By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — Continuing Jfest 2019, the Lyceum’s Main Stage was nearly filled to capacity for Blueish: Jews & The Blues. Not too shabby for a Monday night. This concert featured a Jfest favorite, ethnomusicologist Yale Strom and Hot Pstromi. They were joined by three special guest artists: Blues mavens Robin Henkel, Sue Palmer and Tomcat Courtney.
And what do Jews and the Blues have to do with each other? A lot, actually. Chess Records, a Jazz and Blues label, was started by a family of Polish-Jews. Settling in Detroit after WWII, they were drawn to the Blues. This shouldn’t be surprising. With slavery, racism and persecution playing so great a part in our own history, we do know the troubles they’ve seen.
If you’re too orthodox to listen to kol ishah (the voice of a woman singing), I pity you. Elizabeth Schwartz, in a rich, velvety alto, opened with the traditional Blessing of the Torah and segued into Gershwin’s “It ain’t necessarily so.” Then a rollicking, vivacious klezmer tune set the house on fire and we were off!
Not all klezmer tunes come from bygone generations. “Children, come on” was an original by Strom. It had a dark mystique like something you’d hear in Birdland. All I needed was a glass of bourbon to complete the picture.
Blues guitarist Robin Henkel, clad in the baggiest, yellowest suit I’ve ever seen, transported us to the Mississippi Delta with a tribute to Muddy Waters. And Sue Palmer didn’t need all those sequins to sparkle. She did that with the Slide Piano of Fats Waller on a baby grand.
The charmingly humorous Tomcat Courtney first got into showbiz as a hoofer at fourteen. Growing up in western Texas, he saw the bent over bodies of the cotton pickers and decided that wasn’t for him. After so many years in entertainment, he can name drop legendary figures that he’s personally worked with such as Bojangles Robinson.
In the last number, we were invited to sing along to Leadbelly’s “We’re gonna tear Hitler down.” Inspired by the old Negro spirituals, the message resonates across a spectrum of peoples and certainly with us.
Once again, we’re living in a time of rising anti-Semitism. We’ve endured terrorist attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway, Nazi graffiti in La Jolla and other hate crimes. Our first instinct might be to hide our Stars of David, not be too obviously Jewish for our own protection. But now is not the time to hide. These threats make it that much more important to celebrate who we are. We need to be joyfully Jewish, to laugh, to sing and to dance. And we need to invite others to celebrate with us. This is how we defeat the haters, not by keeping quiet but by making noise. And the joyful noises we make will ring louder and stronger than hateful venom ever could.
Jfest continues with one final concert, The Klezmer Accordion at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad on Thursday, July 11, 7:30 p.m.
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Tauber is a freelance writer who specializes in coverage of the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com