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I first heard about KlezKamp at CAJE this summer. There, I was in the teen klezmer band (with Sruli & Lisa and David Schneyer) and, at the excellent CAJE night-o'-klez (with Klingon Klezmer, Metropolitan Klezmer, and a bunch others), met Ken Richmond and Shira Shazeer from the Klezmaniacs in Boston. The teen band jammed with Ken and Shira the following day, and Ken told me, "You have to come to KlezKamp."
So I did. Since there didn't seem to be a single web page about KlezKamp (at least not that any search engines seem to know about), I tracked down the Jewish-Music mailing list and asked. I finally found Living Traditions, asked for a flyer, got nothing, asked again, got nothing, and asked again. Finally I got two flyers, both of which I almost threw out because they looked like cream cheese advertisements. So I signed up for the youth orchestra, yiddish dance band by ear, instrument group, and ensemble, and got to work on my tape that the flyer said was required. I never sent it in. I'm glad for that because now looking back the tape is kind of embarrassing. They just accepted my self-evaluation of "intermediate" and put in in Frank London's ensemble, which would've happened anyway because I play trombone.
Klezkamp 2000
yakov chodoshMy mom said she'd drive me. I said no, I'll take the train. To make me feel more secure, we tried to set up to meet a friend's friend but that fell through and I ended up going along on Amtrak. Of course, it went completely smoothly. I sat in the last car and stretched out across the seats. The conductor was funny and the 30th Street Station is gorgeous. I met someone there who was going to KlezKamp (she walked up to me and said, "Are you going to KlezKamp?") so we split the cost of the shuttle.
When I got to the hotel there was a line but no chaos. This was good. I went to check in and they told me I was rooming with one "Deena Metzler." This was bad. They said I had to go talk to someone in the other room. In there a harried worker told me I needed to find Lauren and gestured to the right. I went to the woman sitting there and asked if she was Lauren. She took one look at me and turned away and said, "Lauren!" and, to my surprise, Loren walked over and asked me what the problem was. I told him and he straightened it out in about five minutes. So I ended up with Steve Stelman, a very cool (and hard-working; one night I came in at 3:30 and he was sitting on the bed in headphones transcribing music!) clarinet player from California.
So then I met Mike Winograd, the boy wonder from Long Island. I had just arrived and already had found someone else from the island! As it turned out, he was the only Long Islander I found there in the whole week. Later on that first day we jammed but it didn't go so well for me because small-group jamming is hard. Even harder when you don't know the music.
Later, I ate dinner and relaxed in my room for a few minutes. A very few minutes. Then it was time for the concert, which to me seemed a little weak, so I left the concert and was greeted by crazy jamming in the lobby. I think this was the best lobby jam of KlezKamp because we still had some strength to go along with the adrenaline. Two other trombonists were there. We played and played, songs I knew and songs I didn't. The last song we played was great, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and we really jammed out dixieland-style. Most of us retired at midnight.
So, the classes... on the first day i decided my first class was Dveykus with Frank London, not the youth orchestra I had signed up for because, as I found out, the youth in the youth orchestra were much youthier than the youths I had expected to find there. Most of the people I found myself hanging out with over the week were in their twenties and thirties anyway. They were much more interesting than the teenagers there.
So anyway Dveykus, all four days, was awesome. Mostly in that class we just sang different Hassidic songs. (Frank played sometimes, but mostly just sang. His attitude, shared with most of the staff, seemed to be that he wasn't there to show off -- he was there to have fun, on a level with everyone else.) The first few we learned were meterless niguns but later we learned table-thumpin' khusidls to rock the house. Lots of fun. Then on the last day we pulled the big "tish" in the room into the middle and really let go.
It was in Dveykus that I was initiated into the mysterious world of personal recording devices. At KlezKamp the machines run from the traditional big cassette tape style to the small cassette style to the fashionable digital minidisc recorders, with microphones of all size and shape. Myself, I brought neither tape recorder nor camera. And I have to say I think this is the best way to go. I had plenty to think about with my two instruments and my classes and everything else without computers and buttons to push and tapes to swap all over the place. And I think it's pretty funny that folks who would disdain the technology of written music on a staff are usually the same ones who swear by the somewhat newer technology of Sony Minidiscs.
My second class was the Yiddish Ear Band with Merlin Sheppard. Merlin is just the man. Definitely. He was an awesome bandleader and teacher. The ear band is the best band for beginners who don't know so much music because he really taught the music. At the rate of one tune per day you actually have a fighting chance at remembering some of it. I think the ear band is the best anyway because we definitely had the most fun. Especially on the last night. We went on last, after all the ensembles and other dance bands. Merlin started us off and we were moving but not really getting into it somehow. Then he took us to the next tune but we went to the wrong one. Then we played the A section three times. Finally he threw his hands up in frustration and decided he would go dance. He left all of us on the stage feeling kind of sheepish. So the clarinets decide we should get off the stage too. We marched all around the dance floor, underneath a bridge of linked arms and made our way back on the stage. Only I delayed getting back on, so I ended up standing in the front with Merlin. This was about the time that we really started to play, and it got absolutely crazy. Afterwards many people stayed on stage and kept jamming but I was too tired to keep up so I went to the ballroom to hang out and play laid-back jazz with Adrian (the British pianist, from the ear band -- awesome player). I actually at this point brought Lara (lindy hopper from Boston) with me and we danced in there for a short while. But she was pretty blitzed.
So anyway my third class, after lunch, was the Trombone class, by Dan Peisach. He was very good, teaching us ("us" being three trombones, a french horn and a tenor sax) some phat bass lines and helping me crack the code of the klezmer scales. As I said he was very good but I'd been kind of hoping the Shirim guy, David Harris, would be there, or maybe someone else like the Klezmer Conservatory Band trombonist. But it seems that Harris goes to KlezKanada so hopefully I'll see him there this summer. Anyway I liked the class quite a bit: I learned useful information and got a chance to relax a little bit before
Frank London's ensemble. Six trumpets, three trombones, four clarinets, two accordions, some saxes, poyk and french horn. And we rocked. The first few days were spent learning some hot freilachs and bulars. But then it really heated up when Dan Peisach brought in his favorite waltz, "The Hills of Moldovia." On the last two days Frank was really flying, leaping around the room and arranging the waltz and then, on the last day with a double-length rehearsal (and another meeting during the other groups before us) the hilarious suite that would become our show. Anyone who was there knows how awesome it ended up.
After the fourth class I usually found some way to occupy myself before dinner. One time I went to what I originally thought was the "Epicenter" but was actually the "Epes Center" and bought six CDs and a book. The goods were:
Naftule Brandwein - King of the Klezmer Clarinet (Essential! This feels more modern than you would expect!)
Dave Tarras - Yiddish-American Music (Also essential! But not as much fun. Tarras sounds great but over-rehearsed. However, any drawbacks are instantly vaporized by the amazing Henry Sapoznik liner notes, which are huge and extremely well-researched. There's some great klezmer-swing on here.)
Pete Sokolow and the Original Klezmer Jazz Band - Psukay Dovid, The Swinging Klezmer (The bargain of KlezKamp at $20 for over two hours of music! And awesome music too. A bulletproof combination of klezmer-cum-jazz and jazz-cum-klezmer. Essential for any swing dancers!)
Hassidic New Wave - Psycho-Semitic (Key word being "psycho" -- this stuff is far out. Very good but very far out. You have been warned.)
Frank London - Invocations (Cantorial music adapted for trumpet with stripped-down accompaniment. I couldn't wait for this after hearing his sporadic playing in Dveykus. I was not disappointed!)
Frank London - The Debt (Mad eclectic -- or, as Frank would say, "stupid eclectic" -- filmscore music, from a few different movies. Runs the gamut from funk to cool jazz to abstract avant-garde to beautiful a capella chorales.)
Ben Katchor - Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (Literary surrealism with nostalgic art. Katchor captures the spirit of New York perfectly in Julius Knipl. Women be warned, though: You are somewhat underrepresented in the book. It is an amazing work of art though.)Later I wound up with another CD -- Storysinging Dance Music by The Ballroom Roustabouts. This was from Kevin MacDowell, the person who owned the drum you might have seen around the ballroom and crystal rooms that said "www.rousta.com." I would call Kevin (a.k.a. "Kid Kazooie") the coolest person on earth if I didn't have to consider people like Adrienne Cooper, Frank London, Merlin Sheppard and Henry Sapoznik. Anyway he does win the prize for coolest person I met at KlezKamp from Bloomington, Indiana.
Anyway, I jammed with him on a few occasions and each time it was just a joy to be around him. A lot of fun was the last day when he played his Storysinging Dance Music ("The Day Before the Camera Got Invented," "Magic Rocks," and the timeless "I'm Going to the Library Smelling Like Garlic and Stinky Socks") in the crystal room for the little kids. I joined him on trombone. Mike Winograd (leader of the group I'm in now -- Kap'n Klezmer and the Klez Kadets) came by later and we had a crazy fun jam, going all-out later with "Up the Lazy River." He gave me his CD for $5 because that was all I had. Earlier, on the third night I think, I had jammed with him, Nik Ammar (the guitarist from Oi-Va-Voi who always wore the hat), Jonathan Walton (the trumpeter with OVV) and some other poeple. This was probably my favorite jam of the whole week, because we really went all-out, morphing the music in all directions and I actually led the part of it that wound up sounding the coolest.
The concerts were fun, at least as far as I remember them. Sunday night was a little disappointing, as I said above. Monday night I made a great move by going to sleep right after dinner, so Tuesday night I was fresh for the "wedding" shtick. I left when the operatic-type stuff started up. No insult on the performers, it's just that I'm not very hip to that kind of music. I heard that it got better later, but I was jamming in the ballroom by then so I missed that. Wednesday was incredible, with Adrienne Cooper (there simply is no way to say enough good things about her, personally and professionally and in every other way) and Judith & Tamar Cohen (Sephardic music, very welcome after hearing a bisl too much D-minor music) and Alicia Svigals. And all the other performers whose names I don't remember.
It was particularly cool seeing Alicia because she was partly responsible for me getting into klezmer in the first place. See, in 1995 or so, I was in ninth grade, and my mother was working as a hebrew school principal at Temple Beth Israel in Port Washington, Long Island. Anyway at TBI they got a huge grant for the arts, so they got Adrienne Cooper to administer it. She did some awesome things with that money, chief among them being getting the Klezmatics to do all kinds of stuff at the shul. I went to one concert and was hooked. So naturally I was excited when I heard that Sruli and Alicia would be leading an "intergenerational klezmer band" there. (After a few weeks, it became not quite so intergenerational when the younger kids were separated off into their own group.) At those Monday night rehearsals (which quickly became a looked-forward-to part of each week) I learned a lot. It's strange that I don't seem to particularly remember much from that group. I know that I learned, but I don't seem to remember how the rehearsals worked or what I learned then. Mostly it's just isolated moments in my head: discussing with Sruli (O, Sruli of the infinite patience) the differences between freilakhs and khusidls in the back of the library; grasping the concept of "D, A, D, A"; finally grasping the chord changes for our simple freilakhs; walking out in the rain to listen to a tape in Sruli's car. Also, recently I went to record over what I thought was an unimportant tape, but mistakenly hit play before sending its contents into oblivion. What I found was a tape Alicia had made for me from old records with some of the songs we were playing at the time. It was so freaky to hear it again.
So anyway it was cool seeing her again after four years. I walked over and introduced myself. Of course she didn't really remember me, but she was happy to hear what I just wrote above. It made me feel good to have talked to her.
Every night, after the formal concerts ended were dances with the reading band, the ear band and the Hassidic disco band. Lots of fun all around, except I didn't really like the Hassidic group. I thought the ear band was a little corny but it definitely got the job done, especially with the swing numbers. That was a lot of fun, as I got to show off my lindy skills with a great dancer, a girl -- actually I should say "woman," because, as she pointed out, she was nearly old enough to be my mother -- from Boston. I noticed a lot of other folks swing dancing too, everyone having a good time.
So... after the last night, after the Frank London ensemble, after the ear band, after the drowsy jazz jam in the ballroom, I went to bed around five. In the morning, I got up at ten, packed my clothes, double-checked all my bags, and went downstairs to check out and eat lunch. I sang for a little bit in the lobby with someone but I've forgotten her name. Then I ate standing up and went to steal the Klezmer Brass All-Stars poster that had materialized in the Epicenter but someone else got to it before I did. My father arrived. I said goodbye to my friends who were still there and, as I had done every other day that week, slung my drum bag over one shoulder and my trombone case over the other. I picked up my bags and walked to the car.
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Klezkamp info: Klezkamp is annually over Christmas break. For information, contact Living Traditions HAPPY NEW YEAR!
.-Yakov Chodosh
1 January 2001, 12:27 A.M.sign guestbook >>
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