‘Kosher Jammers’ Links Jewish and African-American Jazz

We learn that discrimination against both groups (Jews and African Americans) by the majority WASP Americans from the late 19th century through the 1950s closed many doors to any hope of economic success. White Christian America resented the influx of East European Jewish immigrants, a hatred ingrained in the antisemitic trope blaming them for the death of Jesus. Jews who assimilated, even converted, were tolerated a bit more, but African-Americans were not accepted at all because of their skin color. And assimilation was impossible before the Civil Rights Era.

Gerber details how the doors of entertainment were always open to anyone who was stupid enough to think they could make a living from it. Consequently, many Jews and African-Americans found themselves rubbing shoulders in the music business.

There is a lot of information as well in the book about the connection between the Jewish mode (freygish), cantorial singing and the Blues. Is it just coincidental that the bending cry on the clarinet, violin, tenor saxophone or in the human voice might connect Jewish music with jazz? Ornette Coleman (saxophonist) once was asked to listen to the famous Hungarian cantor/khazan  Josef”Yossele” Rosenblatt’s record of Hebrew prayers. “I went down to his basement, and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing and playing all in the same breath. I said, wait a minute, you can’t find those notes. Those are not ‘notes’, they don’t exist.”

Schoenberg says: ” …there ‘s all kinds of people from all kinds of cultures who have this cry and this moan in their voice, and so that’s something expressed in all kinds of music. I wouldn’t make too much of the Jewish cantor and the black blues connection without going into all the various connections. Now having said that, let me really contradict myself. Something that I always thought, if I named a jazz player where I’ve heard Jewish, it would be one of my favorite tenor saxophone players of all time, Al Cohn. And Al Cohn’s style formed a lot of Stan Getz’s style. Al Cohn had a certain kind of moaning quality to it that we do associate with a cantor.”

Packed with facts and trivia, this book will be full of surprises for the reader. The writing can be a bit dense at times where some things could be said much more succinctly. Some judicious editing was needed and the layout of the book is a bit messy. For example, the large type footnotes at the end of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph can be confusing and distracting.

One correction I have to make is for footnote No. 8 in Chapter 11. Gerber writes about the cellist Fred Katz who played jazz (Chico Hamilton), classical, folk and Chasidic music and played in the San Diego Jewish Festival’s Klezmer Summit concert “Jews and Jazz” just before he passed away in September 2013. I visited Fred (and jammed with him as well) in February 2013, but he never made it to the June concert, as he was too sick to travel.

Whether it is the klezmer crying on the violin or the jazz cat moaning on the tenor sax, it is more than just notes and scales that connect these two peoples and their cultures.

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Yale Strom is a klezmer musician, documentary filmmaker, author and an ethnomusicologist. He performs with his band Hot Pstromi June 27 at the Unitarian Church in Hillcrest for JFest’s Klezmer Summit.