Arts & Entertainment

A Complicated Cultural Relationship

For Black History Month, we look at a new collection
featuring black musicians singing Jewish songs.

Eric Herschthal
New York Jewish Week

singing Jewish songs.
On Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical
History of Black-Jewish Relations, Mathis
n 1958, when Johnny Mathis was
is one of 15 musicians performing Jewish
recording an album of African-
songs, few of them ever heard. Others
American spirituals in homage to his
include Nina Simone singing "Eretz Zavat
black mother, he included a seemingly
Chalav," an Israeli folk song; Billie Holiday
odd song: "Kol Nidre," the centerpiece of
performing "My Yiddishe Momme" and
the Yom Kippur service and perhaps the
Cab Calloway doing "Utta Da Zay," a spoof
holiest of all Jewish prayers.
on shtetl life.
Why?
It is tempting to view the album as a
"Spiritual music is all about emotion:'
celebration of black-Jewish bonhomie.
Mathis, 75, said in a phone interview from But the album's producers insist that it is
his home in Los Angeles. "If you can bring just as much about exposing deep-seated
the emotion to the music, then that's what tensions. Black musicians did not neces-
you're looking for." He added, " (Kol Nidre'
sarily sing Jewish music because they felt
is just a big, big emotional outpouring?'
a mutual connection or shared sense of
Mathis first heard cantorial music
suffering. They often did so to entertain a
growing up in San Francisco, where many Jewish audience or Jewish producer.
of his friends were Jewish. And when it
"Not every version of cross-cultural
came time to record an album of spiri-
appropriation is necessarily a testament
tual music, he could not resist including
to solidarity:' said Josh Kun, a co-founder
a version of "Kol Nidre." Many of the
of the Idelsohn Society, although he
backup singers and producers at his label, added, "Black Sabbath points to moments
Columbia, were Jewish; and he asked
of celebration and identification [as much
them for help tracking down recordings
as it does] to the fraught relations?'
of the prayer so he could rehearse. They
A case in point is the Yiddish song
brought in several, giving him pointers,
"Eli, Eli:' based on King David's Psalm
too. "Everyone had an idea about my
22. Before it became a staple for black
[Hebrew] pronunciation:' he said. But in
musicians from Paul Robeson to Duke
the end, he relied on his musical instincts. Ellington, it was standard fare for Jewish
"It was done in a rather innocent way:'
musicians on the Lower East Side.
he said. "I wasn't even aware that what I
Close proximity lent itself to musical
was singing was Hebrew and not Yiddish." appropriation. And at the same time that
The recorded version was featured on
Jews were reworking black music — in
a 1958 album, Good Night, Dear Lord, one short, the history of Broadway, where
of the few Mathis albums that did not sell
Jewish songwriters rifled on black spiri-
well. And few would have remembered it
tuals — black musicians began perform-
had the Jewish nonprofit record label, the
ing Jewish songs. Sometimes it was out
Idelsohn Society, not reissued it in the fall of respect, other times out of naivete. But
on a new compilation of black musicians
sometimes it was done with spite.

I

Views

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m ew Nate Bloom

saw Special to the Jewish News

lit

Oscar Nominated

lc
As, Another Year, written and directed

-

i by Mike Leigh, 67, opens in Detroit
Nk
vow on Friday, Feb. 4. Leigh, a British
Jew, has earned
seven Oscar nomi-
nations for writ-
ing and directing.
His screenplay for
Another Year just
was nominated for
an Academy Award
Mike Leigh
for best original

36

February 3 2011

screenplay.
In the film, Jim Broadbent and
Ruth Sheen co-star as a mature,
long-married couple who have man-
aged to remain very happy. Over the
course of one average year, their hap-
piness is contrasted with the relative
unhappiness of most of their friends,
colleagues and family.

Post Super Bowl

-

The Glee episode airing on Fox imme-
diately following the Super Bowl
on Sunday, Feb. 6, is a real blow-out,
costing $3-$5 million and sponsored
by General Motors (with limited ads).

"Kol Nidre," said Johnny Mathis, who recorded the prayer

on a 1958 album, "is just a big, big emotional outpouring."

That is why Ethel Waters, for whom
"Eli, Eli" was a staple, could say both that
the song "tells the tragic story of the Jews
as much as one song can ... I felt I was
telling the story of my own race, too?' But
also: "Jewish people in every town seemed
to love the idea of me singing their song.
They crowded the theaters to hear it, and
they would tell one another, `The schvartze
sings "Eli, Eli!" The schvartze! '
Though the complicated, often painful
back-story is discussed in detail on the
album's liner notes, as well as the website
www.idelsohnsociety.com/blacksabbath,
some argue the essential product, a music
album, cannot do the topic justice.
"There's a real breakdown between
the liner notes and the music that
[the producers] include said Jeffrey
Melnick, a professor at the University of
Massachusetts-Boston and author of A
Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans,
Jews, and American Popular Song
(Harvard University Press)."In the liner
notes, they're trying to get at the com-
plicated nature of it. But the music itself
doesn't really bear that out?'
Kun doesn't entirely disagree. "That's a
good point. There aren't really any songs
that" evince the more troubling history,
he said. "That said, I deal with those cri-
tiques from the very first paragraph of
liner notes."
Which is true. The opening paragraph
discusses the case of the black blues sing-
er Alberta Hunter doing a version of "Ich
Hib Dich Tzufil Lib:' a popular Yiddish
song. Even stranger, she sang it on the
nationally televised Dick Cavett Show, in
1979.
On the show, Cavett asked her about the

"

Most of the musical numbers take
place during the half-time of a cham-
pionship high school football game.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" will be
performed.
Featured in the episode is recurring
character Dave Karnofsky, a big, bul-
lying football player
who is a closeted gay.
I recently was able
to confirm that Max
Adler, 25, who plays
Karnofsky, is Jewish.
Last November,
Adler and fel-
low cast member
Max Adler

origins of her song. After telling him that
she learned it on a trip to Jerusalem, she
mentioned a story about Sophie Tucker. A
renowned Jewish blues singer in her own
right, who also used to perform in black-
face, Tucker had once asked to borrow
one of Hunter's own songs.
But Tucker had her black maid send the
request. And Hunter refused, recalling to
Cavett: "Sophie, as good as she was, would
never sing the blues like a Negro. And
that's not boasting. You see Sophie Tucker
hasn't suffered like we've suffered?'
Many of the songs have more benign
histories too, of course. And it is often the
case that what to one black performer felt
like appeasement to a Jewish audience, to
another, felt like an expression of mutual
understanding. Or perhaps, the origins of
some songs were purely accidental.
For instance, Louis Armstrong's
famous song "Heebie Jeebies," one of the
earliest known recordings of scat sing-
ing, was said to be inspired by Jewish
prayers. Armstrong once worked for a
Lithuanian Jewish family in New Orleans
(the Karnofskys are believed to have
bought him his first trumpet) and later
told Cab Calloway that his scat singing
was inspired by, as Calloway remembered
it, "the Jews rockin', [by that] he meant
davening."
In fact, the 15 songs on the album are
just a fraction of the dozens the Idelsohn
Society collected. The group's website, as
well as an iPhone application, includes
many of the songs not included in the
CD. And so does an exhibit of the same
name running through March 22 at the
Contemporary Jewish Museum in San
Francisco. 1-1

Josh Sussman, 27 (who plays
nerdy high-school newspaper editor
Jacob Ben Israel), co-narrated the
Anti-Defamation League's Concert
Against Hate in Washington, D.C. The
event honored those who stood up
to bullying based on sexuality, race,
religion, etc.
The Glee Super
Bowl episode is
directed by Brad
Falchuk, the show's
co-creator. His moth-
er, Nancy Falchuk, is
national president of
Brad Falchuk
Hadassah. II

