19/12/99

Satchmo with tzitzis

   Straight outta Louisiana, it's the Stompers, a real-live New Orleans Dixieland jazz band. Only they're not from New Orleans (they've never been there). They're white folks (in fact, Jewish). And only one of 'em is actually American.
    They sound like the real thing, even when trumpeter Stanley Ross sings 'Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home?' But you ain't heard nothin' yet: Stanley is from Scotland, clarinetist Oleg Lapidus is from Kazakhstan, Amnon Ben-Artzi on the trombone is a sabra who barely speaks English, and Harvey Benson (drums) and Eric Silverstone (banjo) are also Brits. Pianist Evelyn Tamary comes closest to being the real thing, but her hometown Detroit is a light year away from New Orleans, and besides, you don't even think the word Dixieland in the Motown capital.
    Stanley must be the world's only Scottish Dixieland trumpeter who wears tzitzis. (I guess that would make him the strings section.) He says he was 'a member of the only Jewish jazz band in Scotland.'
    The Stompers put on a peppy performance full of the unexpected: Oleg singing jazzed-up 'Midnight in Moscow' in Russian, Stanley's Yiddishisms, and a freak hybrid Louisiana-style Irish tune sung in a Glaswegian accent, if you can imagine 'It's A Long Way To Tipperary' performed like that.
    Mostly they do stuff like Louis Armstrong, Sophie Tucker and Tommy Dorsey, blues and 'real jazz,' Stanley stresses, 'as it was played over 100 years ago.'
    In this country, if you play music and the audience does not lapse into rhythmic clapping from the first moment to the last, it probably means you stink. During the concert I attended in Jerusalem, Amnon, the sabra, might have been concerned. But this crowd was Anglo-Saxim, and we were listening in intent silence, waiting for the end of a song to make noise. Mind you, we couldn't hold back at the end, and rhythmically clapped during the final number, 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' But who could blame us?
    The Stompers put their first foot forward in 1983. 'I was an extra in a film, and so was Amnon,' Stanley relates. 'At a lunch break we played together and I realized he was the person I needed to create a band.' Their impromptu jam entertained actors John Mills and Brooke Shields, but the reverberations of that afternoon carry on to this day.
The obvious question is how Dixieland got lodged in these foreign ears.
   I mean, Kazakhstan?!
'There was a tradition of listening to American music. In fact, Louis Armstrong toured Russia. New Orleans-style music took root in [the Soviet Union] as far back as the 1920s, and there are many good jazz bands in Russia and eastern Europe. Oleg played it there.
   'England was slow to catch on, but it did. Certainly in the '50s concerts were organized, and they had the queen come along, and the royal family - Princess Margaret was a great jazz fan.
'Here, the population is not exactly turned on to it.'
Mind you, they seemed to win a fan in none other than Ariel Sharon. 'For many years we played for the American Embassy at their annual garden party, the highlight of the diplomatic year. They get about 2,000 people, and all the politicians. One time, Arik Sharon came over and said he enjoyed the program.'
    Most of their support is among the English-speakers and -listeners, of course, but 'we get big crowds of Russians coming too.'
    The Scotsman would like to use Dixieland to further Zionism. 'I'd like to take the band to Britain to encourage aliya, to show people something that I feel is very important to olim: that they should have a hobby. Something they can do here. It's a link to their past.'
    Most of the band members are middle-aged or a bit beyond. Stanley is a zayde 22 times over (11 grandsons, 11 granddaughters), while Oleg, the youngest, is in his early 20s. Stanley discovered him, plucking him out of obscurity. 'I found him playing in the streets in Netanya, took him onto the stage and gave him some dignity. Gradually, he has increased his knowledge of jazz. He's very talented, very obliging, tries hard.'
    Oleg learned at Jerusalem's Rubin Academy of Music, and now he's studying computers.
    Besides endowing the band with his rapturous clarinet, Oleg added another dimension to their program. 'One night, he suddenly started singing when we played 'Midnight in Moscow,' a favorite tune known worldwide. We never used to sing, but I thought, this is great!' Now they do vocals for select tunes, and Stanley shtups in the occasional Jewish quip or joke.
    Like the one about the Mongolian Irishman. But never mind.
    When Stanley sings, magically, his thick Glasgow accent isappears. It's his musical ear, he explains - in Americanese: 'I c'n mimic, y'know, but as fer a good Amurric'n accent, I'm not rilly good at that because, uhh, I've never ac-chewally bin t' the States, an' I don' have many rill Amurric'n friends.' He laughs, but Scottishly.
    It is entirely consistent with this offbeat bunch that 'Tipperary' was inspired by - the Israeli.
    'The funny thing is,' Stanley chuckles, 'I never thought of 'Tipperary.' Amnon phoned me up one night and said, 'Stanley, I've heard this number, I think we should play it.' I said, 'What's it called?' He said, 'I don't know, it goes like this:' And he hummed it to me. I said, 'You mean 'Tipperary!' He said, 'Oh, that's what it is!''
    Their repertoire ends when the saints go marching in and the audience goes marching out, humming all the way home.