When I was a kid, the New York Transit Museum had a commercial in heavy rotation on local TV that used “Take The A Train” and I remember being riveted by it. I should point out that Billy Strayhorn wrote this tune, not Ellington, but it became the Ellington Orchestra’s theme song for decades.

When I was in sixth grade I got totally obsessed with my folks’ CD of Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included a recording of a tune called “Way Way Back” that I listened to every day after school for I don’t know how many days in a row.

I didn’t get exposed to much Ellington after that until college. When I was a sophomore I went to hear some friends playing in an informal sextet in the campus center. They played “Mood Indigo” and though I had never heard it before, it felt like it had always been part of me. A couple of years after that I came under the sway of Andy Jaffe, then Amherst’s jazz professor and a devout Ellington worshiper. He didn’t resolve the mystery of why Ellington and Strayhorn had such a powerful grip on my emotional brain, but he did certainly expose me to a lot more of their music, in a much more rigorous analytic framework. I’ve been a fan, student and interpreter of Ellingtonia ever since.

My usual reaction when I love something is to remix it. So, here we go.

The Money Jungle Remix Project

I’m working on an album-length revisioning of Money Jungle, the trio album Duke did with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. This album is a pretty crazy one, a must-hear for jazz nerds.

Take The 2-3 Train

Combines the intro to “A Train” with samples of Slick Rick, Britney Spears and M.I.A., along with synths I played on a video game controller.

Morning Mood

Combining the opening to Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of Grieg’s Peer Gynt, with percussion by Glen Velez and some snippets of the a capella from “Get Ur Freak On” by Missy Elliot.

Lay-By

The swinging violin is by Ray Nance, who also played the famous trumpet solo on the original recording of “A Train.”

“Morning Mood” and “Lay-By” come from the amazing Three Suites album. The first suite is Ellington and Strayhorn’s arrangement of the Nutcracker, which to my ears is a substantial improvement over the original.

The second suite, as mentioned above is Peer Gynt, less known but also pretty rad.

The third suite was inspired by John Steinbeck’s book Sweet Thursday.

I’ve never read the book, but it inspired four devastating Ellington/Strayhorn tunes, some of their best late-period work, including the Ray Nance feature “Lay-By.” The band kills it on the recording, too.

I went to a panel discussion of Duke’s later music at Amherst that included Stanley Crouch. During his talk, he summed up his feelings about Duke’s drummer on the suites, Sam Woodyard, like so:

Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!

I don’t agree with Stanley Crouch on a lot of jazz-related issues, but I agree with him on that one.

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!

Because Alicia Keys was involved, I thought she might have written the chord progression. But no, it’s built from samples of the intro to “Love On A Two-Way Street” by The Moments.

“Empire State Of Mind” was originally written by Angela Hunte and Janet “Jnay” Sewell-Ulepic (though Jay-Z substantially rewrote the verses when he recorded it.) Their sequencing of the Moments samples seems like a different process from the way that someone like Alicia Keys would write a song at the piano. Using the sampler is a lot more limiting. But sometimes that’s good for creativity, as in this case. I like Alicia Keys’ own material okay, but she’s never written anything as powerful as “Empire.”

Let’s analyze. The Moments’ intro is in the key of F, but “Empire” speeds up the sample a little, moving it up to F#. I’m going to spare us all some annoyance and confusion by analyzing both songs as if they’re in C.

The Moments’ intro starts with a simple but beautifully voiced I-V-IV progression: C, G, F. The bass walks down from C to the B in the G chord. From there, your ear expects it to land on A minor. Instead it lands on F. There’s an A in the F chord, so it doesn’t completely fake you out. Still, your ear expects the A minor, and the F that takes it place has an implicit wistfulness.

Next there’s an F to G cadence that you expect to land on C. Instead, it lands on a dramatic and suspenseful E7, once again setting up a strong expectation of going to A minor. But the Moments fake you out yet again, by changing keys altogether when the verse starts.

There’s more than enough information in the Moments’ twenty-second intro to unpack into a full length song, and “Empire State Of Mind” does exactly that. The verses loop the C-G-F, F-G-C parts. The prechorus is the suspenseful E7 chord. The chorus is just the verse chords in a different order: F-C-G. And the bridge combines parts of the verse and the prechorus.

The song gets a lot of its power from the way the A minor chord is constantly implied but not actually stated. (It appears very briefly in the bridge, but otherwise is absent from the song.) Your mind is constantly engaged trying to fill in that missing minor. The song even feels minor, more tragic than triumphant, even though there are (basically) no minor chords in it anywhere. That’s real musicianship.

Writing a chord progression is like reaching into a box of legos and fitting the pieces together. There’s an infinite universe of possible chord combinations, but very few of those sound good, and even fewer have the kind of drama and power of “Empire State Of Mind.” Everyone writing in a particular style is drawing from the same box of legos. The artistry happens in your selection and ordering of the pieces. Once you have enough music training to be acquainted with all the legos in the box, the challenge lies in leaving stuff out.

The sampler can be a better songwriting tool than traditional instruments because its limitations encourage economy of musical means. Sitting at the piano, the temptation to resolve to A minor might be too hard to resist. But since the Moments don’t use A minor in their song, Hunt and Sewell-Ulepic can’t really use it in theirs, much to their enormous benefit. I can’t think of a better piano-based pop song than “Empire State Of Mind” in the last ten years, even though there was no piano used to write it.

It’s a common idea that sampling a song is a form of stealing, that “Empire State Of Mind” is somehow coextensive with “Love On A Two-Way Street.” But not all sample uses are created equal. The Moments’ intro was also sampled a few years ago by Asamov in their song “Supa Dynamite.”

This is a perfectly decent hip-hop track, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as “Empire State Of Mind.” Of course, these guys can’t flow like Jay-Z and they don’t have a colossal hook sung by Alicia Keys, but the track itself is weaker too. It just loops the C-G-F, F-G-C part. It doesn’t use the E7 and doesn’t shuffle the pieces around. Asamov drew from the same box of legos as Hunt and Sewell-Ulepic. They just didn’t build something as interesting.

At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.

Sixties Motown

When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.

In the eighties, my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. I can’t argue with the musical qualities of the Big Chill tracks. The singing is full of emotional truth-telling. That said, the arrangements sound cynical and commercial to my ears now. All those strings weren’t exactly sticking it sonically to the man. The slickness of Motown drove me to eventually seek out…

Delta blues

Raw, intense, minimalist, tied to a specific time and place: this is as good a definition of musical authenticity as you could ask for. The fact that it’s being made by oppressed people is even better. I embody the cliched story of the white hipster going back through the Stones and Zeppelin and hearing all the music they were inspired by/stole from.

The blues is a powerful and truth-telling musical form. But my desire to participate in it quickly became a problem. Blues might have been authentic for Howlin’ Wolf, but for me, it’s an awkward fit. It’s not for lack of trying; I play the best white blues harmonica of anyone I know. The phrasing and microtones and general attitude have shaped my approach to every other style of music I’ve attempted. But if I was going to tell my own truth in music, I needed to find something socially a little closer to home. Jerry Garcia helpfully steered me towards…

Bluegrass

As the fans like to say, bluegrass is sung from the heart through the nose. It has all the earmarks of regional authenticity, including an apparent lack of concern with finding a wide audience.

As with blues, I ran up against some immediate cultural tourism issues when I started exploring this music. It’s easy for a New Yorker like me to condescend unintentionally, treating bluegrass as “pure” because its practitioners are supposedly unsophisticated hicks, and therefore “unspoiled.” The true story is more complicated. The bluegrass guys might be rural, but they most assuredly are not dumb. Bill Monroe conceived bluegrass partially on a commercial basis, choosing repertoire and instruments that appealed to the audiences of his time and place. Also, bluegrass requires a lot of technical skill, especially for the lead instruments like banjo and fiddle. It’s not a good genre for the casual dabbler. Besides, by the time I dug into this music I was also starting to get interested in…

Monk and Coltrane

One way to define authenticity is through exclusivity. Bluegrass excludes casual dabblers with its technical demands. But bluegrass isn’t remotely as demanding as bebop. This is part of the reason why bebop is as untainted by commercial success as any snobby hipster could wish. Hard jazz is consistently the worst-selling genre in America, year in and year out.

Monk and Coltrane don’t fit into the bebop box exactly, even though they helped define its sound. They’re good avatars of purity because of the extreme individualism of their respective sounds. Any three-second sample of either of them is instantly recognizable. Monk isn’t as impenetrable as his reputation would suggest — several of his tunes have melodies a normal person could whistle. Coltrane wrote some nicely approachable tunes too, but he gets extra authenticity points for spending his last few years playing harshly avant-garde experimental music.

I’d recommend that any musician tackle bebop if they want a rigorous education in American music generally. It’s all in there: the blues, the showtunes, the highbrow and the lowbrow, all the chords and scales and rhythms and textures our culture has to offer, at least up until the advent of electronic music. But much as I love it, bebop never really felt like home to me. I’ll continue to study Monk and Trane and their cohorts, and will continue to enjoy and be inspired by them, but if I want to express my experience in the present reality, they don’t have all the answers I need.

Klezmer

Okay, so if urban black or rural white music is an awkward fit for a New York Jew, how about the music of the tribe? Klezmer is culturally close to home for me. It straddles the shtetl and the big city, the old country and the new one, ancient folk forms and American pop.

Klezmer sometimes gets called “Jewish jazz” but a better comparison is to country. There’s the oompah-derived boom-chick beat, the harmonic minimalism, the melodic improvisation, and the emphasis on rawness and feeling over technical complexity. The scales are different — you don’t get a lot of Ahava Raba scale in country. But the comparison is close otherwise. Discovering this music was a key puzzle piece for me; I use those Arabic scales any chance I get. Klezmer’s mutt-like fusion of disparate styles is a truer statement of myself than anything that could be described as pure. Unfortunately, klezmer isn’t a great way to connect with other people aside from other NYC hipsters with Jewish ancestry, so it was never going to be my ultimate destination. But I’m glad to have gotten acquainted.

The impenetrable avant-garde

You could define authenticity as an uncompromising commitment to inner truth, the desire to please others be damned. There’s something noble and admirable in this commitment. The problem is that the furthest reaches of inner space don’t usually produce music that other people can connect to. I never enjoyed extremely experimental music, but the academic world and critical establishment hold it in high regard. As an educated highbrow type, I felt like I had to dutifully subject myself to a lot of avant-garde experiments in an effort to purge myself of my weak-minded desire for music to be fun. I guess I learned a few things about the limits of human tolerance, but mostly I learned that I really do just want to have fun. Here’s a hilarious quote from “Can Machine-Made Music Sing Without a Composer?” in New York Magazine:

[O]n February 5, the Fireworks Ensemble will perform a live version of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 album Metal Machine Music, at Miller Theatre. Listening to Reed’s original double LP is a test of endurance. In his garment-district loft, he leaned various electric guitars against their amps so that they howled at each other in crescendoing feedback loops, and welded the tracks into deafening industrial polyphony. The result was one of the most loathed records ever to hit the market. Nevertheless, the intrepid composer Ulrich Krieger decided to arrange it for traditional instruments, an undertaking that smacks of flagellant zeal.

I like the word “flagellant.” We just can’t shake our puritan roots, can we? There’s a lingering notion that painful music has the deepest purity. I’m grateful to have rid myself of this silly idea. Deliberately annoying music seems to me now to just be another form of class competition, its flamboyant uselessness a bigger statement of materialist affectation than any crassly commercial pop.

Fake is the new real

So where has the authenticity quest ultimately led me? As a kid I loved Michael Jackson and Run-DMC to pieces, but as I got a “music education,” I felt morally obligated to reject their music for their sinful use of drum machines, synthesizers and borrowing other people’s ideas. Most especially, I felt I had to reject them for their emphasis on pleasing people above all other musical concerns. Now pleasing people seems to me to be the only good reason to make music. If “fake” and accessible sounds like synths and drum machines put bodies on the dance floor, then fake is better than real.

I’ve had an instinctive attraction to electronic music dating back to loving science fiction sound effects and scores as a kid. But my peers and educators pressured me to be suspicious and hostile towards high-tech, pop-friendly musicians like Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s acoustic piano work is acceptable to the guardians of the jazz canon, but controversy continues to roil over his embrace of the synthesizer, sequencer and the sounds on the radio.

I’m glad to have withdrawn from the battle over purity. Not everything you hear in clubs or parties is terrific, but rejecting it wholesale was getting me nowhere. Giving myself permission to enjoy pop-jazz fusion, Herbie’s seventies and eighties future sounds, hip-hop and dance music has opened up huge new continents of sonic enjoyment to me. Authenticity is about truth-telling. For a high-tech city dweller, loop-based electronic sounds are more truthful to my experience than banjos and mandolins. I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the whole bag of technological tricks: Auto-Tune, lip-synching, whatever you’ve got.

Musical authenticity is in the emotional content, not the tools used to make it. Many musicians of my acquaintance fetishize vintage gear. There’s the hope that if you play the same harmonica as Little Walter Jacobs through the same mic and the same amp, maybe some of that Little Walter Jacobs magic will rub off on you. No doubt, quality gear sounds good in the right hands. But the hands are more important than the gear. Good tools can make it easier to realize an idea, and can even spark ideas. But a lame, unpracticed or anxious harmonica player will sound lame, unpracticed or anxious no matter what. And there’s nothing inherently soulful or un-soulful about any instrument. Drum machines only sound inauthentic when they emulate human drummers. Drum machines are perfectly authentic when used for their uniquely posthuman quality. It all depends on the musician. Like Herbie Hancock says, the machine doesn’t program itself.

As of this moment, my favorite song is “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

Is it authentic? Not really. It panders to me on many levels, as a hip-hop head, an R&B fan and a patriotic New Yorker. But Jay and Alicia pander so well, the beat is so tight, the chord progression and melody are so energizing, who cares?

The concern over purity is really about exclusivity. A mutt like me is is no position to be excluding anyone. But then, no one really is in a position to be excluding anyone. The shocking truth of biological evolution is that if you go back far enough, we’re all cousins with each other, and if you go back further, we’re cousins with bats, bananas, and bacteria. I believe strongly that the rules of evolution apply to music too. Our music all descends from the same monkey calls, so who’s in a position to be disputing the musical methods of anyone else? You don’t have to like everything, but disliking something is no reason to call its basic validity into question.

For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.

I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:

In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.

Seinfeld is comfort food for me. It simulates hanging out with Mom, the Kramer clan and the majority of my schoolmates. It’s like how King Of The Hill and Garrison Keillor simulate my dad’s family. But Seinfeld has some authenticity problems. Like, we’re supposed to believe that George, Elaine and Kramer aren’t Jewish. Frank and Estelle Costanza are supposed to be Italian? Whatever. Cosmo Kramer? More like Schlomo Kramer. My sister’s nickname for the changing of Jewish names and identities to fit into America is the semantic nosejob.

A few other fakinesses of Seinfeld: the slap bass riff on the soundtrack is a sampling keyboard. Aside from a few outdoor establishing shots, the entire show was shot in Los Angeles, even the street scenes.

But for all its TV fakiness, Seinfeld is sometimes remarkably psychologically truthful.

Sometimes it even has Buddhist wisdom.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.” This kind of confident embracing of one’s own self with all its shortcomings is a powerful thing. It’s the basic psychological strategy at work in Barack Obama’s confessional writing. It conveys and inspires inner strength.

Here I’m going to collect some breakdance media and see if any thoughts emerge. Your suggestions welcome.

Beat Street

Grandmaster Flash spins in Wild Style

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo broom dance

Here’s a fan video someone did, Michael Jackson breakdancing in slo-mo to Nite Lite by Yo Gotti.

Anything else I should see?