddish culture and Yiddish music is sort of a culture without boundaries that moves between all of these different cultures that are based on you know the land, and it's sort of living testament to the fact that culture moves in a way that passports can't. So. >> Michael Alpert: Transnational. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Yeah, transnational culture. So I went to Hungry to study when I was in college, I went, got a Fulbright [Fellowship] in Romania to study Moldavian music and I've been to Romania tons of times to, you know, research, do field research with old musicians, but also just study from younger musicians. Most of those players are Gypsy. There's not much in the way of Jewish music left in Romania, but if you dig a little bit there's actually a ton just through the kind of musical traditions that, that have been carried on there. No one will, you know, people probably won't know it's, that it had anything to do with Jewish culture: this trill or this tune or this sort of style of playing. >> Michael Alpert: Do you find that mostly true? Because I mean I was going to say the whole role of Roma in performing and ultimately in many, you know, often being the transmitters or the people who have carried on Yiddish music, but have you, do you find that most people are not aware? I've had just the opposite experience, >> Jake Shulman-Ment: I have found [multiple speakers] well, I have found in Romania that is they're old enough to have remembered playing for Jewish weddings then of course they know exactly what this was for and, you know, and if, when they were growing up professionally there were no Jewish weddings to be played, they didn't need that knowledge. So, but sometimes they still have the tunes and maybe they know of, this was a Jewish tune that my father taught me, or sometimes they just know it as this is a Romanian dance that we play at weddings and Dave Tarras recorded it also, or you know that kind of thing. So yeah, this is a really important element of my, even my identity as a Jew and a citizen of the world and as a musician. >> Ethel Raim: Now it's time for you to talk Pete. How did you get connected to all of this? >> Pete Rushefsky: Oh, well, I guess growing up I sort of in a way came from a mixed, product of a mixed marriage as well. My mother came from a more assimilated Jewish family. Her great, my mother's grandparents had come from different parts of the Ukraine. On my father's side it was my grandparents who had come from around Brisk, Brisk-Litovsk, is I guess in Russian Bresk, in Polish "Brzesc. It's a city on the Bug River, which is the borderline, boarder between Poland and Belarus, White Russia. So, so but for my mother's family I got, I got music, I got, because you know my grandmother was a concert pianist when she was young. I never saw her play because I guess she'd gotten out of practice and was so disgusted in her lack of what she used to be that she would never play anymore, but you know, you could put on any piece of music and you know within the first three bars Grandma Alma could tell you who the pianist was, you know, what movement it was, you know, whether it was Beethoven's Sonata number seven in this key, just an incredible mind for music. And my grandfather was also a wonderful appreciator of music, so that was a really special thing for them. And my mother grew up in Broadway, doing Broadway shows and things like that. Was very active in community theater in Rochester New York, where we grew up, and, but on my father's side was where I got, I think, I got a lot of Yiddish, a lot more sort of immersion in Yiddishkeit. They were from Eastern Europe and the dialog around the dinner table was always half in Yiddish, whatever they didn't want you to understand, and then the rest in English. But from an early age, for some reason, you know we'd have simchats, you know family celebrations and I would always find myself, I was the one of, you know there was a lot of cousins, I was always the one who wanted to sit with the old folks and listen to the old stories and for me it was this, you know, this incredible, I'm going to use the word time capsule experience where you could sort of transport yourself through these stories and songs to a different world. And for whatever reason, it always just, from an early age, my earliest memories is always wanted to learn as much as I could. You know hear about, hear those stories over and over. There was only limited amount of stories that I had a lot of time, so I heard the stories a lot, it was like that. And then growing up, you know, I grew up in Rochester New York and went to synagogue with my father every week. We had a very good cantor named Sam Rosenbaum, who is actually one of Mark Slobin's main informants of his little study of the American Cantorate, and I gained a real-so I always had, you know, throughout my musical growing up, you know growing up you know my friends and I were in to, you know, folk, you know, American folk music, you know, Big Bill Broonzy, you know, Lightnin' Hopkins, you know. I was a, a real, sort of a blues guitar addict when I was a teenager. I would just lock myself in my room for hours upon end trying to pick guitar like Mississippi John Hurt, which I still can, right Michael? >> Michael Alpert: Absolutely. [Laughter] >> Pete Rushefsky: Humor me. [Laughter] But I for years I just never knew how to sort of explore, as a performer, explore Jewish music really and as my music, musical interest developed from sort of blues, I got interested in -- upstate New York has a very interesting hammered dulcimer and fiddle tradition. Just a wonderful old time hammered dulcimer player, Paul Van Ardsdale, up in Tonawanda New York, still going, now in his 90s, and I guess somehow I gravitated in this interest between these sounds of a violin and a struck instrument. It was from first banjo, banjo and fiddle recordings, but I got real interested in that but I just didn't know that world of, really existence of Klezmer. I mean I knew what Klezmer was sort of, very superficially, but I wasn't here, all I ever heard was these jazzy sort of bands and things like that that had no aesthetic interest to me. It wasn't, I mean, to me I think the first things that I heard that sparked a lot of interest was Andy Statman's music, particularly on mandolin, and his album with Zev Feldman. You know I picked up in my senior year of college I was in Ithaca New York and I picked up the a copy of the Dave Tarras "Music for a Jewish Wedding," that Ethel and Marty had put out; that was Zev and Andy, and you know then I started realizing you know there's something much more folky than what I'd been sort of led to believe about Klezmer. And actually, another turning point was in the mid-90s was the Pearlman, Itzak Pearlman's involvement in Klezmer. Michael was the Music Director of a documentary called "In the Fiddler's House", which really lifted Klezmer to a much higher level of public visibility in the United States. And the opening scene, I'll never, you know is Deborah Strauss, this wonderful, fantastic Klezmer violinist playing in a courtyard in Krakow. >> Michael Alpert: Actually, I thought it was Kurt Bjorling playing in a courtyard in Krakow as well. That's how it starts. >> Pete Rushefsky: Oh is it? Okay. I just remember the scene of Deborah playing this beautiful doyna and wow there's fiddle, there's real Jewish fiddle music... >> Michael Alpert: Oh, exactly. >> Pete Rushefsky: ... which I hadn't really heard before until then. And so that project and you know really gave a sort of a whole, it sort of between those different listening experiences I was sort of able to put together musical worlds together that I didn't realize could be put together. I knew there must have been some space where that existed but I never found the way to find that until those, you know, that series of listening experiences. >> Michael Alpert: That was, oh, sorry go ahead it's your time. >> Pete Rushefsky: No that was the story. >> Michael Alpert: I mean especially for, you know, we all have various experiences. I don't know if, I mean, I bet it speaks to you in the same way, too, but certainly the three of us have this important experience of, of American traditional music or of other kinds of traditional musics that because of both the presence, I would say, in both the presence and the absence of, or absence of awareness of our own, of parts of our own traditional music- especially the instrumental tradition when you were growing up, that all these other music's spoke to us in that way and I mean I often kind of say that you know Balkan music was almost a kind of proxy for, especially the music of the south Balkans and like a proxy for Jewish music until such time as we were able to find our, our ways to via, in particular, I mean, 78 recordings but also -- which is not to say I mean, you know, I mean one of my routes to it was music that was played at Jewish weddings, which I mean still, I mean in the 60s, especially, was you know there was more Jewish music, I mean a lot more, but mainly clarinet-based music. Then also hearing both from people who had old 78 recordings: My uncle was -- one of my uncles was one of those people. And also hearing what was on the Yiddish radio, where like in Boston, I mean Ben Gailing would play, you know he'd put on these old 78s. I remember you know kind of-and as a kid in L.A. hearing that stuff on the radio, the old you know band 78s of kind of transitional European into American Jewish music. And hearing these you know, hearing these Jewish orchestras playing, that it was all this incredible interweaving parts and you know what we refer to as heterophony these days. And you know feeling like this is really like this is deep old Jewish music. It's like, that was a part of the experience, too. Yes, so that kind of stuff, both the recordings and then older musicians, instrumental musicians, giving us this window into and a way to re...reclaim, maybe claim for the first time or reclaim this, you know, a whole tradition that, you know, more and more pieces of it that I think our endeavors have been about. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Yes, I think people find, you know, people find this kind of stuff by like sort of where it touches where you are, and then you're there and there's all of this under, you know. I also, I mean I grew up really into rock, you know. I mean my parents were playing Bob Dylan and Paul Simon all the time, but also Led Zeppelin and getting into all that kind of stuff. and I think that's why I gravitated towards Alicia Spiegels, who I, was my first violin teacher because she's also totally came from Led Zeppelin, inspired by that and her playing also is really, so it's kind of rock, rock Klezmer violin is her style. And that's actually what really got me hooked on it when I first, like when I was really young. And then after that I like, it was like, so I sort of copied her and the rest was okay find everything else and soak that in, too. >> Michael Alpert: That's what, I mean I've always felt that, I mean the, I mean I also had the you know, this sort of came out of rock and roll and this sort of, the folk into rock and roll continuum and I mean really what, what I and I feel a lot of people that I worked with over the years, to me the best music that, you know, what I've been going for in, in Yiddish music is playing, or whatever traditional musics they are -- Yiddish and peripheral music's and or whatever, all the music's that I or we make, making that music with the energy and with the, you know, the "down-ness: of rock and roll, as with the drive of rock and roll, so. >> Ethel Raim: That's interesting. One thread that's sort of coming through, it was your original question Pete, you know, what, what was the context of this music and the context has so dramatically shifted, but new contexts have been provided such as you know the camps from the various musics you know across the board, and performance. That's a very major way in to the music, and the context for the music is so different. It's not so different. I mean you know weddings were performance, but the wedding music that was happening then is really not happening now. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: That was functional music as opposed to concert performance. >> Ethel Raim: Right, But still doing it, yes. It's interesting, the context. Where are we on time? >> Thea Austin: A few more minutes. >> Pete Rushefsky: Few minutes, okay. Why don't we, should we talk a little bit about everybody, our experience, just to say, the An-sky Yiddish Heritage Ensemble-this is the first time we've performed together and, now each of us [multiple speakers] playing in different, performing in different combinations with each other. >> Michael Alpert: Say what you said before. >> Ethel Raim: What did I say? >> Michael Alpert: About the four decades. >> Ethel Raim: Oh yes, we're four decades, we're over four decades between us. And Michael and I have been singing and performing and teaching together, and you and Jake have been doing that, so it's wonderful that we have that range of expression in our group. >> Pete Rushefsky: So, what about the ensemble, you know, hopefully, well we are performing all week at the Folklife Festival, but what to you is sort of interesting about this ensemble? What do you think we capture in performance? >> Ethel Raim: Well, for me I've never performed with instruments. I mean I'm an a capella singer, you know, either in performance or by myself or with groups of people and in whatever settings I find myself. >> Pete Rushefsky: It should be said that Ethel, I don't think we mentioned it, was the leader of the Penny Whistlers in the 60s, which was one of the major, sort of, you know, had a sort of an interesting niche I should say in the folk revival. >> Ethel Raim: Right, that was the, that was the outlet for all this wonderful women's voices in harmony, you know, to have the Penny Whistles, which actually, you know, we were a group of friends, no one auditioned and there are always other issues around, but whatever. We were friends and remained friends and that was really nice. So, certainly singing with instruments is different, and integrating unaccompanied singing in this context is also very interesting and its challenge. I mean we've been working out you know where should we put this, how would that work, and how can we get a flow going and...and some frame for what we're doing so it's exciting. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: I think, yes, I think, I find this, a lot of experiences- you were talking about these camps and one of the things I've had to do sometimes teaching at these Klezmer camps teaching students how to play Klezmer music or Yiddish music, is accompany, I mean especially at Weimar, actually, with Sasha Lurja. She was sort of giving students songs that she had learned a lot from you, actually, these unaccompanied things. And our project was to have, I had an instrumental ensemble and these students would come in and I'd have to get my instrumentalists to accompany these normally a capella songs instrumentally and it forces the instrumentalists to really, really know what the words are and feel the song in a completely different way, even than a song that's sort of like rit-rit-rit [rigid tempo] song. It's really, really different way of playing music, which is great. >> Ethel Raim: Right. And it's a challenge in terms of what you were talking about Pete, you know, how to pass on... I think the fact that there's so much creativity happening is really coming out of a very deep grounding in the tradition, so somehow that has to continue, that deep grounding, for it to really continue and new songs, new instrumental pieces so that it comes out. Andy talks a lot about that; Weimar, yes. He had an experience teaching, oh I've lost -- Let's stay with what we're talking about here. But just quickly, he -- Andy doesn't particularly teach. And the experience that he had is, you know, everyone's going off and making new music and it's like it's just floating around, you know, there's no roots there. There's nothing that's grounding it, there's nothing that's, there's a real sense of continuity and depth, you know, and it loses its depth. So that's our challenge. And you know, before we did this interview I was thinking, gosh, An-sky Jewish Heritage Ensemble, there should be many An-sky Jewish heritage ensembles! Really, I mean it's like another mechanism for doing this and integrating it. >> Pete Rushefsky: What about you Michael? >> Michael Alpert: Right. It's a franchise. [Laughter] Let's see, what about me? Yes, I was going to say, I guess I'm in -- I'm the person that kind of does, you know, a number of these traditions. And, that's kind of role I've been in much of my life, as in I do the, I mean, knowing the language and I sing the old, you know, the old style unaccompanied songs and all that, and I'm a musician, instrumentalist, you know, and in the position of, you know: I mean sometimes I'm a singer that plays instruments and sometimes I'm a musician that sings, you know, that kind of thing. I mean obviously there's, they're not, they're not such desperate, I mean, they're not desperate at all although they're distinctive idioms. But yes, I was going to say, on the one hand it's not as if everyone's just kind of floundering around without roots because there's, at this point there's, you know, with people like Jake and your generation without all -- I still have this naive idea like we're all kind of one generation or different points on a spectrum of experience. >> Ethel Raim: Andy, I just have to clarify. Andy was talking about fusing different music's and just taking off and there is no grounding. I was not at all inferring to anyone who's been involved. >> Michael Alpert: Well, Not only us involved here, but there's so much really informed, amazing creativity in Jewish music or the Yiddish world now, too. But certainly that was not always true. And the opposite is also simultaneously true, that there are people that really don't, I think there are people who don't have much grounding. I mean it's true from the beginning. Just to say it's one of the only traditional music revival phenomena where the majority of people have not - And I include myself in this as far as instrumental music from the beginning, kind of started taking it somewhere without actually knowing the traditional music pull before taking it somewhere. And I mean there are issues with the language, too. I mean it's like, I mean I would often talk about, I have often referred to the fact that can you imagine things like, like Latin music or Salsa where you know most, almost no one involved in it, I mean you could practically count the people on one hand who speak Spanish. It's like.... >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Well, it's also, this, this issue also comes from Klezmer music or Yiddish music becoming a genre. >> Michael Alpert: Which is problematic. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: I mean, because now when you have like jazz musicians saying "Oh, I'm a jazz musician but I'm going to use some Klezmer," like as if they were using elements of rock or like Klezmer music being a genre is problematic to the depth and breath of the music. >> Michael Alpert: And it's also very Jewish, I mean, it's extremely Jewish. I mean the historical pattern of Jews in most places is to, I mean we adapt so and acculturate you know to whatever our current environment is, that it's, the Jewish aesthetic is not necessarily to have an attachment to a particular cultural style and cling to that; that's not the center of our identity and yet it's very, you know, at the same time, I mean it is both is and isn't enacting that contradiction or that balance, you know, it's an extremely Jewish thing. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Yes, I mean it's hard when, it's sort of a fragile thing when the lines between what it is and isn't are vague. I mean, that's like people hear Romanian music and they think. "Hh, that sounds so Jewish." But why does it sound Jewish? Because Jews used it. So to American ears it came to them through the context of Jewish music, but it's not particularly Jewish. [Multiple speakers] It's sort of that kind of grey area complicates it. >> Pete Rushefsky: And I mean just so to me, I mean, there's such a, an exciting opportunity for this ensemble to, I think, expose people to alternative aesthetic traditions, you know? I think the Yiddish songs that we present are not the Yiddish songs you normally hear at concerts of Yiddish music. Most of the stuff we're performing is, I guess you would say, is pretty rare repertoire that maybe was embedded in a particular geography in Europe or particular communities in the New World and things like that, and really if it wasn't part of the sort of the top 20 hits of Yiddish that you hear recorded over and over again. So I think-now so the exciting thing is to put that together as well as present it in a, in its, you know, something much closer for stage but much closer to its traditional soundscape in terms of the singing, the singing styles, the different style of singing than I guess you would say a bel canto performance style that you see so often, And so you have this very intimate Yiddish song tradition put together with this other very intimate fiddle-tsimbl [hammered dulcimer] tradition. Michael does some brachonus [phonetic], which is the wedding, traditional wedding gesture; only one of the few people in the world who can do this performance art any more. >> Michael Alpert: I don't know if in the world I mean because there's all these people -- It's very much alive. [multiple speakers]. >> Pete Rushefsky: Yeah, the Hassidic community it survives, For sure... So I think the opportunity to present these things, these different parts really wonderfully, incredibly beautiful aspects of the Yiddish performing arts tradition that are really, you just don't hear at all. And in a way, we're sort of packaging them together for a concert audience and we'll see what happens with that. It's exciting. So thank you so much. >> Ethel Raim: Thank you. >> Thea Austen: Thank you. >> Jake Shulman-Ment: Thanks. >> Michael Alpert: Thanks guys. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. [Silence]