My mom is Jewish, so that’s enough for the tribe to have welcomed me as one of their own, but it’s a complex question as to what that membership means. Wikipedia has two separate articles for Judaism and Jews, to distinguish the religion from the ethnicity, and I definitely belong to the ethnicity more than the religion.

My most significant personal connection to the tribe, aside from family Passover seders and Seinfeld appreciation, has come through music, specifically klezmer music. I may not know my way around the Torah, but I know my harmonic minor modes inside and out.

Klezmer is mostly secular, for partying and dancing. Musically it overlaps with sacred Jewish music, but the subject matter tends to be a lot more earthly. A good analogy is the relationship between black gospel music and secular R&B. Jewish sacred music is sung in Hebrew; klezmer songs are usually in Yiddish. Also, klezmer songs usually have more of a dance beat, though they also sometimes make use of the rubato feel you hear in temple.

As jazz has Miles and Coltrane, and rock has the Beatles and the Stones, so klezmer has Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. Dave is like the Beatles — polished, virtuosic, conversant with many musical styles. Naftule is like the Stones — more raw, more gutsy, inhabiting a single personal style that varies little from song to song. The best introduction to these guys is on the Rough Guide To Klezmer, which combines old-timey traditional music with newer hipster revivalists.

The first two tracks on the Rough Guide are recordings of “Fun Tashlikh,” first the 1990 version by the Klezmatics, then the 1930s or 40s version by Naftule.

The name means “on returning from the river.” “Fun” is related to the German “von,” meaning “from.” Tashlikh is the ritual of casting out your sins on Rosh Hashanah. The Klezmatics version isn’t embeddable, but it’s worth seeking out. It opens with wild shrieking bass clarinet and gets more intense from there. My Jewish relatives aren’t much given to ecstatic states, so it’s nice to hear that at least some parts of the tribe still know how to throw down.

Another standout track from the Rough Guide is “Der Gassen Nigen” by Harry Kandel’s Orchestra, from 1923. I’d love to embed it, but I can’t find it on the web. The tune sounds like a heartbreaking dirge, so I was extremely amused to learn that it’s actually a wedding processional. The name means “the street song,” and it was traditionally played as the bride and groom went back to their house from the temple where they were married. This says a lot about Jewish expectations around marriage. Kidding aside, “Der Gassen Nigun” is one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard. (The Rough Guide also includes Klezmokum’s maudlin modern version, which, meh.)

“Meron Nign (Tune From Meron)” by The Klezmer Conservatory Band is another Rough Guide standout. It kicks off with a killer unaccompanied mandolin solo that just begs to be sampled. I’ve found a lot of creative inspiration from dropping pieces of it into my tracks.

The only real-life klezmer band I’ve ever been part of was called F Train Klezmer. We weren’t very good. The high point of our performing career was at an old folks’ home in Washington Heights; otherwise we mostly just struggled through traditional material in the trombone player’s living room in Queens. I’ve tried to get various of my other bands interested in klezmer material too, without much success. I’m hoping that this post will draw more klezmer nerds out of the woodwork.

So what’s in this music for me? There’s the historical value — it’s good to know what kind of music my Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents were listening to. Getting into klez was a big bonding moment with my late grandmother, who danced to stuff like Dave and Naftule when she was young.

There’s present-day value too. I dig the sound of exotic Arabic-sounding scales over Western dance music forms. The easiest entry point into klez for Western-trained musicians is the Ahava Raba scale, also known as the phrygian dominant scale, the Freygish mode, and the Hava Nagilah scale. Jazz folks will recognize it as the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale.

“Fun Tashlikh” uses something like diminished scale in its A section, and lydian dominant in the B section. It’s refreshing to my ears to be reminded that the major scale and its modes aren’t the be-all and end-all of popularly accessible music. Also, it’s cool to discover that flat seconds and fifths aren’t the exclusive province of highbrow artsy music. For all their exoticism, klezmer tunes are perfectly accessible to first-time western listeners.

Klezmer often gets referred to as “Jewish jazz.” This is an appealing name, and it has some basis in reality;Benny Goodman did take clarinet lessons from Dave Tarras. But jazz isn’t really the right analogy. The improvisation in klezmer is mostly variations and embellishments on the melodies, not like the harmonically-guided freeform lines in jazz solos. Klezmer is more like Jewish blues, or Jewish country. The scales are different, but the subject matter is mostly the same. Also, like blues and country, klezmer is full of soulfully expressive microtones.

Digging into klezmer also put me in contact with the music of the New York City Yiddish theater scene, which combined traditional shtetl sounds with American jazz and showtunes. You can hear this music, along with ads for various Lower East Side businesses, courtesy of the Yiddish Radio Project.

I’m especially drawn to the Yiddish vaudevillian Aaron Lebedeff. He was a comedian given to singing in “Yinglish,” going between Yiddish and English in mid-phrase. Here’s one of his big hits, lamenting how confusing America is to the newly-arrived Jewish immigrant. The chorus translates to “What can you do, it’s America.” I feel that way a lot.

My absolute favorite Aaron Lebedeff song is called “I Like She,” which I learned during my F Train Klezmer adventure. It’s pretty much impossible to find online, which is too bad because it’s hilarious. Sample lyrics:

She’s got cheeks like fresh tomatoes
She’s sweet like herring mit potatoes
I like she, and I like she and that’s all.

Klezmer is a distinctly fringe taste in America outside of Jewish hipsters in New York and their most elderly relatives. But it’s making a comeback in its original home in Eastern Europe. When I was in Krakow visiting Anna’s family, the klezmer musicians probably outnumbered the Jews significantly. My great-grandparents were mostly relieved to be putting the shtetl behind them and were eager to embrace American culture. For me, though, American culture has too many empty calories. Outsider music like klezmer, along with blues, jazz and hip-hop, feels a lot more nutritious.

I’ll close with the Klezmatics singing a traditional anthem of brotherly love, “Ale Brider.” Here’s a translation of the lyrics.

Oy, oy, oy, oy!

Revival Revival vs Primus

mp3 download, ipod format download

Vocals by Barbara Singer. Samples and programming by me. The guitar licks were originally played by Alex Torovic but have been chopped up pretty dramatically. This is part of our ongoing strategy, learned from hip-hop, of taking a familiar chorus and coming up with new verses.

“Tommy The Cat” is far and away my favorite Primus song. Les Claypool does the spoken intro and the choruses, but Tommy The Cat himself is voiced by Tom Waits. The song has a cool video, which I had never seen before the very moment of embedding it in this post, because it’s not like it got a lot of MTV spins back in the nineties. What did we do before Youtube?

I’m a funk, blues and jazz guy more than a metal guy. Among the metal virtuosos, Les Claypool is the funkiest. He says that when he auditioned to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica, he suggested they all jam on some Isley Brothers tunes. I’m sure that went over huge. Metallica wisely advised Les to go start his own band.

As with everybody we sample and remix, we hope Primus is cool with it, it’s purely a gesture of love. I imagine that they’d be okay, since they themselves have been known to do some sampling. “Jerry Was A Race Car Driver” uses a line from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (“Heh heh heh, dog will hunt!”)

My first reaction to Primus as a high schooler was mostly alarm. Growing up in New York City, you don’t get exposed to a lot of metal. If you’re a brooding white city kid looking to annoy your parents, you’re likelier to turn to hip-hop or punk (or both, this is why my high school classmates loved the Beastie Boys so much.) For most of my adolescence, I didn’t even realize that punk and metal are two different things. So I didn’t have a lot of context for Primus. I liked the spazzy energy but couldn’t handle the tightly coiled anger that seemed to underlie it. Was I ever so innocent? Having heard a lot of genuinely angry rock music since then, Primus sounds pretty harmless, and the comedy aspect comes across as more dominant. But of course, the best comedy comes from anger. It’s fitting that Primus did the theme song to South Park, they inhabit a similar emotional space.

Primus’ material isn’t exactly my cup of tea but I stand in awe of their musicianship. Most guys at their level of skill have no sense of humor whatsoever. I’d like to know how Les managed not to lose his sense of playfulness even after the tens of thousands of hours of disciplined practice it must have taken him to get that good at bass. I especially love hearing him play fretless, he gets so much microtonal excitement out of it. Ditto with Larry LaLonde – I can’t think of a more harmonically adventurous guitarist. Here’s to spazzy virtuosity.

For such a foundational element of America’s music, there’s a surprising amount of confusion as to what a blue note is exactly. So allow me to clear it up: a blue note to be a microtonal pitch in between a note from the blues scale and a neighboring note from the major scale.

Here’s a guide to the blue notes in the key of C.

• C major scale: C, D, E, F, G, A, B
• C blues scale: C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb
• C major plus C blues: C, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, A, Bb, B

There are three notes from the blues scale not found in the major scale, in bold above:

• Eb — the flat third
• F# — the sharp fourth
• Bb — the flat seventh

The flat third and seventh give the blues scale its tragic minor-key feeling. The very dissonant sharp fourth makes the blues unsettling and dark. Some people commonly refer to these non-major scale notes as blue notes. That’s not right — they’re blues scale notes that still fall on the piano keys. The blue notes fall between the piano keys, between each blues scale note and its closest major-scale neighbor.

In the key of C, there are blue notes between:

• D and Eb
• Eb and E
• F and F#
• F# and G
• A and Bb
• Bb and B

To play a blue note on guitar, like John Lee Hooker does, you bend the strings, making them go sharp.

If you’re playing slide guitar, you just move slightly above or below a given fret. On trumpet, sax or harmonica, you can bend the notes by overblowing. On a synth, you use the pitch bend control, like Herbie Hancock does in “Rockit.” At about 2:50 in he kicks off his solo with the blue note between the sharp fourth and fifth.

Herbie uses blue notes throughout his synth solo in “Chameleon” — listen around 5:00 – 5:30.

On trombone, fretless string instruments like violin, and the voice, pitch is continuous, so playing blue notes is as easy as playing “correct” piano key notes. You can’t play blue notes on the piano, but you can approximate them by playing adjacent keys simultaneously, for example F and F#.

The blues notes I listed are the most commonly used ones, but any microtone can find its way into the blues. Harmonica players sometimes use a slightly flattened C, D or A. Guitarists will bend any note so that it’s slightly sharp when playing very emotionally and emphatically.

The western tuning system is cool and versatile and full of intriguing symmetries, but it gets oppressive after a while. We’re taught that pitches from outside our system are “out of tune” or “wrong.” If you’re intending to play the standard pitches and you miss, that does usually sound bad. But when you play between the piano keys on purpose in musically logical places, microtones can be the most beautiful sound in the world. Blue notes enrich the western tuning system with glimpses of the infinite possibility of the underlying continuous pitch spectrum.

Other world cultures routinely use subdivisions of the octave much finer than the western half-step. Indian and Arabic scales use quarter tones. Klezmer clarinetists bend and stretch pitches like silly putty. Some avant-garde western western composers use their own idiosyncratic microtonal systems to write music that sounds like it’s playing on a warped records. That gets to be a little too much pitch freedom for my tastes. I prefer my microtones against a nice steady backdrop of western equal temperament, they jump out more that way.