I went out for breakfast in a greasy spoon, which is something I like to do.  It was your average small diner, most of the establishment taken up by the counter.  The Golden Cup. Owned by a Chinese family.  Nothing fancy about it.  I don’t think they even had a bathroom, at least not one that was visible.  I ordered pancakes and a cup of coffee.   The waiter, a middle aged man in a clean white button-down shirt who looked he was probably also the owner, leaned down in towards me looked me in the eye and slid a newspaper over to me.  "Want the paper?"  he asked me.

Ofcourse I wanted the paper.  The owner/waiter knew with the certainty that comes from years of close contact with the world at large refracted through the prism of a contained public space that what a grown man sitting alone at the counter of a diner needs is a copy of the paper.  He knew it as certainly as a jailer knows the hour of the execution of a condemend man and as completely as a batter knows the sound of the ball hitting the bat.  At that one moment I felt that the man on the side of the greasy spoon counter knew me better than anyone else in the world.  He knew my secret melancholy, the enui and pale romance of travel and the lonliness of being away from my family, the pleasures and disappointments of adulthood, the intensity of feeling and the need for escape that mark a life.  And he knew how to make it all disappear and how to let me put on the mask of adult masculinity, how to let me be a man sitting in a coffee shop.  Everything normal.  There was a kindness in the simplicity of the gesture.  I usually associate greasy spoosns with a degree of toughness, and somewhat expect to be mildly abused by the wait-staff.  But that’s in New York, and I was in San Francisco and things are a little different here.  There’s a little less to proove and a little less cause for senseless anger.  It was refreshing and beautifully human.

That night I played at Yoshi’s, the wonderful San Francisco jazz club, as part of the Idelsohn Society’s recreation of the 1961 album Mazel Tov Mis Amigos.  The album was made by a bunch of great Jazz and Latin players, including Doc Cheatham and Ray Barreto, playing Yiddish standards.  It was certainly a commercially motivated project, but the old record is very cool and the recreation concept is unique and fantastic.  The band was led by Arturo O’Farell, a great pianist and arranger and a lovely human being. Featured on the program were a bunch of special guests, including the legend of Fanya records and of the classic New York Salsa scene of the ’60s and ’70s, Larry Harlowe.  And I sang four songs. 

The highlight of the show was the reunion of the Burton Sisters, an Andrews Sisters style vocal duo who had worked the borscht belt circuit back in the ’40s and ’50s.  They hadn’t performed together in 50 years.  It was pretty remarkable to see these wonderful and sprightly ladies singing together after so long.  They were  wonderfully excited to be on stage again.  The audience was really moved by the experience of hearing them and seeing them.  They gave them several standing ovations.  It was really lovely.

Then I went back to my hotel room and packed my bag and took a shower and swallowed two aspirins and went to sleep.

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2. Like every Jewish boy, I was born out of a rupture in history, at a special moment when the past had been either intentionally discarded or else appropriated by weak-minded, self-appointed guardians. Those who broke with the past completely sought a new world of order and beauty in the cultural achievements of Western Europe. Those who clung to elements of the old ways lacked the breadth of spirit needed to re-imagine their history flourishing in a new world. As I grew, I was consumed by sorrow and rage because I perceived that there was a vacuum in my world where once there had been a spherical wholeness of culture and spirit. I heard ghosts speaking to me from out of the emptiness and I clung to them and invited them to enter into me.

3. I was born in New York City and for me the subway was the center of the world. The winding subterranean passageways were both inviting and terrifying. The tunnels of the subway system felt like they might open up at any moment into another world. Down by the trains I saw old Blues singers play, old African American men transplanted from the South recreating the incredible sounds of their youth. I admired their style and the dramatic intensity of their performance and the beauty of their music. In all aspects of my life I was surrounded by culture but the experience of hearing the Blues in the bowels of the city made an indelible mark on my young imagination. I decided as a little boy that when I grew up I would be a singer down by the trains.

4. I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ apartment in Queens when I was growing up. My grandmother loves color. One of the walls in her living room is painted dark red. She has a huge glass door china cabinet all filled to overflowing with bits of chintz and tchotchkes mixed up together with Judaic objects brought over from the Old World long ago. The china cabinet seemed to me a magical thing as a child. It seemed as if there was a ritual order to all of the beautiful things jumbled together there. Her china cabinet was a kind of family altar piece-a place where objects were brought as an offering to be made holy by their contact with the ancient past. My grandfather was the master presence in the house, his booming voice and quick silver imagination constantly enlivening all the things great and small in life. And although his role as a Cantor and a great artist inspired and excited me, it was the red of the wall and the jumble of images and the smells of antique dishes and rose perfume that provided the ritual atmosphere and physical culture of our family’s special gift. It was in this sensual realm that I came to know and love chazzanus, the Jewish spiritual music tradition which I have devoted now many years to studying and making my own. The music that The Sway Machinery will play for Hidden Melodies Revealed is in many ways a tribute to my grandparents’ home and to their wonderful and un-self-conscious blend of tradition and iconoclasm.

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