Dancing About Architecture, Vol. XI

Tonight’s Episode: the Tifereth Israel Ad Hoc Polyphonic Klezmer Orchestra and Tizmorim

October 4 and 5, 2007, Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Del Cerro, CA

This was supposed to be a four-parter. We had planned to go see Metric at the House of Blues on Wednesday, and then go back on Thursday for They Might Be Giants. It promised to be a veritable orgy of our favorite recording artists and performers doing what so few others can do, and nobody can do as well. Sadly, scheduling issues and stomachaches (what a funny lookin’ word that is) kept us away. So I am in no position to describe these fantastic performances, as they must surely have been. To make it up to you, I now offer you a deal you can’t lose: go to iTunes right now and download Metric’s song “Empty”. Do it. It’ll cost a buck. Listen to the whole thing, and if you don’t enjoy it, or remain unmoved that this is the sort of song that could launch one of the most compelling and tightly drawn rock concept albums of the decade, I will refund your money. That’s right, folks: if you don’t like it, I will send you one shiny silver dollar, no questions asked. You wanna download a Coldplay track instead, knock yourself out.

And if you haven’t been listening to They Might Be Giants over the last twenty-five years, I can only say I’m sorry for your loss. Get to it! Your life will be appreciably better for it, I promise.

Now to parts three and four, which will feature…me. See, about five years ago my synagogue somehow discovered that I play clarinet, mostly Jewish music even, so someone had the idea to enhance their “family” Shabbat services, the first Friday of each month, with instrumental music. This sort of thing is maybe a California thing, as synagogue services are generally a capella, and strictly speaking there shouldn’t be musical instruments besides voice on the Sabbath (Friday dusk till Saturday dusk). Anyway, I think this place might have already had a piano player doing this, but I got incorporated into the scheme along with a few other congregants, and after a year or so of shuffling through iterations, we’ve settled to me on clarinet, Sandy on piano, and Ted on bass. For a while Ted’s teenage son Ethan was using the venue to beef up his acoustic guitar skills, too, but recently dropped the gig, to our detriment. So now we are a trio; the Rabbi calls us the Tizmorim (song-players).

The gig typically goes like this: I sit in Friday afternoon traffic for an hour or so to get to the other side of Creation on time, and we mess around on our instruments while families with young kids and various congregants who go for this sort of thing file in. The “audience” consists of anywhere from a dozen people to a full house of a hundred-ish; usually it’s somewhere in the middle. We start at precisely Jewish Standard Time of 15 minutes late with the Rabbi leading off with a nigun (a typically wordless melody, e.g. “lai dai dai”) and we pick it up. He then leads through the series of prayers in the service, for which we play whatever melody for the congregation to join in singing, hopefully. Now, Jewish liturgical music is an enormous, chaotic, expanding universe: prayerbooks have text only, and for any piece of text there are a hundred melodies, such that each congregation the world over chooses which tune they dig and sometimes will try out new ones. So in the early days, it was a crapshoot for us because we never knew which melody the Rabbi would start on, or in which key, and we’d have to land on both pretty fast. Now we’ve settled on a routine set of melodies and generally the Rabbi (who always leads off the singing since we have no Cantor) gets pretty close to the key we like, and more importantly, a key he can handle. The installment of such a routine has good and bad sides for me. On the plus side, since I know the tunes now I can experiment in front of a friendly audience (they ain’t payin’ us!), and stretch my pathetically limited range just a little bit. On the minus side, changing the melodies up some could aid in that effort even more. Sometimes now I feel like I’m just calling it in.

Let’s discuss this past Friday’s gig. A little on the light side numbers-wise, but given an artificial boost by the extended family who I’d never seen before but for their new girl’s baby naming (it’s a thing we do for gals in place of the more direct branding thing we do for guys). One of the grandfathers wore a tie with a red blinking light in it. Really put me in the mood for introspective prayer. It was otherwise a pretty typical run. Most of the prayers we play along with happen to be frontloaded, so the first half of the service requires the most intense concentration and effort as we jump from one tune to the next. Both Sandy and Ted have great ears, and can always find the chords, even any tricky transitional ones, so they make it easy for me. All I have to do is play the melody and, depending on the tune, stretch it out and play countermelodies. In general the tunes are pretty simple anyway. Sandy has this tendency to get engrossed in his own noodling at the expense of listening. He’s quite good at it, the noodling, and it can add a lot to the overall sound, but it drives me nuts sometimes, too. It drives me nuts because I have the exact same tendency. It’s like a debilitating seizure that takes over when I sit in front of a piano. There are just so many keys to press! Whee!! This time, though, we all kept it together pretty well. It’s not unfair to say we’re pretty tight now. Some of the tunes are lovely, some are raucous, and some build up. Some are cloying, ugly and tiresome. It’s these last ones that are the biggest challenge for me, because I don’t know how to make them more enjoyable. I am constantly feeling like my playing is just making a bad thing worse.

We had some decent moments this time, but nothing superlative. “L’cha Dodi” offers me an opportunity to do a lot of note-bending and the rhythm section a chance to pump up the volume. We did an OK job on it, but didn’t reach heights we’ve approached a few times before. For “Oseh Shalom”, instead of using the old chestnut melody, we use this modern Debbie Friedman melody I could take or leave, although it is a builder. The trouble I have is that the bridge is awkward because it has a lot of open space, so it sounds lame if I don’t fill it in with a lot of movement. Often I forget the chord progression here, so I am usually shy to bust open for fear of hitting a honker and killing the moment. This time my approach was simply to go up an octave and play LOUDER. Safe, but still I can’t wrap myself around that one. We threw in “Sim’n Tov” for the baby naming, and I can’t say it was the most inspired version we’ve ever done, but the red blinking light was sucking my inspiration, not unlike HAL. After the service we retired to the usual Oneg in the Social Hall (bread, wine, cookies, coffee), and as usual I didn’t really talk to anyone but then that guy that looks like Eisenhower didn’t come tell me I sounded “a little flat” again, so I can’t complain.

Part four of this overlong chapter shall cover the night before the so-called Simcha Shabbat, Thursday night’s observance of Simchat Torah (Simcha means happy – get it?) The latter holiday falls at the end of a series of autumn observances which begin with the very solemn High Holidays and continue with more holidays of diminishing solemnity, so this ending is intended to be a real celebration. Our version involves a short, utterly irreverent service that involves the Rabbi picking on everything and everybody; to our fortune he has a pretty endearing and smart sense of humor. This is followed by a series of seven hakafot (processions) in the Social Hall, in which the Torahs (we have seven, I think) are paraded around by congregants and music is played and dancing is encouraged. This is maybe the fourth year where we’ve added an “Ad Hoc Polyphonic Klezmer Orchestra” to enhance the festivities. I’d say the first two terms in that title are accurate, polyphonic and orchestra are redundant although one would have to concede that those apply, however there is little resembling klezmer music here. It always bothers me when Jews, who might know better, lump Jewish musical styles together even if they have little to do with one another. As Americans we don’t confuse Christian rock with country line dance music, but there you have it. Our Orchestra, then, consisted of Sandy and I, Ted brought his violin, Ethan on bass, our esteemed lay congregant-cum-de facto Cantor Noah singing, and Al and the Rabbi on accordions; the latter led the singing. We played a standard hakafa melody, the Torahs were passed around, and then the Rabbi yelled out song numbers from this nice little Jewish fakebook they put together a few years ago for this event. These were your typical Jewish Hebrew numbers, zmirot (songs, usually sung around the Shabbat table or by kids or whenever, but not liturgical texts) – the same root word as found in Tizmorim and Klezmer. It took about an hour to get through all seven hakafot.

The night was, as ever, a perfect example of the strange middle ground occupied by the Conservative Jewish movement in the realm of religious celebration. The Reform movement (“lazy”), mostly probably don’t show up for this holiday; their take is generally more inclined to the spiritual. On the other end of the spectrum, the Orthodox (“crazy”) and all related stripes (e.g., Hasidic…particularly Hasidic) will party like its 1999! On Simchat Torah it is commanded that one get completely shikker. Commanded! The Orthodox and company take their celebrations seriously, so this holiday to them means not just lots of drinking, but dancing – real, hearty dancing on into the night and clapping and stomping and singing, simchat – the genuine article. Then there’s us (“hazy”). We show up for the holiday, and we try to celebrate. But we’re too uptight to take off the reins and let loose, and we’re too Americanized even to know how. I’m not saying booze has to be a part of it, but it does have its place on the mantle of proper celebration. So instead of a little schnapps and some ecstatic dancing, people were instead divided into five groups: the poor saps marching around more or less alone in the center of the hall carrying the Torahs, kids running around everywhere (that was a good start!), adults standing around the periphery engaged in soccermom chatter, us playing in a line up front, and the alter kochers sitting in chairs to one side. Three of these groups were having fun. We were, I think, although it’s so much more fun to play for people who are dancing; the kids were enjoying themselves, and the alter kochers seemed to be happy actually listening to us play. We could tell because every time we started up a new tune that was familiar to them (as they all would have been), they rocked in their chairs and added enthusiasm to their endless clapping that, I’m sorry, reminded me of somebody holding and clapping the paws of their adorable puppy – meta-clapping for the misguided. One old boy actually got up and danced around in the back with a big grin on his face. I wanted to hug him, he looked so happy. We ended with, dear me, Hava Nagila, and I felt like a goyishe band playing for Jews. But the smaller crowd still remaining got into it and danced, a little. And so the celebration ended, and the two fingers of whiskey I had at home later didn’t really satisfy. They say if you can reach one person in the audience you should leave feeling as though you’ve accomplished something. I can only say that after two consecutive nights of playing for this crowd, watching that one alter bocher dancing in the back made it all worthwhile.