[Dixielandjazz] Jewish Minstrelsy

[Steve Barbone]

Tin Pan Alley compositions are one of the roots of Dixieland Jazz. No
history of Tin Pan Alley is complete without a look at Jewish dialect music
and its performance in vaudeville houses across the USA. It was somewhat
controversial parody then and perhaps still. Interestingly enough, virtually
all immigrant groups in the USA had their own parody plays, songs and
theaters at one time or another.

Kind of like "The Mind of Mencia" today?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 


NY TIMES - October 29, 2006 - By ALEX WILLIAMS

Love ŒSpringtime for Hitler¹? Then Here¹s the CD for You

SACHA BARON COHEN, meet Irving Berlin.

Jokes that compare Jews to cockroaches have left some viewers of Mr. Cohen¹s
farcical new film, ³Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,² shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Mr.
Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat¹s ill-fitting suit ‹ in fact, long
before the 1929 stock market crash ‹ Berlin, the songwriter behind ³White
Christmas² and ³God Bless America,² was reeling off satirical songs about
Jews that might seem dodgy on the ³Borat² soundtrack. One such Berlin
number, ³Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,² from 1916, concerns a
businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over his unrepaid
i.o.u.¹s. 

This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on
a new compact disc, ³Jewface,² which is aimed not at the History Channel
crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains
16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a
century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as
Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in
hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular,
if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history ‹ perhaps
justifiably. 

³It¹s like Hitler¹s playlist, but it¹s not, because it was actually Fanny
Brice¹s playlist,² said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online
magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre.
(Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand
in ³Funny Girl.²) ³It¹s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish
history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.²

In spring 2005, Mr. Rosen, who is the author of ³White Christmas: The Story
of an American Song² (Scribner, 2002) and has also contributed articles to
The New York Times, joined forces with Courtney Holt, a former Interscope
Records executive, who now runs MTV digital operations; David Katznelson, a
former Warner Records executive; and Josh Kun, an associate professor in the
Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
They turned a shared obsession into ³Jewface,² an album they hope will turn
the MySpace generation on to a form of music that offended many even in
their great-grandparents¹ day.

³Jewface² is the fourth album released on Reboot Stereophonic, a nonprofit
record label devoted to unearthing odd Jewish-theme pop recordings from
earlier eras, which Mr. Holt, Mr. Kun and Mr. Katznelson founded a couple of
years ago. The CD will soon be available at record chains like Virgin, as
well as on Amazon.com and iTunes.

Coarse, yes. Consider the very title ³When Mose With His Nose Leads the
Band,² from 1906. The four collaborators acknowledge that these playful
vaudeville ditties could function as hate speech in the wrong context, and
they carry particular power in a politicized climate where newspaper
cartoons can cause riots, and Mel Gibson has risked his career with a
drunken outburst. 

But to the project¹s partners ‹ music professionals typically associated
with the likes of the Beastie Boys (for whom Mr. Holt produced a music
video) and the Flaming Lips (whom Mr. Katznelson signed at Warner), not
Eddie Cantor ‹ this forgotten genre serves as a window into American Jewish
heritage for people just like them: young secular Jews weaned on kitschy pop
culture, abrasive rock and irony, as much as on the Torah.

³We¹re all kind of disaffected American Jews, who aren¹t particularly
religious, don¹t really practice and don¹t really lead very Jewish lives at
all,² said Mr. Kun, 35. ³Digging up these recordings was really about
figuring out who we were in this world.²

Many of these lost recordings spent nearly a century buried under dust on
wax cylinders, the canister-shape phonograph records that predated discs. To
contemporary ears the songs are camp, much like a previous Reboot
Stereophonic release, ³God Is a Moog² ‹ a 1968 rock-opera reinterpretation
of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service, performed on Moog synthesizer by
the electronic-music pioneer Gershon Kingsley.

But they also fit with a growing tendency among Jews of Generations X and Y
to embrace, and even have fun with, stereotypes that might have made their
parents squirm. It is the same impetus behind Heeb magazine, an irreverent
publication about Jewish culture, and the proliferation of hipster Hanukkah
parties in Manhattan each December, when fashionable young clubgoers bat
around inflatable dreidels as house music blares.

The ³Jewface² tracks may soon find their way onto the dance floor. Adam
Dorn, a Manhattan musician and producer who records under the name Mocean
Worker and has worked with Bono and Elvis Costello, recently cut a trancy
remix of ³Under the Matzos Tree,² a 1907 song performed by Ada Jones,
complete with blips and beeps and a thudding drum machine laid over lyrics
like ³Listen to your Abie, baby, Abie, come out in the moonlight with me.²

³I just said, let¹s take this woman who would probably be 116 now and give
her a backbeat,² explained Mr. Dorn, 35.

But even the original versions of the old tunes rock, in their way.

³There¹s an ethereal quality² to the music, said Mr. Katznelson, 37. ³It
teleports you to another time. It¹s almost psychedelic.²

Mr. Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews
and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was
released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old
World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted
country.

But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock. ³My
Yiddisha Mammy,² a 1922 riff on Al Jolson¹s ³Mammy,² written by Eddie Cantor
and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with
lyrics like these: 

I¹ve got a mammy,
But she don¹t come from Alabammy.
Her heart is filled with love and real sentiment,
Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.

The ³Jewface² project, however, does have historical as well as musical
value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

³This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for
a century,² said Dr. Magee, who explained that this music was generally
ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews,
who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes,
not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own
vaudeville self-parodies.)

³Some generations had to come and go,² Dr. Magee said, ³before younger
people could listen with fresh ears, say: ŒHey, let¹s listen to this. It¹s
not us, but it¹s our predecessors.¹ ²

Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Mr. Rosen
writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such
Hebrew comedy was ³the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a
class than all other causes combined,² and that same year it was denounced
by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation
League, said that a project like this ³gets very complicated.² It is on the
one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its
impact. Still, he said, ³our experience in this kind of thing is that
inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.²

Mr. Rosen discovered the genre in the mid-¹90s, while working on a master¹s
degree in Jewish history at University College London. One day, while doing
research at the British Library, he ran across the sheet music for a song
called ³I Want to Be an Oy, Oy, Oyviator² ‹ a comedy song about a Jewish
aviator. Digging deeper, he found sheet music for hundreds of such songs,
usually decorated with insulting caricatures of Jews as Shylocks, nebbishy
immigrant greenhorns or schlemiels (like Levi, the Jewish wrangler in ³I¹m a
Yiddisher Cowboy,² from 1908, who falls for an Indian maiden, then runs
afoul of her father, the Chief).

Fascinated, Mr. Rosen set off on a quest to track down actual recordings of
this music. He trolled dusty junk shops, record-collector conventions and,
inevitably, eBay, looking for wax cylinders, which cost $10 to more than
$100, and 78s. His search, he said, ³took roughly 10 years on and off.²

Mr. Kun heard Mr. Rosen speak about the genre at the Experience Music
Project conference in Seattle last year. Within weeks, they said, they were
planning an album.

Mr. Kun recalled: ³I would get e-mails at 6 in the morning: ŒHey, have you
ever heard of this guy?¹ I remember one night he found the personal
stationery of one of these old vaudeville performers, and it was as if he
had found a brick of gold in the pyramids.²

While the collaborators hardly expect ³Jewface² to become a commercial
smash, their industry savvy does increase the chances that the music will be
heard. 

Mr. Holt, who worked on the iPod deal between U2 and Apple while at
Interscope, is trying to organize a concert and eventually an album, with
established rock and folk acts doing covers of the old songs. He¹s making
calls, he said. So far no one is getting back to him.

³It¹s a hard sell,² Mr. Holt acknowledged last week over a Scotch at SoHo
House, the private club in downtown Manhattan, declining to name the acts he
has been in touch with about the concert. ³It¹s like, ŒOh my God, there¹s
this lost Jewish music, recorded by Jews, making fun of Jews for non-Jews to
be able to enjoy, in order to assimilate!¹ That¹s not a great elevator
pitch.²

Even family members can be skeptical. Mr. Rosen said his in-laws were taken
aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which
gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some,
culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture¹s
distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for
entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the
same culture. 

³To some extent, people like to see themselves represented,² Mr. Rosen said,
³even if they are badly represented.²