[Dixielandjazz] Max Raabe interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

This band has been mentioned on DJML before and youtube links given.  

Max Raabe interviewed

The Wunderbar Max Raabe
by Barrymore Laurence Scherer
Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2010

>From Al Jolson and Mae West to Prince, Cher and Sting, the annals of popular entertainment
are filled with inimitable figures. And to their ranks we add the German singer Max
Raabe.
Mr. Raabe, 47, is the lead vocalist and trademark incarnate of the Palast Orchester,
a 12-member German dance band playing Carnegie Hall on Thursday. That appearance
is part of a North American tour that began last month on the West Coast and ends
on Tuesday.
The band's name (which means Palace Orchestra) evokes the brittle splendor of Berlin
between the World Wars, when every grand hotel from Berlin to Chicago boasted its
own dance orchestra, not to mention its resident band of lounge lizards. And the
Palast Orchester's repertoire of ballroom numbers, romantic ballads and madcap novelty
songs is a happy throwback to the tuneful 1920s and '30s. "This music evokes a time
when people were laughing," says Mr. Raabe. "They may have been laughing hysterically
because they were living in the Weimar Republic, or through the Great Depression,
but it was still laughter."
Harmonizing with its distinctive period flavor is the band's sartorial image: Mr.
Raabe and his gifted colleagues perform in immaculate evening dress -- tailcoats
and double-breasted black or white dinner jackets, with shirtfronts and batwing collars
starched to a board-like stiffness lamentably forgotten by our wash-and-wear society.
Setting off the males, the orchestra's solo violinist, Cecilia Crisafulli (who succeeded
Hanne Berger in 2007), is always charmingly coiffed and gowned. "She is our princess
on stage," Mr. Raabe says, "our bird of paradise."
For all his brilliantined resemblance to one of J.C. Leyendecker's Arrow Collar ads,
Mr. Raabe keys his panache to his real passion: the music. Like many who love this
repertoire from an increasingly remote past, Mr. Raabe's interest developed "step
by step." In Westphalia, in northwestern Germany, he spent his evenings as a boy
"listening to opera, mostly Wagner." But there was other music too. "On Sundays the
television always featured black-and-white films from the 1930s, which often included
a nightclub scene with an orchestra. Even Walt Disney cartoons had a band or orchestra
playing in the background. Unlike today, this kind of music was a part of our culture."
Most important, Mr. Raabe was inspired by old records. "Our family had a record collection
and a phonograph that played 78s," (the shellac discs that were the industry standard
before 1950). When he was 15 or 16, he says, a particular disc struck a nerve, "an
instrumental number called 'Ich bin verucht nach Hilde' ['I'm Nuts About Hilda'].
It was very fast and funny, but it had this underlying sadness too. For the first
time I was really touched by this music."
Mr. Raabe began haunting local flea markets, finding "lots of old records -- German
dance bands, English ones. They were cheap, so I could afford them." He quickly developed
a discriminating palate. "One collector sold records like 'Go Wash an Elephant If
You Wanna Do Something Big.' But," he adds with a characteristically ironic grin,
"I wouldn't sing that one."
Initially aiming for an operatic career, Mr. Raabe entered the Berlin University
of the Arts in 1985, but he found that his light baritone was even better suited
to the music that had caught his imagination. Among his fellow students he also found
sufficient soulmates to form an orchestra to perform the old tunes, and to join in
his musical archaeology. "When we started building the orchestra, we discovered a
pile of original song arrangements in the cellar of a bookstore. Some included all
the band parts, but for others we found the missing parts in music archives and flea
markets." He notes that while collecting repertoire, he and his colleagues began
to notice that many of the best composers and lyric writers simply disappeared from
the publishers' lists after 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became German chancellor.
"Gone," he says, "killed by the system. So this repertoire also represents the problems
and politics of those days."
The Palast Orchester made its debut playing in the entrance foyer at the 1987 Berlin
Theaterball. But by the end of the evening the crowd had deserted the ballroom to
hear the musicians outside. Seventeen records and multiple German, European, Asian
and American tours later, the orchestra plays more than 100 concerts a year. The
repertoire of more than 500 songs ranges from the hilarious "Mein Gorilla hat 'ne
Villa im Zoo" ("My Gorilla has a Villa in the Zoo") and "Du bist meine Greta Garbo"
to more seductive numbers such like "Amapola" (formerly a signature tune of the great
Tino Rossi), Cole Porter's "Night and Day" and Franz Lehár's classic tenor aria,
"Dein ist mein ganzes Herz" ("Thine Is My Heart Alone"), which Mr. Raabe croons as
a tango. "Many of these songs tell the same love stories in three minutes that Verdi
and Puccini take several hours to explain," he says with a smile.
Mr. Raabe notes that he gets many repertoire suggestions from friends and acquaintances
who send him MP3 downloads of old records or play them to him by telephone. In the
past, the band's arrangements of such songs were usually made by Günther Gürsch,
a veteran musician and arranger, who died last year. "He was quite old when we met,
but he was like a young boy about our music," says Mr. Raabe. "From the recordings,
he wrote everything down note by note, so his arrangements are completely authentic."
Stylistic authenticity has not usually been an issue in popular music, where songs
of one period have often been souped up by successive generations. But Mr. Raabe
and his colleagues treat their repertoire with the same care as performers of early
music, scrupulously preserving each composer's original melodies and harmonies. Moreover,
their authentic sound is fundamental to the Palast Orchester's profound appeal. Built
upon the mellifluous blending of saxophones, clarinet, trumpets, trombone, sousaphone,
double bass, guitar, percussion and piano, their evocative Klang (as the Germans
call it) is gilded with the soaring line of the violin, which imparts the lyric sweetness
characteristic of dance orchestras up to the swing era. And as virtuosic as they
are elegant, many of the bandsmen play multiple instruments, even lending their singing
voices in various combinations to songs that require it.
Mr. Raabe has also composed a few novelties himself, among them the 1992 song "Kein
Schwein ruft mich an" reflecting his dislike of cellphones and answering machines.
Though he wrote it as an elegant tango, the title, literally meaning "No Pig Ever
Calls Me," is considered vulgar in German. It became an immediate hit in Germany.
"My mother was shocked!" he says. "It was months until I could tell her that I wrote
it."


--Bob Ringwald K6YBV
rsr at ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band


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