6/7/99

Syna-gogo

    The shul I don't go to is strictly Orthodox, but I recently ventured into a Conservative synagogue, which was surprising, not least because no food was served.
    Why would I forsake my Lubavitch roots? I went not for religious reasons, but to attend a jam session of the country's finest barbershop quartets, including an all-woman barbershop quartetette.
    (It's only fair. As you can see from this photo of me, when I go to a barber shop, I pray.)
    Anyway, this evening I'm going to a Reform synagogue. I'm still not planning to pray, though: this time, the reason is folk music.
    The Kol Haneshama Congregation in Jerusalem's Baka neighborhood is holding a sort of syna-gogo, a three and a half hour mini-marathon of singers and musicians who tuned out before the '60s were over. The event is part of a three-day environment-awareness festival in Baka.
    The concert boils down to an odd combination of worship, shipwrecks, compost, doctors, melody and spaghetti. Well, that's how I understood it when I spoke to a few of the performers, and that's why I'm going to a Reform shul tonight.
    It's kind of a doctor's appointment for me. My hematologist sings. Her husband, a geriatrician, strums. Together with another doctor, a nurse, and an artist who seems to have got mixed up with the wrong crowd, they comprise a group called The Unstrung Heroes.
    Ora Paltiel was poking my lymph nodes last week (I'm fine), and, happy to change the subject, I asked when she and her husband, Mark Clarfield, would be performing next. She told me about the Baka concert: "We're doing it for a good cause, for recycling and the synagogue." She thought about that for a moment, and chuckled. "You could say, 'Garbage & the Clarfields.'"
    All told, there will be 15 to 20 acts -- including the Kol Haneshama rabbi himself, Levi Wyman-Kellman -- and the whole thing will wind up with a huge jam.
    The impetus for the concert, says David Mencher, an organizer/performer, is the visit of a professional fiddler from Virginia, whose brother is a congregant. "We figured we'd organize something around that, and the timing was perfect, because everyone's in the mood, it's just before Jacob's Ladder Festival."
    (In fact, not everyone's in the mood. If you don't see many haredim listening to women's voices at the Reform synagogue, it's because we're in the midst of The Three Weeks -- not to be confused with The Seven Weeks or The Nine Days -- during which entertainment is avoided.)
    "We'll be playing folk music of all sorts: Ladino, performed by a Baka choral group; French, Balkan tunes, and of course lots of American music,ג€ says David. "Hopefully, the music should overshadow the garbage."
    Mencher insists there's a definite link between trash and shul. "The synagogue is a place that serves the community, and this particular synagogue is very involved. The environment is an important community concern." Light refreshments will be served, adding to the problem.

THE CLARFIELDS come across as, well, folksy. You won't mistake them for brash rockers, quirky jazz musicians, perfectionist classicians.
    Mark has an easy, self-deprecating Toronto sense of humor; Ora, from Ottawa, may be the most congenial hematologist on earth. They manage to stave off depression and burnout in two of the most disheartening branches of medicine, because they actually like what they do.
    "In Ora's case, at least, she cures people," says Mark, chatting with me at their kitchen table. "I very seldom do. I help people. But there's a lot of satisfaction: I like looking after broken down old people. I like building them up a bit, or at least making them comfortable. Because believe me, whatever's wrong with you, could always be worse."
    It's only coincidence, he says, that four of the five Unstrung Heroes are medicos. Dr. Barry Knishkovy is their fiddler; Marc Gitelson, a male nurse, plays bass, recorder and an acoustic bass guitar called a guitarone. Debbie Schwartz, a jewelry artist, plays dulcimers, spoons and spaghetti.
    Spaghetti?
    Ora takes a plastic container off the kitchen shelf and rattles it at me. "One of our songs is Caribbean, and instead of maracas, Debbie shakes the spaghetti, which gives a nice percussion sound." She retrieves a smaller plastic jar. "Here. This is what I play."
    Elite brand soup nuts. Impressive.
    "I shake soup nuts. You'll notice they make a different sound from the spaghetti." She demonstrates, and I'm amazed, she's right.
    That's folk music for you.
    Ora is also the vocalist, often crooning in unison with the spouse. "Neither of us has a fabulous voice," Mark admits, "but we specialize in harmonies. Together we can put out a good sound. I'm not musically good enough to copy others, so what we come up with is pretty unique, it's our own style."
    Is it happy music, Mark?
    "No. No." He grins. "We're specialists in the lugubrious. People laugh at us, like we're The Lugubrious Band. Our songs are usually slow. We don't do drinking songs, I hate them. Although I do one drinking song, it's cute. We sing songs about love, drowning, shipwrecks, tragedies, people who die."
    "For this concert," Ora says, "we were told to make it happy, because we specialize in sad songs. So we're a bit out of our element."
    Mark quickly points out: "Despite the fact that our stuff's lugubrious, we're pretty funny."
    Their repertoire includes bits of Americana -- Dylan, Baez, Buddy Holly -- and Canadiana: Joni Mitchell, the McGarrigle Sisters, Ian & Sylvia, Stan Rogers. "It's hard to do justice to Stan Rogers, though. He has a voice from Voiceland."
    (Actually, "had." Rogers, a huge man from Nova Scotia with poetry in his soul and a rumbling voice, was a fast-rising star. Returning from a folk festival in Texas in 1983, his plane caught fire on the runway. He kept going back into the fire, pulling people out to safety, but went in once too often and perished, at the age of 34. Just the stuff of folk music.)
    "We do a lot of Scottish and Irish, medieval English, and French Canadian. We're not experts in Gaelic, but we can sing it." Mark says they have a modest following. "One of the things we're known for is that nobody knows our songs. We don't do new stuff, more like 1800s, 1700s."
    "Folk-music groupies in Israel," says Ora, "are people who grew up in youth movements, where there was always a guitar, and they never progressed because they came here. They weren't influenced by the popular music that came later: they got stuck at that stage of music."
    As Mark puts it, there's an "underground cult of aging anglophones" in Israel who dig folk, and don't mind if a note strays a bit off-key. Again, that's folk music for you. "It means you're not a symphony orchestra, it means you sit around the kitchen (where the soup nuts are) and play. There's a sense of informality in folk music. We can forget words, like we do, and play the wrong chord. That doesn't mean the musicians don't try hard. We do. But we're not professionals.
    "We love the music, we practise a lot, and we take it seriously. It's just that we don't take ourselves seriously."
    "If we did," Ora says, "we'd go out and buy real maracas." But spaghetti will do. It's close enough for folk music.