14/11/99

Upon us, from the broken sky

"Ladies and gentlemen, Ray Scudero!"
    The folk music aficionados in the hall burst into applause, and it was apparent that this fellow was a crowd favorite. But nobody got up on stage. The technician adjusted the mike and fiddled with a few levers.    
    Unfamiliar with the performers, I didn't know what to expect.
    The technician was now moving instruments around. Waiting for Scudero, wondering if perhaps he was a no-show, I idly watched the techie. Thin fellow. Colorless. Compared to the energetic characters who had been entertaining us, he looked dozy, bland.
    Unexpectedly, this gaunt figure languidly moved into the spotlight, his entire body jolted, and a startling blast of song erupted.
    This was Ray Scudero.
    The song electrified. He performed it solo, a cappella, with nothing but his emotive voice. The audience was enthralled. That song was the hit of the evening.
    "Yeah, I always get a good reception to 'The Sky Has Broken,' " Ray softly chuckles. We met for a nosh and chat at The 7th Place in Jerusalem's Beit Agron, where he performs three times a week. "That song carries me, works its way up from the ankles."
    He wrote it a year ago, "at a time when I felt very oppressed by things going wrong with the world. There's all this rottenness going on. There's a bit of disguised cynicism in the last verse, which is a reverberation from the Prophets: 'See how they've fallen down from the towers, these mighty men of wealth and fame, see how they've lost their terrible powers, never, never to rise again.' "
    He's a soft soul, born 53 years ago in Brooklyn, but with none of the bluster commonly associated with that town. He's bashful, not brash, sensitive to the point of youthful naivete, pained by suffering.
    "Some of my songs have been so moving that I have to rehearse them until I could sing them without breaking down. Particularly a lullaby that was inspired by the horrible situation in Bosnia, where children were being orphaned, and then the orphans themselves were being killed. There's a line, 'I won't let them hurt you, I won't let you go through the night': it has roots in my childhood. I had a younger sister and I was in protective custody, so to speak, placing myself between her and our abusive father."
    A prolific songwriter and poet, Ray likes to "express common feelings, things that everybody goes through. Performing songs that are deeply personal strikes a chord with the audience. Most fun of all is getting people to sing: It's a beautiful feeling when a song I write catches, when people go away whistling the tune."
    He loved singing even as a child, but in 1967 got his first professional vocal training in -- of all places -- the US Army. "Yeah," he laughs, "the First Armored Division Chorus."
    Something of a hermit, he says, his Jerusalem home is "structured like a womb: there's nourishment, security, isolation. It's noiseless." Yet he does not shun human contact; on the contrary, his humanism has brought him intimately close to strangers wherever he has been -- and that accounts for a fair part of the globe.
    "There was a time in Belize, I was hitchhiking, and it got late. I figured I'd spend the night by the riverbank. Then, an aboriginal Mayan came to me, and we sat and watched the sunset together. Communicating by sign language he invited me to his home, fed me dinner, made a bed for me. In the morning, we communed with nature and with each other, then I had to go. He looked at me with a pained expression: Why? Why leave? There's food -- he pointed to the fish bones, and reached up into a tree and pulled down a fruit; he pointed to the bed. Why?
    "In Mexico I was welcomed into a house, and all they had was one bowl of beans, and they shared it with me." The most generous people are those who have nothing.
    "Many places in my travels, people said I could stay there forever. the feeling of friendship was strong. It was tempting, but I knew it wasn't enough."
    He made aliya in 1988. "In Israel, I found a sense of family, of integration that could be meaningfully applied to my life, and a sense of having some worth in the community."
    He lives "very close to the bone," supplementing his meager earnings as a folk singer by doing odd jobs like setting up sound systems for events, and building and repairing instruments.
    He also invented Stanley.
    "Stanley can be played as a guitar, but it has a short neck and a mandolin-sized body. It's set up with 12 strings in double chorus, that is, each string is a pair of strings sounding the same note, six strings tuned in the sequence of the guitar. It has an unusual sound."  
    Not to mention an unusual name. Why not, say, the Scuderophone?
    "It's been suggested," he chuckles. "I named it after the twin Stanley Brothers who invented the Stanley steamer, one of the most extraordinary advances in automotive technology that ever hit the planet. Unfortunately, it was not successful."
    He is a man distinctly unhurried, and the reason may be related to his distaste for hot chocolate. Sounds bizarre, but this is what happened:
    "I was 12, and out of school for the day to go to a dental clinic. The sky was overcast. It was snowing.
    "I finished at the dentist, and I was not in a hurry to go back to school. Overhead I could hear an aircraft approaching, getting closer and closer, louder and louder. Next thing I heard --" he pauses for a few seconds "-- was an inexpressible sound of crush and crumble, and a loud low-frequency boom. There's a ball of fire. Black smoke. The tail section of the United Airlines DC8 fell right in front of me. In the middle of Brooklyn! The plane smacked into the Pillar of Fire Church and -- irony abounds -- the property was later turned into a funeral parlor.
    "Everyone aboard perished, and two others on the ground; if I hadn't dawdled, I would have been right under it.
    "I went into a coffee shop and called my mother. 'Mom? It's Ray. I just saw an airplane crash in front of me.' She said ok, sit down, have a cup of hot chocolate, then come straight home.
    "Only about a year ago, I confronted myself with the question, 'Why don't I like hot chocolate?' I went digging into myself and made the connection."
    Sensitive kid that he was, "The first thing I did when I went home, I wrote what I saw, and what I felt."
    You could tell, even then, that kid was going to grow up into someone like this.