{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/j678s4m05g/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["London, Frank"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/115/original/Boxed_Milken_Center_logo.png?1628711583","metadata":[],"provider":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/115/original/Boxed_Milken_Center_logo.png?1628711583","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/190/244/small/Screenshot_2023-06-23_at_9.15.06_AM.png?1687876480","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - 23050_Frank_London_FINAL.mp4"]},"duration":7109.92689,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/190/244/small/Screenshot_2023-06-23_at_9.15.06_AM.png?1687876480","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-milken.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/190/244/original/23050_Frank_London_FINAL.mp4?1686337520","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":7109.92689,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Frank London [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I grew up in Plainview, Long Island, which was a working class suburb of New York City. At the time I grew up it was. I'm the third of three children and I'm the first one who was...we're not--I'm not sure where I was born, whether I was born in the city or on Long Island, but I was the first one. They just moved out to Long Island, my family, from Queens and Plainview is a town that was pretty much half Jewish and half Italian. So a very white town, all Jewish and Italian. There was very little diversity except there were Jews and Italians. So I guess that's diversity. And I grew up obviously in the Jewish, not the Italian side. And that's where I grew up. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: And what was the nature of that? I mean the two communities. Was there interaction among them?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=15.0,77.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Yeah, I mean, it's funny--it's funny. So much of what I could tell you about my past, I only got in hindsight. Growing up, I wasn't aware of anything. I didn't know that there weren't other kinds of people there. I never thought of that. And this carries over into my music...the power...it totally parallels my musical growth. I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't know that there were all these other cultures and all these other peoples and all these other traditions. You just know what's in front of you. And yeah, we all hung out. I don't think we...me and the people who hung out with me, made a differentiation between the Jews or the Italians--all one thing, you know, probably the differentiations were, \"do you play in the band or not?\" or something like that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=77.0,129.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And it was only when I left and I realized that there was a bigger world out there. I know it sounds very naive, but it was very, very...it just was...it was probably a little bit that post-fifties idyllic suburban working class life. My father worked at Grumman Aerospace. He was a chemical engineer. My mom taught piano lessons in the town. She gave me my first few piano lessons until I kind of rebelled and said, \"I can't study with my mother.\" And then I sort of taught myself piano and then started trumpet in fourth grade, because the US used to have free music education for everyone universally, that started at nine years old. They said, what instruments should you play? What would you like to play? And I chose trumpet. And I think that this is a great loss that we have lost music education in public schools.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=129.0,192.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And so I'm a product of the public school system. I finally left the day I graduated high school. I left Plainview, never returned, spent a year at Brown University trying to figure out what I was doing. And I ended up doing nothing but music during that year. So I sort of figured I might as well go to music school. I had a few interesting and important influences in that one year. And some people I'm still in touch with. I like to say that \"Brother Ah\" who was Robert Northern, the French horn player from Coltrane's Africa Brass Sessions, and from Charlie Hayden's Liberation Music Orchestra taught a class at Brown back then in 1976 called Sound Awareness, where he got us into the idea of group improvisation before I ever knew anything about this. And I think that affected every aspect of my musical life after that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Before we get too far, can you talk a little bit more about what some of your musical experiences were like in your childhood era, in that part of your life?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=192.0,266.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So being a public school trumpeter, I played in the band. I played in the orchestra with Bernard Shaw. And it's funny the way things come around. I'm trying to focus on Jewish music. There was more...Bernard Shaw was the guy who taught orchestra in all the schools as opposed to each school had their own band director. And he played, as was common in those days, doubled on trumpet and violin because the trombone players would played cello. That's how it worked. And the bass players would play tuba. These are the doubles. And I remember...I'm cutting a little bit ahead. When I first moved back to New York City, one of my first jobs in New York City was a Hasidic club date, a wedding club date. And I walk in, and there's the other trumpet player, and it's Bernie Shaw, my orchestra director since I was nine years old.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=266.0,321.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I'm like, \"Mr. Shaw!,\" and he's like, \"we're on the bandstand now, you can call me Bernie.\" It was a beautiful moment. What's interesting is that through...this is hindsight, this is not something I experienced then, but I realized that...okay, I have to say that I have no connection to Yiddish music or Yiddish song, or Yiddish language, or klezmer or hazzanus or any of these traditional Jewish forms growing up. My family was a real, strictly observant, Long Island reformed Jewish family. The music in our synagogue was the absolutely execrable Long Island Jewish reform music, very, you know, Germanic hymns played on a bad electronic organ with an out tune choir and a cantor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: So what was the name of the synagogue?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=321.0,380.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Temple Beth Elohim.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: And do you remember the name of cantor? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: I don't. I remember the Rabbi. I started talking about...Yeah, Rabbi Stein, Louis Stein. Wonderful, sweet person who actually got in touch with me years later when I was actually out in the world as a professional musician. \"Very proud of you, Frank. You've done great things.\" Wonderful person. No...the cantor's name is best left forgotten. And my only connection to Jewish music before the big breakthrough, which happens about two years after, or three years. So first of all, it turns out I didn't know this, but Bernie Shaw, my teacher, was playing these Jewish club dates. So he knew all...had I only known I could have gained so much information. And he played with The Musickers and all the great musicians, klezmers, of that generation--that's his generation. [inaudible] He's gone.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=380.0,438.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: He was a beautiful person. Everyone loved Bernie Shaw. And, you know, he was up with the Paul Pincuses and the, you know, everyone of that generation, that's the New York Jewish Club, big world, I didn't know it existed. And not vis-a-vis Jewish music. So I found that out later. Also, what I found out later, this is so funny. I have, I think, two artifacts that came to me in that period. One, I realized much later in my box--in the family box of 45 singles, I realized we had one Mickey Katz 45, not even an LP. And it was the song--it was a parody of \"You Belong to Me?\" [sings] And the flip side was \"Feet up, Pat Him on the Pipick.\" And then, I also started working professionally as a musician.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=438.0,505.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And you can say I started working by the time I was 12 or 13, because we would go out and play Christmas carols and get paid, you know, with a brass quartet around Christmas time. And I would do church gigs. And I was in a rock band starting from like, around seventh grade. And we'd do parties and everything, playing trumpet and keyboards. And so I've been working as a musician since I was in my teens. And I did do some Jewish parties, weddings, and Bar Mitzvahs at the famous Huntington Townhouse, but we were mostly playing standards and dance music and any Jewish music when we had to play the Hora was either Israeli or Hava Nagila, or [sings]. That was the Jewish repertoire that I knew. And if anyone had ever told me that I was gonna end up working my entire next 40, 50 years in Jewish music, I would've laughed because there was nothing interesting musically about any of that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=505.0,565.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: The Israeli and the schlock, and the--nothing. And the other early connection--and I found this out later--but I had a book. There was a man named Harold Branch, who's an interesting...you know, rest in peace, who was another one of that generation of club date musicians. However, instead of like most of them being a teacher who was a club date musician, he was a publisher of music and he had his house, the publishing company was in his house, and it was in the more of the rich part of town. So I would ride my bike from the poor part of town where we lived up to the rich part, and I would go through his stacks of music and buy--he would put out guides to how to play club dates. And I still have the books where it's got the 15 Italian tunes and the 15 Irish tunes and the 15 Jewish tunes, you know, how to get through and all the standards of the day. And I still have that, but I have a book, which I only rediscovered after, many years after I was into klezmer, which was Dave Taras' own transcriptions of his music. Harold Branch published it. And I didn't even, I was already playing klezmer about five, six years, ten years when I was looking through some old boxes of music that had been packed up. I said, what is this? So I didn't even know. It was so close to me and I didn't even know it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=565.0,645.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: How did you come upon that?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: I bought it by going...yeah, he was a...he was just a guy who sold music. He was a publisher. And I don't know why I picked that up. I bought all sorts of music. I bought brass quintet music, you know, just everything I love. I love music. I'm obsessed with music.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=645.0,665.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: But basically all I played growing up, I played in the band, I played in the orchestra, I played any gig, if anyone hired me to do anything, I'm still the same. I'm still like that. If anyone hires me to do something, I'll do it. But I only really played rock and roll. That was it until I went away to college. And then everything opened up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: So talk a little bit about how you made that transition and the kinds of things that opened up, you started mentioning...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=665.0,691.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Well, first I went to Brown. First I went to Brown in 1976. I met a guy who said--sadly he became a schizophrenic, I don't even know if he's alive or not--Gary Shore, but he was a crazy tenor player. And he was obsessed with swing music like Cole Hawkins and Lester Young. And he showed me...and we would just spend hours playing jazz standards together, just trumpet and saxophone. Hours. And I didn't know, I'd never done that. This is what jazz kids--all the jazz kids here have been doing that since they were 10. So I started that. And then I was still into folk. I was kind of a real hippie then, so I would play folk music, but on the trumpet, hang out, you know, barefoot with the folk musicians. And played in the band, and in the jazz band. But then I studied Brother Ah's class and that opened me to this world of creative music, of experimental music, of avant garde and improvised music, and Black music--great Black music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=691.0,754.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I decided, really, I had to go somewhere. Brown was a great place, I should have stayed, but I wanted to study music. And up in--I was in Providence. So Boston had New England Conservatory, and they had this department called--I forget if I applied to the third stream department or the jazz department. It was called the Afro-American Music Department. And I have my degree in Afro-American Music performance. That's my degree. Afro-American trumpet performance. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Is there any other institution that offers that? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Well, they don't even offer it anymore. Now it's called jazz. And there are thousands of institutes that offer jazz. And in fact, we could...if this weren't a Jewish lecture, I would go into rapping about how the universities have killed jazz. But that's...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: But when I said it's your interview, I mean, it's your interview. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Well, but let's stay on Jewish... \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Go on a rant.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=754.0,806.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Let's... I'll rant about Jewish stuff. But part of the third stream department...the idea of third stream for those who don't know, is that Gunther Schuller posited that classical music is one stream (by which he meant Western classical) and jazz is a second stream. And he wanted a third stream, which blended the two. That was his original impetus. But by the time I got there, it actually expanded, due to other things which are crucial to my entire development, which is using your ears. And I still believe, as a fundamental of all music of my career, of everything important is listening. And we learn--you learn how to listen. So that was the first thing. Ear training and listening and learning music by ear and transcribing music. And secondly, the entire fields of what are called, horribly, \"ethnic music,\" although we used to have a badge, \"everything is ethnic, everybody's ethnic.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=806.0,868.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: But basically what happened both through school and through living in Boston, because as I said, I like to play music. So I went from knowing nothing to going to Brown and learning a little bit about jazz to all of a sudden experiencing everything. Within a year of getting to Boston, I was playing in salsa bands with the Orchestra Pabon, Los Hermanos Pabon. I was playing Haitian music. And of course I would volunteer to write the horn arrangements for each band. So I'm playing and writing in Volo Volo and traveling to Haiti with them. I'm playing in Serbian gypsy bands. I put together Les Miserables Brass Band about my obsession with brass band music. I'm playing in dance companies. And all of a sudden I went from knowing nothing to listening to everything. And it hasn't stopped.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=868.0,922.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And it keeps...and then I would get deeply into something. And then something else. The very famous Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, we never fail to laugh when we get together, that my first Brazilian gig was playing a Carnival gig with Cyro back in like 1978. You know, I had no idea. And all of a sudden I'm sitting next to the great trumpeter Claudio Roditi, and we're playing Carnival gigs. So I mean, being a trumpeter who is open to a lot of experience, who can read music, who listens...and part of listening is you copy, you emulate, you make...I try to make myself fit in situations. And I was able...and I've been able to work in many situations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Did you start like that, off the bat? The way you tell the story, you kinda arrived in Boston and just started picking up lots of gigs. So did you have that sort of voracious appetite and that desire to really learn all these different things or how did it...?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=922.0,987.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Well, I think it's always been there. I just didn't know that there were all those things to learn. I mean, in high school, again, in the hippie days, you know, I would hang out in the hallways of the school. I remember this--I think I didn't wear shoes for about two, three years. It was that time of life in the seventies. And hang out with the the kids strumming their guitars and singing folk protest songs. I was the guy sitting there with the trumpet. So I was used to working by ear and playing folk music and learning how to blend and not caring that, \"why are you playing trumpet with a bunch of guys singing Bob Dylan songs?\" You know, why not? Cause I'm a trumpeter. That's what we do. So I just, yeah, I think I just love music and I love experiences and I'm open to anything, you know, like, just say yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=987.0,1038.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Yeah, sure. Just say yes. So in the midst of this...here's the funny thing that happened when I was in my early teens, around 13 or 14, I went to a--my parents sent me to a music and art camp called Lighthouse Music Camp in...Potstown, Pottsville Pennsylvania. Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It's wherever they make Yuengling beer, because that's the first beer I ever got drunk on, is Yuengling beer. So, and the teacher there, although he was less than four years older than me, I was still a punk camper. And he was already a counselor and a band director, was Hankus Netsky. So back then, I'm a teen, I'm, you know, like barely past Bar Mitzvah. And there's this guy, and he's the jazz band director. Next thing I know, I get to New England Conservatory. And again, I'm--he's not that much older than me.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1038.0,1097.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I'm 19 and he's probably 22. He's already teaching in the third stream department. So he's again my teacher. And then around 1979, they're organizing a concert. Because they had theme concerts of Jewish music. And Hankus had just sort of discovered his family's...I'm not gonna go into it, you can do your interview with him, but he had just sort of discovered his family's connection to klezmer and the family. And he was getting deep into this whole research. And, at this time, if you look at, like your calendar, mid seventies, we had just had what can be seen as the first few recordings. I didn't know this at the time. The first few recordings of the klezmer revival had just come out. So I would say that the first one is Giora Feidman record, which is early seventies. I think the second one, don't quote me exactly, but you can check it on the internet more or less at the same time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1097.0,1156.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: You have The Klezmorim's first record. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: East Side Wedding.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Is that the first one? Yes. The Andy Statman, Zev Feldman, Marty Confurius record. And the first Kapelye record, I think that comes a little later, but pretty quickly between let's say 70...between 1972 and 1977, you get those four records. I didn't know any of them at the time, but just to know what's...and I didn't know at the time that Hankus was in touch with all these same people who were just starting this thing. And he was also checking out his family. All I knew was I was there, I was at the school, and he's getting people together to recreate some old recordings of klezmer music or whatever it was called or something, whatever. He didn't tell us just like, \"come.\" Yeah. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Wasn't it...didn't they do many different themed concerts? At NEC?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Yes, yes. Absolutely. That, that was my...that was my preference was at NEC in the third steam department. They did theme concerts.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1156.0,1220.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: One of the most important ones for me actually was the Thelonious Monk concert when my partner in crime, Tom Hall, and I did a two horn arrangement of \"Epistrophy,\" which, if you know the song and is not an easy thing to do for just two horns. And maybe...I want to stay on the Jewish music track, but we should talk about Ensemble Garuda before we're done. That's an aside, but that's about me and my music history. But finishing this thing. So, yes, so they did theme concerts. I don't know why the only ones I remember now are the Monk Concert and the Jewish Music Concert. But there were surely others. On this Jewish music concert, I know--I think I also did something with Joe Maneri. And...but in any case, Hankus has put a bunch of us together and we learned two or three songs. We learned \"Lebedig and Freilach\" [sings].","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1220.0,1274.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And we learned it from, you know, transcribing the record, 'cause that's how we did everything, by ear. And I forget which...one vocal song. And so we did three songs. 1979, 1980--we can check with Hankus exactly what year it was--'79 or '80. And this is the fascinating part, is that immediately from these three songs on a concert, this group that didn't exist as a group--it was just a bunch of students playing together--started getting besieged with offers to play concerts. Because there was...it was such a zeitgeist moment of identity. I and many others of us see it as sort of what happened post Alex Haley's Roots, which he just played on television. And this was the era of the beginning of identity and hyphenated Americans. I'm not an American. I'm Irish-American, I'm Jewish-American, this thing.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1274.0,1337.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And the idea of looking at your roots, which didn't really appeal to me. I was just fine learning about music and life and I had no need to go back. But it was certainly in the air. And as we know from history, American Judaism post-Holocaust and post state of Israel, had really moved away from Yiddishism and klezmer and all these cultural artifacts, and really moved to a pro-Israeli thing, the music was--and again, this is the music that never interested me. Of course, I didn't know then about all the interest in Israeli music and all the Mizrahi music. This all comes later. But the stuff I heard, which was all the, you know, [sings] and all that, it's horrible. Why would anyone want to play that? Or, you know, [sings] I mean, why would you...you know? So, but I wasn't the only one who felt dissatisfied both politically and aesthetically and as an identity, with the idea that Jewish identity was Israeli identity, especially in the 1970s.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1337.0,1412.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It seemed like there were a lot of people who said, wait, this is not who I am. And especially those people who were looking to make it, whose parents and grandparents, like mine, were totally assimilated, who were saying, wait, there's something back there that they were covering up. And so there were many people. So they latched onto our concerts and \"we want, what is this thing you're doing? This sounds like the thing I heard my grandmother sing and and play when I was a kid.\" And there weren't 3000 klezmer bands in five in every town. So we were still in college or just right out. And all of a sudden we're working all the time. Of course I'm doing a thousand other things, but right away, and I think they had to name the band. So Hankus came up with the Klezmer Conservatory Band as kind of a joke because klezmer was never in a conservatory.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1412.0,1463.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So that was his thing. So, and then we recorded our first album. So we're like our album, KCB's first album, Yiddishe Renaissance is sort of the final note of the very first, first wave. There are maybe a couple of others. First wave of the klezmer revival. I forget, I'd have to look whether, the Chicago Band, well, no, there's still, there's bands like Alfind [sic] in Europe. There are some, a couple of other European bands like Alfind [sic] that were equally around from that time period. But again, I found this all out later. So that's the end of that period.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: I wanted to ask you something, there were three songs on that concert, but you can't make a concert of three songs. So it was a Jewish music concert, what else were you playing?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1463.0,1512.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Oh, well, wasn't one...these theme concerts weren't only one group. They were variety shows. Because they wanted feature all the students in the department. Like I said, Joe Maneri, if you don't know who Joe is, you have to know Joe Maneri. Too bad he's not alive anymore to interview. But I think he's been interviewed. Joe Maneri taught us so much. He knew what it was all about. He was an avant garde composer. I feel like I have so many anecdotes, but they're not about Jewish music per se. But, so I don't...I can go on and on. You got me on Joe Maneri. He was...he wore a bad toupee, a really like, ill-fitting...He was a kind of a stocky, shortsighted, you know, like what do they said, built like a fireplug kind of Brooklyn guy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1512.0,1561.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: You know, Brooklyn \"ethnic\" and \"ethnic\" in Brooklyn meant you were either Jewish, Italian, or Greek. And it was all the same thing. He was a Greek guy. And through Greek music, he played micro tonally. But as an avant garde composer, which he was, he used the microtones of Greek wedding music in his avant garde compositions. And he was an improviser. And he was also a total mystical, Jesus fanatic in the best sense of the word. And it's beautiful because I still use him as a model for religiosity. If there was a young Christian student who was very into Jesus, they would have prayer meetings together. But as a public person, he would never bring it up for anyone else unless you came to him. And I always think of Joe, and yet spirituality and Jesus filled his life and inspired his music. And I said, yeah, that's what religion should do.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1561.0,1619.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It should make a person act like a better person. It's not something you have to force on someone else. And that was Joe. And he would just talk about love. He just talked about love. And when he taught composition, he said, \"you write a melody of love.\" It was just...and his voice is always in my head. But being that he was an improviser...oh and the other great Joe story, which is for a jazz player. So he was very insecure. He was, because he was just a very insecure, neurotic guy. He told this story about this concert he played back in the sixties, in the real heart of the Vietnam War in the era of like '64, the radical jazz thing at...I think it was at St. Mark's Church or [inaudible] Church, one of the big... And he's telling the story about--it was an improvised concert and it was recorded and broadcast either on WBAR or WRVR, one of the baby stations.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1619.0,1674.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And that Ornette Coleman heard the broadcast and called him up on the phone 'cause that's what you did in those days. And said, \"are you the guy who played that? It's fantastic. This is the greatest thing I've ever heard.\" And then he turns to us little 19 year old kids and the class goes, and he's not joking. Joe goes, he played us the tape then, and we're like, our jaws are dropping. And he goes, \"is it any good?\" He was that insecure about his work. Humble. But so...he played on the concert because from his Greek music and his improv, he learned something like a doina and he played this avant garde microtonal doina. So right from the beginning, my introduction and--I'll sort of end this segment here--my introduction to Jewish music was intertwined with a lot of other things. And it remains. It was intertwined with a mix of learning from sources, meaning lists, finding the old recordings and learning them by ear and trying to play them exactly.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1674.0,1738.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: But also improvisation from within the genre or without, and being very consciously aware, \"Yes, what I'm doing now is strictly within the genre, the stylistic parameters of the genre.\" Or, \"no, now I'm clearly doing something which is not,\" and I never do anything where I blur the lines. I know when I'm doing something that's inside or outside, it's a choice. You know, I would never say, as opposed to some people who talk about klezmer, I would never say that something is klezmer when I know it's not. I don't need to misrepresent anything. The academic in me doesn't. The musician just plays whatever I want to play. So improvisation, cross-culturalism and seeing this Jewish music within the world of world musics of different musical traditions. I guess the part that I didn't say is when I first heard the music that Hankus played us, I was like shocked.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1738.0,1801.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And it wasn't, \"oh, I finally heard the music of my family and ancestors. I'm connecting.\" It wasn't that at all. It was like, you know, \"this is a music I really like. Isn't that cool that I don't only like the musics of other people's. I actually also like one that happens to be from my background.\" But it was nothing like--it wasn't like I identified with that more. I still don't, I identify much more with either African American music or Latin music, you know, or any of a number of things, or just improvised music or avant-garde music. But it--I gotta say, it was really nice to know that we weren't the only people on earth who didn't have a good music in our past--in our history.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1801.0,1847.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: I believe you've written a little bit about how you may not have had this--this feeling of reconnecting to your roots or so, or finding some sort of unanswered question that has been looming over your whole life. But did other people make certain assumptions about that? And what has been your experience?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1847.0,1870.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I would say my entire life and career within Jewish music has been about dealing with other people's false assumptions and learning how to deal with them. Even this week, you know, I'm in my sixties, I just premiered my first opera this year. Just did my first symphony about three years ago, et cetera. I just did an avant-garde full length dance theater piece, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I come in here and they're like, \"oh, this is...\" you know, they'll introduce me around, \"this is Franklin he's the klezmer guy.\" And I learned--I remember the day that I learned how to react, how to be an adult. It's very hard. 'Cause you want to say \"I'm not just that, I'm much...\" I remember being introduced to the head of BAM, Joe Lillo [sic], the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and who was...and the head of La MaMa who was still alive, Ellen Stewart.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1870.0,1940.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And they were bringing me in to compose a theater score. And they're like, \"this is Frank London. He's the klezmer musician.\" And they're like, \"oh, we love your klezmer music.\" And I just looked at them and said \"thank you.\" That was a very adult moment, one of my few ones. So yeah, the assumptions--but the bigger assumption, and this is the assumption which actually made my whole career, is that, so I got out of New England Conservatory. I was still freelancing, I was still playing with the Klezmer Conservatory Band and a thousand other bands, three or four years. Stayed in Boston, moved to New York, which is what one did. I did it for my career. I did it to be close to my grandparents before they passed away. 'Cause I loved them dearly.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1940.0,1993.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Started the Klezmatics--all this stuff. And it's around 1988 now. I've been out of school for like eight years. We had just started the Klezmatics a couple years before that in New York. My first tour of Europe as a musician, I was playing with Kip Hanrahan's band, which is an incredible--Kip that's another story. Kip is an auteur, but he...it was the greatest Latin jazz musicians on the planet. I'll just...and jazz and improvisers, but it was Giovanni Hidalgo and Milton Cardona and Andy Gonzalez and Steve Swallow and Jack Bruce. Jack Bruce from Cream. Now this is my music. This is me growing up, I was playing with Jack Bruce from Cream. And so I was...and my favorite moment of that, 'cause all I listened to when I was growing up was like Cream and King Crimson and you know, and I--and we would always close this big Latin jazz show with \"Sunshine of Your Love.\" [sings melody]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=1993.0,2060.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And we were in Italy and Ginger Baker sat in, the drummer from Cream, you know that, but maybe someone else doesn't. And I was sitting there and I'm playing [sings melody of \"Sunshine of Your Love\"] and there's Ginger Baker playing bass and there's--I mean, Ginger Baker playing drums and Jack Bruce playing bass. And I said, oh gee, that must make me Eric Clapton! So that was, you know, it felt like my life was achieved. But my point is this, that was my first tour of Europe. My second tour of Europe was playing with Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy, which was...Lester Bowie is my hero. My teacher alav ha-shalom, I miss him every day. He taught me everything about everything. And he was the greatest ever. And we could talk all of the next three hours about Lester Bowie. In any case. So the first time I'm in Europe, I'm with a Latin experimental Latin group.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2060.0,2114.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Second time I'm with an experimental jazz group. And, the third time the Klezmatics, way before we deserved it, got a tour Europe, actually one concert at a festival in Berlin, 1988, the Heimatklänge Festival. And basically, we were New York Jews and we had also decided for various reasons to be out as gay Jews. And we weren't all Jewish and we weren't all gay, but we made this our stage--our public persona is that we identified as Jews and as gays. And we put this out there. And the professional music people, the journalists, and the promoters said, you know what? We can sell these young New York Jews as the authentic, traditional young generation of Jewish music. 'Cause you have to understand 1988 is the birth of the idea of world music. World music as a marketing phenomenon. Not...obviously ethnomusicology has been going on, but there was a conference--you know about this?--it wasn't even a conference.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2114.0,2186.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It was a meeting on the second floor of a pub in London with the important players. And they just started WOMAD. And they started--and they're trying to decide what to call this phenomenon. And they were like, should we call it \"roots music\"? Musique Mondiale was the French suggestion. And they came up after many beers. They said, its gonna be \"world music.\" And then you would go into Tower Records and there was a world music section and the World Music Festival. So everything was world music. And Klezmatics got dubbed like the official klezmer Jewish voice of the world music movement because of a false assumption that oh, they are the authentic thing. And which is bullshit because with maybe the slight exception, slight of Lorin Sklamberg, we all learned this stuff totally as any outsider would learn it by studying the recordings and by studying...you know, we learned it as outsiders, not as insiders.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2186.0,2248.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: We were not...But based on the basically salability of a bunch of--since everyone knows that New York means Jewish, so by being, \"oh, this is a New York band playing klezmer,\" we were instantly authentic. And I remember having a crisis of confidence, or of moral judgment or whatever, and saying, do I want to be sold this way? It's a repugnant thing to be put in a box. And I made a choice. I said, you know what, I need to work and I do--getting ready to support family. And I like the music. I have no problem. I mean, I love playing with Lester. I love playing with Kip Hanrahan, and I love playing with the Klezmatics. And I said, you know what,I'm going to do any music I do on my terms and if they're gonna buy it on my terms...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2248.0,2306.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: We, so we never went out and played the expected klezmer show. We didn't go out and play the \"Rumania, Rumania\" and play the songs and people would say, \"play this.\" And we would say \"no.\" So we always did it on our terms and we developed our own aesthetic. And everything I've done since then in Jewish music I do on my terms. But it was a--it was a choice. I could fight that assumption. I could say, you know what, this seems to be what happened. I'm a little bit of a go with the flow kind of person. And I said, but I'm gonna do it on...And we did it on our political terms and on our musical terms. And we've had a lot of fun being able to...and we did it well, and we got better. I don't think we were very good at the beginning. We had great ideas, but we weren't very good. The Klezmatics, we got a lot better at the tradition as the years went on.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2306.0,2357.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: Could you back up and talk a little bit about how that... of all your projects, I assume that's probably the one that you're most known for. Or the most known...How did the Klezmatics come to be the Klezmatics?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2357.0,2373.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Let's start with one thing and then get back there, because you asked me, you suggested that I'm most known for the Klezmatics. And I have to just say that it's--I've often said, and I truly believe, I'm a really big fish in a really small pond. Klezmer music, Yiddish music is a tiny--it's barely a pond. It's barely a little, you know, waiting pool in the world. But I'm a really big fish in that pond. And so, you know, people think, oh, you're famous. Well, yes, among people who know that thing, you know, it's like, it's...it is very funny. This dichotomy. I mean, 99.99999% have never--so, you know, you call, I'm best known--parenthesis--of people who've even heard of me at all.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2373.0,2427.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: Well, right, what I'm getting at, is if you talk to somebody who's outside of that world and you mention something about klezmer, like 8 times outta 10 they're going to say, oh yeah, I've heard the Klezmatics.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2427.0,2438.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Maybe, maybe. But you know what? And 8 times out of those 10--8 out of the, or 7 out of those 8 are confusing Klezmatics with klezmer. You know, I'm just...so I'm used to it. This whole thing about--I don't wanna avoid your question, but it is just interesting, the perception thing. I think people conflate klezmer and Klezmatics. \"Oh yeah, I've heard of you guys, the Klezmers,\" you know, whatever. And then they'll start to describe me some other klezmer band and I'll smile and go, \"oh yeah, you're talking about that band. Right. Thank you.\" That's okay. It's all good. But what was the point? Okay, the question...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: The question was how did the Klezmatics...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2438.0,2480.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Okay, so had did they...the Klezmatics began very simply. I moved to New York. I was still playing with the Klezmer Conservatory band, I hadn't left yet, I was still commuting. And basically, well an interesting side to this--a different side is that I started playing Hasidic weddings and things in New York and other Jewish weddings and learned other Jewish musics. But that's--and that leads into the niggunim and a lot of other things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: That doesn't seem like an aside, but...we'll get there. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Well....no, no, no....it's just like we can't mesh everything together. It's not an aside, it's very related because I bring them together. But I moved to New York. Well, it's funny. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: So what year did you move to New York? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Uh, 1985. And we formed in 1986. Oh my, actually, I did leave out my other, my third tour of Europe before the Klezmatics, which actually made for the Klezmatics career.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2480.0,2542.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So I'll throw that in in his story. So I guess again, I moved to New York. I have to make a living. And I made--and I was playing in salsa bands. And you know, all the same. Just all the same. I played in a twenty-tuba choir on the top of city Hall. I'll just do anything. 'Cause I love music and I love gigging and I'd like to make a living. Klezmatics...so some guy who...I forgot his name...Rob...Rob Thomas...No, Rob Thomas is the lead singer of Matchbox Twenty, yeah. And I recorded with him. I got...I recorded...I recorded with him on shofar and I didn't realize, and I was getting paid double scale and I brought like ten shofars and I didn't realize that he was actually a fundamentalist, like a very right-wing Jesus freak, like a friend of Mel Gibson kind of guy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2542.0,2603.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And that, the music that we were doing, I had no idea. Walking in the studio, it was a great session and lots of money and fun just playing shofar, not even trumpet. It was his music inspired by Mel Gibson's...What was his big, Christian passion? The Passion of the Christ. It was the...and I'm sitting there and they were trying to make it sound biblical, so they hired me to play. So that's Rob Thomas. Rob Garcia! No, he's an avant-garde drummer. There's some guy named Rob who put an ad in the Village Voice when, back in the day when that's how you started bands, and he said, \"I'm looking to play klezmer music. Anyone want to join me?\" And I said, in that same way, I say yes to everything was like, well, I know how to play klezmer music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2603.0,2649.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It wouldn't hurt to have a band here in New York so we could do a little gig. So someone called us. So I went down and basically the Klezmatics started out of that ad. And one thing led to the next. You can find all the history of the Klezmatics and how Dave Licht, had just moved to town playing with Shockabilly and Eugene Chadbourne. But he knew Henry Sapoznik and he called Henry and Henry said, oh, there's this young kid, Frank London. So Dave called me and how I was then... because I was playing Balkan music and was trying to meet people, I went down to Zlatne Uste, which is the Balkan Brass band that still exists now, 40 some odd years later. And there was Lorin Sklamberg and we played Balkan music together. And then I ran into him in a coffee shop in the East Village.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2649.0,2698.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I said, \"oh, you're the guy, that Balkan accordion player. Do you want to play in this new klezmer band?\" I didn't even know that Lorin was a singer or that he had a background in Jewish music. I had no idea. I said, you're that accordionist that I just met. You want to come down and play with us? We're putting in the klezmer band. And he knew Paul from the Balkan scene Margo Leverett. I forget how she got in. But so we just started and then--oh, Margo came in after this guy Rob who started the band, disappeared. So the guy who started the whole thing disappeared. And then we got Margo Leverett as our first clarinetist. So here we are, we're playing like little gigs around New York. And at that point I wanted us to really learn the tradition.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2698.0,2745.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: 'Cause I was just starting to get the bug of klezmer and I wanted to do it right. And as opposed to a lot of the other klezmer bands, my only rule for us, well we had a couple of rules. One was we weren't gonna play schlock. Two was we were not gonna engage in nostalgia. We were gonna only play this music as good music that's what we cared about. And that actually, right away, by not playing schlock and being nostalgic separated us from all the other bands. We wouldn't do something just 'cause people went to hear it. It was a...we never played \"Oyfn Pripetshik\" or \"Rumania Rumania\" or anything because why? But the other thing was that we said, I said, we're not gonna do--at this point, I was aware of the other band I was aware of the Klezmorim, Kapelye, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Andy Statman. So we're not gonna do any of the music that they're doing so that we can make our own identity.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2745.0,2802.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: None of us were composing music yet. So it was all found repertoire. So I wanted us to have our own identity, so we would make a point of only choosing things that no one else was doing. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: But you were rendering these in basically a semi-historically....\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Totally. In fact, because of the instrumentation that we just fell upon, it wasn't planned. Nothing about the Klezmatics was planned, it just kind of happened. But it turned out that our instrumentation matched Dave Tarras' Boibriker Kapelle, a six piece group with a rhythm section, trumpet, clarinet, and violin. So we started by transcribing these Dave Tarras recordings that had exactly that personnel. So that's actually how we started, by copying these 1930s Dave Tarras records with the same personnel and our earliest repertoire--and there's one song on our \"20th Anniversary Town Hall Concert\" in, I guess, well 2006, where Margo came back and we played like the first song that we all learned, the first Dave Tarras transcription.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2802.0,2867.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: No, we only thought our original purpose was to play the music as close to the way it was played on the old recordings as possible. And the only thing that we were changing to make it \"hipper\" or anything, was the attitude and dialectic around it and the choice of repertoire. We only chose songs with words that we cared about. We didn't just sing any stupid song. We didn't write any new songs. That all came later, but we only--it's a great repertoire. We found out about the Yiddish socialist repertoire. We said, great, this is us. We took the Song of Songs from the Bible in Yehoash's Yiddish translation. And we said, oh, this can be read as as male homoerotic love poetry. Let's do it. You know? So it was our choices. And by putting--we gave ourselves what felt like the hip name in 1986.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2867.0,2923.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It's rather dated--that was the year of the Plasmatics and Wendy O. Williams driving her car through television sets. Do you remember this? Yeah. So we thought Klezmatics was cool, but really musically, we were really adhering to the straight and narrow. We just weren't being a schlocky wedding band and doing everything, but we weren't doing anything innovative. What happened was we went over--so then my third gig in Europe, I was playing, I was the music director for David Byrne and Robert Wilson's \"The Knee Plays,\" which was a part of Robert Wilson's the Civil Wars cycle of plays. And David Byrne did the texts and he recited the text and my band, Les Miserables Brass Band played the music. And we were playing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. And I'm also a voracious listener and I listen still to far and wide and I just like stuff and weirder things.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2923.0,2993.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So I discovered when I was still in Boston, a band called 3 Mustaphas 3, I don't know if you've heard of them. Led uh, again, not led well co-led by Ben Mandelson, aka Hijaz Mustapha. They all pretended to be brothers named Mustapha. And they were doing a world music thing like I was doing with Les Miserables Brass Band, but as an electric folk band just picking songs from different traditions and playing them. And they did a klezmer song on one of their earliest LPs. And I remember hearing it, and I'll never forget the funny story. I don't know if these gentlemen aren't old enough--you might not be old enough, none of our listeners--but in the old days we had LPs and 45s, and they go at different speeds and the 45 singles go faster and the LPs go slower at 33.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=2993.0,3047.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And sometimes your machine even played 78s. So you would have a record player and you would have to change the speed depending what you put on. So there was a famous record, famous to me by a psychedelic group, which actually turned out to have Jewish music influences, but I didn't know that at the time either, called Moby Grape, and who did a version of, I think of Shalom Aleichem, this is a sidetrack in Jewish music history. And they did this thing on one of their records where they were doing sort of a '20s kind of Ricky Tink [sic] thing in the middle of a psychedelic rock album. And what you had to do is go turn--go up to your turntable and turn it from 33 to 78 in the middle of the thing. And then for that one track, so I put on--so now I bought the 3 Mustaphas 3 record, put it on my turntable.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3047.0,3101.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I'm playing at 33, and all of a sudden I get to the \"klezmer\" track. I should know which one it was--I'll think of it. And it's totally the most psychedelic thing I've ever heard. It sounds like it's recorded in an empty swimming pool--which it turns out it was recorded in an empty swimming pool--but it sounds like this [makes echo noises] but I recognize this song. I said, these guys are geniuses. This is the most avant-garde klezmer. Turns out, no, I messed up. They were doing the same trick, that Moby Grape did 10 years earlier where you're supposed to go to your turntable at that point, and turn it from 33 up to 45. And at speed it just sounded like the normal tune. But I didn't know. So I knew then. So jump cut. And now the part that I don't remember, 'cause this is before the computers and before internet.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3101.0,3154.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I don't know how I got in touch with Ben Mandelson. I don't know how, I must have written him a letter, a postcard out of nowhere. I have no idea. Or maybe someone...I was in London with David Byrne and maybe someone knew Ben. And somehow we got introduced. And Ben was one of the people, besides being in the 3 Mustaphas, who was part of this world music mafia that made the decision to call it world music and started these early world music festivals. And I meet him when I'm over there and I tell him about the 3 Mustaphas, and he loved the story, you know, 'cause I mean, not many people...It was a very small world. And he...I told him about the Klezmatics which he hadn't heard about, and basically he's the one who arranged for the Klezmatics to do our first European gig in Berlin.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3154.0,3204.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: That, and this is leading to the point about what kind of music. So we did it and the festival, Heimatklänge, was run by a company called Piranha Music, headed by a wonderful genius man named Christoph Borkowsky Akbar, who is the head of the label. Turns out they were festival producers, a record label, and booking agents at the time. And he said to us--and we went over there, we played the concert for a week, and we went into a radio recording studio and made our first record \"Shvaygn = toyt\" all in this first week. And then he said to us, \"okay guys--gals, people--you're doing this nice stuff and you're young and you got good energy and everything, but you're not putting any of yourself into this music. You're just recreating these old things. Who are you? What are you?\" And we almost looked at him like, \"we can do that? We're allowed to put our own take on the music? We don't have to just, you know, recreate it?\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3204.0,3273.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And he said yes. And by saying yes, he was saying, \"and if you do that, I'll make records of you guys, I'll tour you guys, I'll promote you guys.\" So that led to us doing \"Rhythm and Jews,\" which was for us, a cosmic explosion in approach to the traditional music. And I think of that recording as a template, that's still...I don't know that it's a good record in terms of the music or the sound or whatever. And we still didn't really play very great, but in each piece we are exploring an idea, what can you do with this music? Oh my God, it's a composed music, but you can add improvisation. We'll do that here. Oh, you can put Arabic beats and Arabic drumming in. And we brought in a Nubian percussionist, Mahmoud Fadl, who lived in Berlin to play with us. We tried--like each little piece is like an experiment in something you can do with the tradition, whether they were successful or not, doesn't even count or it became a template for things that we then--basically have been working out those ideas for the last 20 years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3273.0,3345.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: The thought to sort of turn this traditional klezmer music into something very avant-garde, rock, that had not really occurred to you until this producer...?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Yeah, but I gotta say the story of the Klezmatics, we don't do...we're not very avant-garde, we are really not. I know what avant-garde is. I know what avant-garde is. We're not avant-garde. And you wanna...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: You are referred to as avant-garde and rock...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3345.0,3376.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Yeah. But it's all wrong. It's all misconception. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: I apologize for... \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: No, it's all misconception. I mean, you listen to our records and we're playing much more traditionally than any of the other bands. Really, we are. I mean, I'll give you an anecdote which kind of proves the point. Someone comes up to me after a concert, an older woman, and says, \"you know, we don't like it when people mix jazz with their klezmer, we just want to hear our klezmer straight.\" I looked at her, and I knew what she was saying, and I said, \"that's not true. You love it when the Klezmer Conservatory Band puts \"Bei Mir Bistu Shein\" or \"The Angels Sing\" with their klezmer. You don't like--you have no problem mixing jazz with klezmer. You just don't like the kind of jazz we mix with our klezmer.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3376.0,3430.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: \"You don't like...you only want jazz from the twenties and thirties, which is your comfort zone. So don't tell me that you don't want people mixing jazz with klezmer.\" It's just that we're mixing--we're dealing with ideas from seventies or eighties music, not twenties, you know? So, but all--it's all hype. You know people, we are far and away much more traditionally grounded than...well, there's a lot of bands now, so I can't say now, but back then, than almost any of the other bands, much more so. Half of what--and in this case, from my work with Lester Bowie, you know, half it was just the smoke and mirrors, just by not doing nostalgia and by acting like human beings. And I gotta say the pun titles, calling it \"Rhythm and Jews\" or \"Shvaygn = toyt, Silence = Death\" or \"Jews with Horns.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3430.0,3483.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: You know, all these things show an attitude, but really the music is the music. And if you judge the music on its own terms...and even when we started composing stuff, I know that my first compositions for the band were strictly done because I wanted to do a certain thing and it didn't exist. I had no need to ever compose a klezmer tune or a Yiddish song, ever. There's so much in the history and the repertoire. I only do something if there's something that I want to say that doesn't exist. If I can find it in the archives, I will do that. And I saved my composing for other things. But when I wanted...but it was like a joke. We had been recording. We love doing drinking songs. Those are fun in any language. We do Yiddish drinking songs and party songs.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3483.0,3533.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Let's all party, yay. And I said, you know, that's all cool, but actually I smoke a lot more pot than I do drink. Let's do a Yiddish song about smoking pot. Well, then we had to write our own song about smoking pot. And Michael Wex, the great Yiddishist, had a...he wrote the most beautiful lyrics about smoking pot. And I wrote the music. And I'll just give you one great line to show the genius. I love the depth. Everything comes from research and knowledge and insiderness. He writes one of the lines of, in our ode to marijuana, he goes, \"Der Maggid fun Mezz Mezritch zogt 'Es ist God's beste trayst.' The Maggid, the great teacher, the holy person of Mezz Mezritch says, marijuana is God's greatest consolation.\" So the joke here is this, there's a famous rabbi, our history of the Maggid of Mezritch.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3533.0,3598.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: He's--this is one of our holy men. But there was a white jazz musician in the '20s named Mezz Mezzrow--you know Mezz Mezzrow--who is mostly,...he was an okay clarinet player, not bad, but he's known throughout history as being Louis Armstrong's pot dealer. So what Michael Wex, who knows everything about everything, conflates Mezz Mezzrow with the Mag of Mezritch in a song about the holiness of smoking marijuana in Yiddish. These are the kind of like connections that the Klezmatics make. But what I was gonna say, Jeff, is that Klezmatics have always played on traditional music festivals and kind of radical music, avant-garde festivals. And we are invariably the most traditional inside group in the avant-garde festival, and the most kind of wacky, out-there group in the traditional music festival. And it's not a complaint 'cause I'm actually very happy with my life. But if you look at everything I've done, I sort of get dissed from both sides for not being either avant-garde enough--'cause I actually like melodies, and folk music, and dance rhythms--or not being, like, traditional enough, 'cause we don't only play things the way they were played in a certain village in a certain year and adhere to that. And I feel very fine living on the margins and the cracks between it. But...that's the world.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3598.0,3690.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: It's an interesting perspective. You're either too far in or too far out. That might be a good time to transition to some of your involvement with Hasidic music. So how did--how did you first get...'cause you were not exposed to anything like this growing up in Long Island, right? So how did you come to get involved with Hasidic music?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3690.0,3716.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/68","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Zero. Okay. So I moved to New York. This is one...[laughs]...fun...this is one of the funny stories for me, self-deprecatingly. I moved to New York and I need to get started working, you have to make a living. I've supported myself since I was 18, you know, left my parents' house and I supported myself. And so you have to work. So I had a great trumpet teacher who I give all my respect to Bob McCoy, I owe everything to him. And besides teaching me how to play the trumpet, he connected me to one of his students, Stan Shafran. And the connections are hysterical. 'Cause sadly, Stan died very young. But it turns out, first of all, I knew Stan, because I had taught his father in an old age home in Boston. One of my jobs there was leading like the senior citizen jazz band in an old age home.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3716.0,3773.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/69","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And Stan's father...so Stan already knew me from his father, his father said, \"hey, there's this guy Frank London who is working...\" So Stan, Stan had also been in a very important band in the Klezmer Revival. It wasn't a band--there's the CETA Program, which was a government funded program for a few years in the mid- seventies. And they did a tour of New York State, and it was Henry Sapoznik. You should find out for the archives all about this touring band that did Yiddish and klezmer. It wasn't exactly Kapelye, but it was Henry, maybe Michael Alpert. And Stan Shafran was on that. So he actually has a weird connection to it. But he was playing Hasidic club dates. There's a number of--if you're not in the symphony or the ballet or on Broadway, there were always, when I moved to New York, a few ways of making a living, one of them was playing Latin gigs.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3773.0,3826.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/70","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I did that. And another one was playing Jewish weddings. And I decided to do that. And through Stan, helped me get connected. And I get called for my first Jewish wedding. Now, at this point, I thought I knew something about Jewish music because at this point I'd probably played a few hundred Jewish weddings with the members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band up in Boston. And we were playing our klezmer music because as I told you before, this is what all of a sudden the people at that era, who were discovering their East European Yiddish roots wanted to hear, klezmer. I didn't know that there were other Jewish repertoires that were played and other Jewish communities. So, and these were back in the days when they didn't actually have books of music for you to play from. You were expected to know the repertoire when you got to a gig.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3826.0,3882.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/71","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And certainly I played a thousand weddings knowing all the Broadway standards and the rock standards and the pop music--that I knew all of that. And I knew all this klezmer stuff. So I thought, I'm perfectly prepared. I get to this wedding and it's--I dunno if it was Hasidic or Modern Orthodox--but the repertoires are very connected. And I sit down and they start playing and I don't know the first song, and I don't know the second song. And I'm trying to fake it and learn the song. And I soon realized that I don't know any song they were playing and I'm looking like a total idiot on the bandstand. And the leaders look at me like, \"why the fuck are you here? Why did I hire you? I thought you knew it!\" And I'm like, \"I've played hundreds of weddings!\" I--and then I remember the saxophone player was a Russian, impish-looking gentleman named Arkaty Kaufman [ph], who was a big stoner.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3882.0,3940.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/72","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So then we go out to his car on a break and I'm almost crying. We smoke a lot of pot in the car, and then I'm stoned and I still don't...And then somehow they played one song that somehow I knew either because it was a more common Israeli tune or maybe was crossover with klezmer. \"I know this!\" and I played it as loud as I could. So in any case, that was my trial by fire. But then I did...then I learned, oh, there's another world and I better learn it fast. So I got onto another job. No, I went to another job. I called up some bandleader, said I apologize. I said, but I wanna learn. And I went down with my cassette recorder and I recorded an entire wedding. And then I went home and I transcribed 300 songs and I made my own book of music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3940.0,3992.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/73","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And so that the next time they called me, I had my own book of music of all the tunes. And then I could learn--I could play along with them. So that's...and the other part of my introduction to it. So that was the first part. Shimmy Braun [ph] might have been...it was like the Neginah Neshoma Ruach, these are the New York wedding bands of the eighties. And there was that scene. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Are you performing mostly like on the--like the Crown Heights, Brooklyn...?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Well, if it's Lubavitch it's Crown Heights. If it's Satmar, it's Williamsburg. If it's Modern Orthodox, it might be anywhere upper West Side, New Jersey, Tenafly. If it's Bobov or Breslov or something, it might be out in Borough Park. All the weddings--all the wedding places, all over the...And you learn, and this is where I start learning that there's different groups and there's different nigunim, you know, and like I said, I'll bring my tape recorder, I'll transcribe, I'm constantly learning, learning and writing down.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=3992.0,4052.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/74","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I get obsessed with that. I hang out with the people. I say, you know, and then even as we're drinking and stuff, I say, \"can you sing me some other nigunim and stuff?\" And so I'm constantly being like an ethnomusicologist and transcribing it. And it got to the point before I sort of ended up leaving that scene where they would joke about me. Because I was like, even though I was this outsider who wasn't from their world, I was the guy who liked the old music. They were all trying to play the latest. Because over the years I've played the weddings, it transitioned into the Disco Hasidic Music, Mordechai Ben David, Avraham Fried, all this stuff. And I hate that stuff. It's horrible, it's like, why should I play bad pop music if I can be playing great pop music with my buddies, like, you know, at the real rock clubs, which I was. So, but I like the old nigunim.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4052.0,4103.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/75","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And so I got known as the guy who wanted to play the old music. And in fact, if you get--if you look at books of music now that are published, there's a tune called \"Nigun London.\" Because my friend, Avrami Gurreri [ph], who writes out a lot of the music for the community said, \"yeah, Frank, you always used to like that, playing that song on the wedding. So I named it after you.\" Because the tunes don't have names, so it's called \"Nigun London\" because I used to like playing that song. And I still do. So at the same time, my first wife was becoming religious and she's now a Hasid. We're not together. We haven't been together for 40 years. But she was going from being secular to becoming a Hasid. So between her getting into Hasidis and me hanging out, and there was one very other important thing.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4103.0,4153.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/76","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I played at a wedding very early on and I didn't realize, but it was with the Piamenta Brothers. And that's an entire...this is an entire other...it's someone else's music, Jewish music history. So you should know about the Piamenta Brothers, two brothers from Israel who were more like,  jazz rock players. They famously played with Stan Getz in Israel when they were young. Opine plays flute, one plays guitar, Yosi, the guitar player was called the Hasidic Hendrix. And he really was. And so I worked with him on thousands of weddings and...but then between things, and I was playing with my partner Greg Wall, which--who I co-founded Hasidic New Wave with. That's another story. And Greg and I were both studying Hasidis. Greg kind of drank the Kool-Aid and now he's an Orthodox rabbi. But we were learning nigunim...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4153.0,4210.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/77","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And so we were there, we were making money, making a living, we're playing our horns, we were using the music we learned to enrich our other musical lives. I was bringing nigunim into the Klezmatics. We were starting to do Hasidic...I brought Hasidic music into the Klezmatics, because I would again, do the same thing, just like the Klezmatics wouldn't play schlocky Yiddish stuff, I would just find my favorite nigunim and say let's do this stuff. And Lorin shares the same passion. And that's why he and I have recorded three side projects of different nigunim together through...so, you know, I've been fortunate to--I love music and if I'm in a situation, I'm gonna learn songs and I'm gonna ask people to sing me songs. Classic moment. And I love micro-cultures and everything. So I'm a guest artist teaching and performing in Northern Poland, in [inaudible] at an institute.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4210.0,4269.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/78","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And then we're at the last night party. It's a big party. And all of a sudden I learn about some of the people there speak, are Kashubian. Kashubian is a micro-linguistic cultural group in that border region of Poland. And so it's a totally different language than Polish. And it's not Lithuanian, it's its own thing. Very few people speak it and they have their own folk musics and everything. So we're drinking a lot. And I'm like, sing me a song in Kashubian. Sing me your Kashubian song. And the famous--he asked me, the guy says, \"do you want to hear the happy song or the sad song?\" And the only answer is sing the sad song, of course. So I'm always asking people to sing songs. And sometimes I'd just grab--this is all before, you know, the internet and everything.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4269.0,4318.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/79","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I would grab a piece of--I don't have any napkins. I would grab one, make a musical staff on the napkin and transcribe the song before I drunkenly forgot the tune that they had sung for me. So I'm always learning and the things that I like stay and the things I don't like I've forgotten about. And the Hasidic philosophy is a brilliant philosophy. And I've been blessed to work in that community and, and to know Eli Lipsker, who is not the greatest performer, but is maybe the most knowledgeable person about Lubavitcher nigunim who wrote this, literally wrote the Sefer nigunim. He transcribed all the Lubavitcher tunes and so Eli was my \"rebbe\" for Lubavitcher music. And it's--I remember getting a call from Avraham Fried one day, again, the superstar of Hasidic pop music, because I had made a recording with Lorin Sklamberg of a certain lesser known nigun and interpolated a different part of another tune. And Avraham called me and he goes \"I'm recording that nigun and I heard your version. And I want to use that. Did you...who taught you about it?\" And I was like, \"I did.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4318.0,4401.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/80","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So it's like--it's interesting. So with the people who know--we know each other and it's really...it's, again, it's not the popular music, but it's the deep music. I love the nigunim. And then... \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: So, can you talk maybe about some...you mentioned a few projects did with Lorin based on Hasidic music and kinda put that in some kind of context. What your experience was like.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Absolutely. So beside--Lorin Sklamberg and I have been musical partners since 1986 with the Klezmatics. Klezmatics have about 10, 15, recordings. I can't count anymore. And one Grammy for essentially our only non-klezmer recording.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: We have to talk about that too. [laughter]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4401.0,4444.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/81","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: You know, it's all good. It's just like, you know, again, I have no need to misrepresent. There's--if there's eight bars of klezmer on \"Wonder Wheel,\" the Klezmatics' Grammy Award winning record with lyrics by Woody Guthrie, if there's eight bars of klezmer I'm being generous, but it's a Klezmatics record. But it's not a klezmer record. In any case. So, and then Lorin...I forget how it first started, but I think he got invited to do a project somewhere based on Jewish spiritual music. And we decided, let's do nigunim, let's keep it small again. And just like when we started the Klezmatics, I didn't want to copy anyone else's repertoire. Each project I do, I want it to be discrete and distinct and different. I don't want to have Klezmatics and five mini Klezmatics projects. I want every one to be as different from the other. Otherwise, why am I doing it?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4444.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/82","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: The idea is to explore different paths and each of my projects in Jewish music--and out--but each of my projects in Jewish musics has a very distinct goal and field of exploration. I can tell you each one and I will if we get there. And I explore a certain idea. So the nigunim trio, which isn't always a trio, is me and Lorin, and a third person. On the first recording was Uri Caine,  the great pianist, who has a deep connection to Jewish music. And the first one is mostly just general, all-purpose nigunim--nigunim being, and some zemiros. Do I have to define nigunim for the...? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Briefly. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Nigunim, briefly, are Hasidic melodies most often, although not exclusively, wordless. Occasionally when they do have words, they're just a pusikh, which means a small line of holy text repeated over and over again like a mantra. And occasionally they're long form nigunim and where they're usually didactic and teaching things often with acrostics or alphabetical like [sings].","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4500.0,4576.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/83","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So in that one, it's a double parallel alphabetical song. If you don't have \"blank\" along with your money, what do you \"blank\" in this world? And it starts with alef, “amuna.” And in one word, one list is Hebrew and the second list is Yiddish. So it's actually teaching language and teaching morals. And it goes, it is like, “if you don't have faith along with your money, what justifies your existence in this world? If you don't give charity along with your money—that's tzedakah” when you get down there.  And so in any case, those are nigunim, and they're a simple melody and they're hypnotic and they're trance musics and they're repetitive and we love them. So we did our research, he and I and our...you know, and Lorin is the head sound archivist at the YIVO. So he has his research in the archives there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4576.0,4630.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/84","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Mine has to do with the thousands of records. I have all the gigs I've been on, and basically all the people who I've gotten to sing songs for me. When my mother was married to her second husband, who was an Orthodox Holocaust survivor. And we didn't have a lot to talk about, but I can always get him to sing me the nigunim and zemiros he grew up with. And I recorded a lot of those. So I'm always collecting them. So the first one was just nigunim, the second...and I can't tell you what year they were...I'm really bad. We can go online and find years. I...my life blurs together. Second one was a trio with Rob Schwimmer, the great pianist and theremin player. And that was called the Zemiros Project. Zemiros are essentially nigunim, but now always with texts, sometimes short, repetitive texts, but often longer.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4630.0,4684.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/85","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And zemiros tend to be, but aren't exclusively for Shabbas. So we--these were all Shabbas zemiros, but from--we consciously do them from different Hasidic sects. We draw...we would research...there's all these LPs. I love them, you know, a genuine Ger Melaveh Malkah or a fantastic Berditchever Shabbat or whatever, you know. So we would take our favorite Ger tune, our favorite--from all the groups and put them together. And the third one is nigunim for holidays. And we did that. And so for each of the different holidays we did that as a quartet with guitarists. Because I wanted to sound different. Knox Chandler from the Psychedelic Furs and Deep Singh, my percussion partner in Sharabi. So those are our projects and we've toured that, sacred music festivals and we still do them. We're doing it this summer up at the Yiddish Book Center. And so the identity of that project is Lorin's beautiful voice singing nigunim and zemiros and our accompanists.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4684.0,4751.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/86","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: There's a couple of other things I definitely want to get to. Your involvement in...hazzanut in cantorial music, especially given your background, or as you described yourself as sort of mildly disgusted with the music you grew up with in synagogue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Not even disgusted, but I didn't even notice it was there. Just like \"why.\" Okay, but so...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: So how did you kinda get into the cantorial thing and how have you similarly kind of made that into something that's uniquely your own?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4751.0,4781.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/87","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: OK, good. Hazzanus, which is how I pronounce--which is the Ashkenazic pronunciation of hazzanut, which is the sephardic or contemporary Hebrew way of pronouncing it. But since I work in Yiddish music and Yiddish culture, I use that pronunciation. So hazzanus, cantorial music. I did not have a--many people grew...they tell you I grew up with it. My parents listened to it. We had a great hazzan at our synagogue. No, I didn't have any of this. And I, for many reasons, what I did know about it I didn't like at all. And there are reasons. Because many hazzanim wanted to be opera singers. And they weren't great opera singers, but they were sort of singing like operatically. So it's like, Ben, I didn't even like opera there. I love opera now, but I didn't even like opera. So it's like trying to sing like bad opera singers. I just didn't get it. Why, why, why? But somewhere along the way...I'm gonna interrupt myself. I've often wondered what makes klezmer sound like klezmer and what makes it sound so Jewish? And I've often argued, and I put this as a challenge 'cause I want someone to disprove this statement, but in my experience with all the Jewish musics of the world, I'm going out on a limb here, and I want someone to either say that I'm right, or I'd rather have someone disprove it and put it to rest.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4781.0,4879.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/88","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I find that klezmer music, and in a way, hazzanus, this musical tradition, the nigunim, this is all--these are all aspects of the same musical tradition. Same people, same place, same language. So it's one tradition. We're breaking it into parts for musical reasons, but it's one tradition. Of all the--all Jewish musics are in a sense, some form of syncretism between the Jews and the co-territorial peoples and their music of the place that those Jews are, whether it's Ladino music or Sephardic music, or Iraqi Jewish music, or this Jewish music or Jewish Italian music. It's always...or, and to a certain extent, klezmer and Yiddish music. It's always a syncretism. But I argue that in my ear, the Yiddish, klezmer, and hazzanus sounds the most distinct from its co- territorial music. Whereas in something like Iraqi Jewish music, if you're not a linguistician, if you don't know the difference between Arabic and Hebrew, or with Moroccan [inaudible], you're not gonna really be able to hear the difference between the Moroccan non-Jewish version of that piece and the Moroccan Jewish version of it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4879.0,4967.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/89","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: They're really not. They're very--they're nearly identical. Solomon Rossi's Jewish music is essentially Italian music with Jewish texts, Ladino songs sounds like other songs of that time and place. Some, I don't know why. Yes, there are deep--and I just did...the deepest connection yet to klezmer music. This year I've been working a lot with Tatar Crimean musicians, Crimean musicians, and yes indeed the Crimean Tatar music and some of the Moldovan music through the Ottomans--The Ottomans are very important in the transmission, but it's the most distinctly, I argue, it's the most distinctly Jewish music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=4967.0,5018.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/90","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So, back to how did I get into hazzanus. I actually...first it was an intellectual thought before it was actually a musical impulse. I said to myself, I like this culture and music. I like the Jewishness of it. I like the way it is expressed musically. Cantorial music--I play the klezmer, which is, just for the definition of klezmer, is the instrumental music of this tradition. If it's got vocals, technically, even if it's the same exact music, same song, same ornamentation--if it's got vocals, technically it's not klezmer, it's a Yiddish song, it's a nigun, it's something else. And they're all related. So I love this music. Hazzanus is part of this tradition.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5018.0,5067.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/91","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: There's gotta be some...I kept on saying to myself, there's gotta be something there that's going to interest me. I don't know what it is, but intellectually, if I like this stuff, how could it be that there's gonna be a whole branch of it that I don't like? And I'm interested in spiritual musics. And I got deeply interested in music and trance and how music is used to elevate us to different spiritual states and reading Gilbert Rouget's \"Music and Trance\" and studying Haitian trance musics and seeing how nigunim are a form of trance. I said, there's gotta be something. So I...I get a bug in my--what's the expression?--bug in my belly? I don't know. When I get the bug, I don't give up. So I'm constantly asking people, come on. And I started listening and then Hankus Netsky again, this is years after I had stopped working in his bedroom, said, \"oh, here's what you need to listen to.\"","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5067.0,5128.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/92","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And he gave me a recording of Alter Karniol doing \"Avinu Malkeinu.\" You have to know about Alter Karniol. Okay, so recording, arguably...let's say just arguably...it starts around 1900 if, you know, if we're gonna talk about wire cylinders and wax cylinders, maybe a little before, if we're gonna talk about commercial recording, maybe a little bit after--around then. And once they started recording and the industrial revolution, some really prescient people throughout the world said, \"you know what? This change that's happening in our culture through mechanization is gonna change everything. We're going to lose traditional cultures.\" And almost the first thing that happens throughout the world in the first twenty years of the twentieth century is people go out with their recording devices and start recording different musics. I mean, thank God, because they realize that this is going to be important and thank God we have all these documents.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5128.0,5192.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/93","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And this is our only taste of what music actually sounded like before the twentieth century. We can read about it, we can look at the scores. But this deal...so Alter Karniol, even though his name means old man, that's not why his name was Alter, that was just his name. But what's interesting is, at the time recording actually starts 1910, 1912, he's already an old man, he's already in his 60s or 70s. He's...and his voice is not in the best shape. He's an old man. But what you're hearing in his recordings is the way hazzanus sounded in 1860 or 1870, because that's his...and it's not--he's not trying to be an opera singer, like many of them were. He's not...he's not trained in a conservatory. He's got prodigious technique, what they call his recitatives [sings]. I can't do it. All those fast notes are brilliant, but it's kind of psychedelic.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5192.0,5258.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/94","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It's not tempered. And I could go into my entire spiel about the false assumption that hazzanus and that Eastern European Jewish music is tempered. It's not, it's got micro tonalities that are more close to maqams. And I can give documentation after documentation. It's just interesting that Jewish musicologists do not describe it in these terms. I don't understand why they don't. But, if you listen to his music and it's got these, so clearly, he's, you know, microtones on the maqams, on the modes. They're not called maqams, that would be an Arabic thing. He's got passion, he's crying. He's a cross between a hazzan and what they call ba'al tefillah. And I love that ba'al tefillah is something that's better than the hazzan. A ba'al tefillah is a person without professional--without a great voice, without vocal training, but who sings the prayers with deep passion and style and ornamentation.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5258.0,5318.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/95","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: They know the whole thing. They just don't have a great voice. So they're not gonna be great cantors on the great stages, but they're often the ones who have the deepest passion. And his music is not schlock. And I heard this \"Avenu Malkeinu\" and I said, this reminds me in its intensity and energy of Albert Ayler, of the great free jazz--in the same way that people made fun of the Albert Aylers because they didn't play in tune and they had these huge energy sounds, and that's what it felt like. And I said, oh my God. And I started transcribing hazzanus--cantors, cantors, cantors. I'm listening and I kept on finding and I got my favorite heroes, Berele Chagy, Alter Karniol, [Mordechai] Hershman, all the ones of course, Zavel Kwartin, all the ones and the hazzantes, the women cantors we were talking about, certain ones of them, Perele Feig, the ones who are not trying to be big opera stars, but the ones who have deep passion and whose style, the ornamentation, the krekhts are like, what, where do the clarinet and violin krekhts--where do they come from?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5318.0,5399.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/96","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: They come from the cantors, they come from imitating the cantors. That was another part of my intellectual thing--it's the ornamentation that is one of the main things that defines East European Jewish music as being Jewish. And that differentiates it. The ornamentation is different than it all--again, its co-territorial musics in a way that it's not in other traditions. Where does it come from? We've always been taught, \"oh it comes from imitating the voice.\" Okay, let's listen to the voice that it comes from. So I listened to it and I started getting obsessed. There's another stream that I wanted to explore, which is the solo concert. The solo concert. I'm deeply influenced by Lester Bowie and by the AACM, Association of the Advancement of Creative Music, which was a group of African-American musicians out of Chicago in the '60s and '70s who exploded music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5399.0,5461.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/97","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And these are my heroes, Muhal Richard Abrams. I studied with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill. And one thing they all did is they would do solo recitals. They would--one person, one instrument. And I decided I would, and it's really hard as a trumpet player to do a solo recital. So I decided that I would do mine based on hazzanus and I'll just do one thing--I was doing this before when you guys were there. So I love doing this one as a way of being a little less lonely when I'm doing my solo recitals. This is just a little excerpt of Kwartin's... I'll tell you the name in a second. High Holy prayers...I'll get it in a second. [performs on trumpet]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5461.0,5556.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/98","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So I thought this was a great way...So the album I recorded, \"Invocations,\" is lightly accompanied, we recorded live in a synagogue. And that was sort of my...I used transcriptions of the classic cantorial music as the source for an entire repertoire of solo trumpet improvisation, drawing as much from the tradition as from the free jazz tradition. So these two traditions merging. And this is also one of my big tricks in making sort of radical reinterpretations of traditional things, is not to just do the overly simplistic thing, which of course I do the overly simplistic thing we all do. The simplistic thing is to take rhythm A and melody B and put 'em on top of each other. You know, \"Bagels and Bongos.\" You know, it's a...it always works. I do it. We all do it. But let's admit it, it's the most basic, simple that's, you know, there's nothing really creative here.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5556.0,5625.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/99","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It's just fun to have, you know...and look at the history of Jewish music, you know, whether it's \"Twistin the Freilachs\" from 1961, which is surf music or \"Raisins and Almonds Cha Cha Cha,\" or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Or, and \"The Angels Sing,\" or the \"Yiddisha Charleston,\" one of the first...I find it interesting that one of the first recordings of klezmer music in the New World in the teens is the \"Yiddisha Charleston,\" take a Jewish melody and put it over a Charleston beat. So these are always done, it's always fun, but more profound mixtures are taking more like structural elements of one tradition and putting them on another tradition using the language of one tradition, but the structure of another one, which to a certain...to a naive listener, they're not gonna know that there's anything non-traditional.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5625.0,5684.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/100","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: 'Cause most people don't hear structure. And if they do, they're not gonna say, \"hey, that's not a traditional klezmer structure!\" So, but I know that I got the idea for that structure from another source. So the idea of doing cantorial pieces as solo trumpet improvisations is like taking a structure from somewhere else and putting it within that language. And--but then I was fortunate, then I started getting obsessed with, but who are the living cantors who don't just sound like bad opera singers? And even worse, when they give concerts, they want to do Broadway numbers and they want to do pop songs, they want to do Israeli schlock. And I don't, you know, if you...look, if you wanna hire me for a gig, I love all this music. I'll play it really well. I'll arrange it. I'll write your orchestration. Hire me, it's great.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5684.0,5735.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/101","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: But if I'm gonna do my music, I don't want that. So I look for the cantors who really love the old stuff, and I'm blessed to have found them and worked with them. And I did the soundtrack for Jackie Mendelson's documentary \"A Cantor's Tale.\" And I used Zorn's...John Zorn would always say, \"you know, whenever they hire me to write a film score, I always make sure to get a full CD out of the recording session also.\" So I did that with \"A Cantor's Tale.\" We did experiments with Jackie Mandelson singing cantorial music with different kinds of accompaniments. And then I met Yaakov Lemmer who's changed my life and we work together, he's...and now there's a young kid, Yoel Cohen [ph], who's an ex-Hasid who's left the community, but who's obsessed with old Cantorial music.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5735.0,5790.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/102","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Benzion Miller, I'm blessed to have worked with him. These are people who real--oh and Judith Berkson, young Judith Persson, genius musician whose father is a cantor. So working with people who really know the tradition and who either are willing to take it forward or willing to let me contextualize what they do in a different way. And often that's what I do in everything. I don't change it, I don't do anything radical. I don't do avant-garde. I mean I do, but often what I'm doing is just getting rid of the schlock, getting rid of the stuff that I don't want to hear. So if there's a great cantor, rather than this horrible accompaniment, you know, just schlocky accompaniment, I'll say, well, let's just get rid of that accompaniment. When I produced--I produced an album, not Jewish music for Esma Redžepova, the greatest of the massive Macedonian gypsy singers.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5790.0,5849.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/103","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And more than three times over the process, she and her minions tried to basically give me the album fully recorded that they had done with their computers. They had like, made the album for me and I said, \"oh, thank you very much. But really we want to do it live with live instruments and not the drum machines and the synthesizer.\" And I even got her...I don't know how I manipulated her to do, to sing some a cappella songs that she knew as a kid. So if a singer is a great traditional hazzan and they're willing to do their thing and let me work with it, that's often enough. And often I don't wanna do very much. Never get rid of the hazzan [sic], I just wanna get rid of the outside influences [plays note on piano and sings], just, you know, as opposed to this whole schlocky thing. So I've done the record with Jackie.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5849.0,5907.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/104","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: I've done a bunch of cantorial things. I'm trying to think...well actually, one of the earliest ones I did was for a record called \"Festival of Lights\" produced by Bob Appel on the Six Degrees label. It was supposed to be avant-garde takes on Hanukkah. And I was influenced also by this guy Wally Brill, who made an early electronica Hasidic record. So I--me and Wayne Horovitz got in the studio. I took a hazzanus, a cantorial piece based on a hallel that's sung for Hanukkah. So that was my excuse for tying into that record and made a total electronica ambience in the studio of just different synthesizers and things going. And I just played my trumpet through large delays in it. So I love cantorial music and one of my little, many goals in life, like trying to write Yiddish operas and things, is to keep the old East European cantorial tradition a vital one. Because I think it's beautiful and inspirational.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5907.0,5980.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/105","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: Thank you. I'll probably ask you one more sort of main question and then you can kinda wrap up however you want. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: [crosstalk] Well, I don't know, as you can see I can talk a lot. Sorry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: No, please. It's fascinating to listen to. You brought up John Zorn a few moments ago, and I want to ask you kinda how you came to know him and your involvement in some of the Jewish music  related projects that he has been a big instigator of.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=5980.0,6016.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/106","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Very simple. This can be a short one. It's very easy. So I know John, because basically we all lived in the same...we all...we were all part of the same scene, literally, the downtown New York City. I mean, he lives on 7th Street, I live on 3rd Street, Anthony lives on 7th Street--Anthony Coleman. You know, this is our little world. And when the Knitting Factory started, the first Knitting Factory back in whatever year that was, probably mid-'80s, you know, Zorn was playing. We're all--we're just all in the same world. I don't know how to say it in a more obvious way. It's not that we all do the same thing, but we're all in the same world. We all know each other, we all know--we're all very familiar with each other's work.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6016.0,6062.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/107","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: We're all lumped together in this--or we're on this rubric of the \"Downtown New York Scene.\" And my first involvement with him in Jewish music was his recording of...what was it, now my brain just turned off. \"Kristallnacht.\" I was going to say \"Holocaust,\" that would have been stupid. He's recording \"Kristallnacht,\" which is I believe '92 or '93. And I was brought in because Dave Krakauer and I were brought in 'cause we both knew how to improvise and Mark Feldman--because we knew how to improvise and we knew this Jewish klezmer tradition. So on his score, when he needed us to sound like klezmer, we can sound like klezmer. And when he needed us to sound more like avant-garde, I thought we could do that. And then we've just known each other forever. And when he started his radical Jewish music record series, he, along the way, asked me to do many records on it. So the nigunim, and the third nigunim record on it, \"The Invocation,\" is the one I'm talking about, and \"Scientists at Work,\" which is my recording.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6062.0,6144.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/108","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Basically, like I said, I like to get inspired by one thing and then transfer to another thing. So, \"Scientists at Work,\" it was a session where I was influenced by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, which is a very important Nyabinghi free jazz record from the '60s or '70s. Nyabinghi being the mystical...it's very like--much like the Jamaican version of nigunim, except it's more drumming based, but it's drumming and storytelling and singing. But on this album of the Mystic Revelation, he uses this--the bass and horn players from the Skatalites and it's like a Sun Ra experience where it's like traditional and free jazz and storytelling and drumming and chanting. And I wanted to do that. So I put like 15 musicians in a studio, had a group of only women singers that I called the group Kol Isha, which is, again, another joke because Kol Isha literally means the voice of women--so these women singing.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6144.0,6209.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/109","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: But it's actually shorthand in Judaism for the injunction against hearing the voice of women. When they say \"Kol Isha,\" they mean women shouldn't sing. So we called the group Kol Isha. I had my great friend and teacher and most important person Adrienne Cooper, which is...we started an entire fund and festival in her name and memory and our teacher. She taught the Klezmatics \"Ale brider\", she taught the Klezmatics \"Shnerele Perele\" she taught...she did--gave the best seder in the world. We still do her repertoire. So Adrienne was there and Jenny Romain, the theater artist and the great Thomas Chapin, was one of the last recordings before he passed away. And all these people and five drummers. And, so John Zorn put that one out, \"Scientists at Work,\" and so Zorn has released a lot of my records. He's been very helpful for me. When I premiered the Shekhina Big Band, which is my compositions which intentionally fuse Jewish--klezmer Jewish music with jazz, Arabic, Latin, and avant-garde music. And the Stone is where we presented all the Shekhina Big Band. So he's been very helpful. And it's interesting 'cause our paths in Jewish music are very different. We have very different things that we look for in Jewish music and that we create under that rubric. But I think--I like to think--it's a one of mutual respect for what each one of us is doing. Maybe partially because we're so not trying to do the same thing at all.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6209.0,6314.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/110","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: So you've been involved in Jewish music for 40 years? Close to?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Arguably, yeah.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: I thought maybe we could close by you just kind of reflecting. I know you never expected to get into the career, but maybe some of the major developments or surprises you've seen over the years or ways in which it has affected you personally.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6314.0,6336.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/111","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: This last year, my turning 60, was a really good year, thank God, because I was able to achieve actually many ideas that have been on my plate and thinking about for a long time. And it's nice to not just have these things as, you know, dinner party things, \"oh, one day I'm gonna do this.\" So I'd been thinking about writing a Yiddish opera for many years, and if we had time we could talk about why I wanted to write a Yiddish opera, but I didn't wanna write a klezmer opera. I had no desire to do that. I can do that next, that would be easy. I just wrote, last week, a klezmer quasi-concerto for trumpet and orchestra, I had a commission from the Folksbiene. And it's interesting, I wrote the entire 17-minute orchestral piece in a week because this music is so easy. The opera took significantly longer, 'cause it's not just that it's a full opera, but I've been wanting to do this for years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6336.0,6400.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/112","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: It's called \"Hatuey: Memory of Fire.\" It's a Cuban-Yiddish opera. And I did it, I did it last year. It was premiered. I'm very happy. I've been working on a piece called \"Salome: Woman of Valor.\" I did...by the way, \"Hatuey,\" I like to credit people--with Elise Thoron, the writer based on poem by Oscar Pinis. \"Salome,\" I worked with poet Adeena Karasick. And the idea was to create a dance piece with an entire poetic score. And Adeena made a poetic cycle based on re-envisioning the Salome story. And it's interesting, from a Jewish music point of view, when you talk about Zorn and other things and my very particularity about what klezmer is and what klezmer isn't, as I've said, not that I don't do one and only do the other, I'm just very clear about what it is and what it isn't.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6400.0,6471.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/113","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: For many years, I sort of would put down and make fun of people who did things that they called klezmer or Jewish, where they were just using like basically modes that didn't sound like western modes with augmented seconds. And therefore were quasi-\"Oriental\"--\"Oriental\" in the sense of Edward Said's \"Orientalism,\" meaning a signifier of something that could be Jewish. And then people would just play and because it had something like that, they'd say, \"oh, that's very Jewish,\" it's very klezmer--I'm like, no, that mode does not exist in these things. And so I kind of rejected all that. I was kind of being a little bit of a...there's probably a word for, I don't know how to say it without cursing...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Purist?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6471.0,6521.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/114","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Well, yeah, but I'm not, I'm not a purist because I don't believe there is anything called purity. There is no pure music. Everything...More of a snob, a little more of a snob. It was like more proving an ideological point. And then one day I woke up, I said, but why not? I can do whatever I want. I mean, as if I didn't know I can do whatever I want. And I said...and on the \"Salome\" project I started exploring totally made up syncretic modes, which it turns out my partner Deep Singh the percussionist on \"Salome\" and on many other bands tells me many of the scales I invented are Indian ragas. 'Cause they have so many ragas. But it's like, you know, if I go, well, here's one, this might sound klezmer-y [plays trumpet], but it's actually that scale that I'm playing in is an Ethiopian pentatonic scale. [continues playing] So, you know, so I use an Ethiopian pentatonic for one, for another one. I was just inventing modes. Like, [plays trumpet] but if you play it with a klezmer inflection, [plays more].","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6521.0,6610.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/115","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So I finally gave myself free range to mess with as crazy modes as I wanted. So that was really fun. And that was that project. And I like often putting in a box. So I did \"Salome\" last year. I never thought I'd write an opera. I never thought I'd...I'm a kind of a self-taught composer, write a ballet piece. I've done klezmer and other film scores, actually Morricone film scores. So once--so to answer your...your sum-up questions, I'm at an interesting point where...and I'm gonna premiere the trumpet concerto in a month where I got so many pieces off of my plate...what do they call it? My queue, like in your printer, I cleared my queue and now I'm really curious, what do I want to do next? What do I want to explore next?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6610.0,6668.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/116","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Do I want to go back to one of my other projects? Do I want to try something new? So I'm...and it's really interesting. It's almost like I'm gonna give myself a gift in about a month when I finally I've...two big projects in New York, the Trumpet Concerto and this thing called \"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,\" which is my curated tribute to Jews in America. And it's portraits--performance portraits of my favorite dead American Jews from literally from Hannah Arendt to Kurt Weill. That's A-W, I didn't get to Z. From S.J. Perelman, the writer for the Marx Brothers to Susan Sontag. So, and that...and then I'm not sure what I'll do, but I'm kind of happy about the body of work that I've made. That's one question. An observation, another thing is that really over the forty years since I first got introduced to klezmer, I think if you look at the quantity of groups playing klezmer and Yiddish song now and the quantity of product, I'm not gonna say good or bad, I'm not gonna judge it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6668.0,6744.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/117","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: Just literally the quantity and the quality. 'Cause many of them, back when the Klezmatics started, we were kind of blessed. Oh, I could get in trouble but thankfully no one will ever watch this interview...basically by the...when we started...of the klezmer revival, no one had made a great recording. They had recorded some great music, but a great recording for me is something like that you put on because you want to hear it, not because you don't put on 'cause \"Oh, I want to hear some Yiddish,\" you just put it on. 'Cause what I just want to hear now, whether it's John Coltrane's \"Love Supreme\" or a recording of Bernstein doing Mahler, you know, just a great recording and no one had made it, so actually that became the Klezmatics' goal was to actually use all the tricks. That's why by the time we recorded like our fourth album, there were over 80 tracks, you know, like each song.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6744.0,6805.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/118","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: 'Cause we're using every studio trick possible. 'Cause we just wanted to make a great record. And we finally did, I think it took us about four or five recordings to make it. We did that but...\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJeff Janeczko: Which recording is it? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: I think that we sort of crossed the line around \"Possessed,\" is where we started crossing over just getting closer to the whole package of sounding, both the music and the continuity and the sound, and just the whole thing that you can just put it on your player...and certainly \"Possessed,\" \"Wonder Wheel,\" which you were gonna ask me a question about. \"Rise Up.\" These are just good recordings. They sound good, you know, not just the music and the playing, but the whole thing.  And--but my point is, what I was gonna say is, now there's a lot--a lot of other people have done it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6805.0,6855.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/119","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I think that collectively we in this community have taken a music that was clearly on--it was not a dead music. There's no klezmer revival music because it was not dead. 'Cause we still learned from living masters, all of us. But it was definitely on the wane and on the way out. And now it is, oh, it's not as big as let's say Banda or Gospel, but it is flourishing internationally. So that's something. And even Yiddish as a language, and I'm not only talking about in the Hasidic community, there's against all odds, people writing in Yiddish and making operas and making new plays and translating, \"Waiting for Godot,\" and writing new songs. And I feel really blessed and honored and happy. The--to have been a part of it. There's a Yiddish expression they called the golden akate [ph], the golden chain, like a chainlink fence.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6855.0,6926.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/120","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: And I think many of us--this is an old expression and I think we see ourselves as just being one part in this golden chain...in this connection from past to future. And I feel like I did, ,have done and continue to do my job. I'm like this link here and it goes along me and others. I'm not the only one, but we're parts and then the people, and they're already here now. They've already gotten past it. But that's amazing. And to a certain extent, I never expected that. And to have been that--to be that, it's pretty good, you know, it's like to be one part of this continuity of tradition.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6926.0,6974.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/121","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Jeff Janeczko: And you said it in in the beginning, it had nothing to do with this sort of Jewish identity. But has it had any effect on that? Spirituality or anything? This is the absolute last question.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrank London: Spirituality or anything? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no, actually, if we have time, I do want to hear your--whatever your question is about \"Wonder Wheel,\" I'm curious. But...yeah, one of the great things about the--about all this is that I was able, me and my family and my friends and our community...whereas me growing up as a Jew, we did all the holidays, we did all the rituals, we did it. But it wasn't exactly a musical aesthetic experience. It wasn't maybe even a deeply spiritual experience. It was more like you did them. But by incorporating all this great information, and we have a world to choose from. So we have just for Pesach this year we got together and we were singing Ladino songs, and Moroccan songs, and Yiddish songs. And I just learned a bunch of...'cause I just did a project on ghettos and a huge project on ghettos.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=6974.0,7040.0"},{"id":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244/transcript/43930/annotation/122","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Frank London: So I learned Judeo-Venetian Pesach songs. So yes, and when we would sit down as a family to shabbas dinners, as opposed to when I was growing up, we can sing nigunim together as a family. Growing up, not knowing that you even have anything called an aesthetic sense or whatever, a style, whatever. I didn't realize it, but the Judaism was always separated. That's who I was, we were Jews. Of course I was practicing to be a Zen Buddhist, but that's a different story, you know. But my music was--my music was rock and roll, you know, my identities were fractured. And now through this, because it fits aesthetically and spiritually and musically and practically, it's like there's no separation. It makes--it made me and my family a more integrated thing. Not just, it's not like, and here's the Jewish practice and here's the musical practice. It's all much more connected.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://milken.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1159/collection_resources/93932/file/190244#t=7040.0,7109.92689"}]}]}]}