Music

Paul Shapiro provides the musical accompaniment to Edward Slonem’s groundbreaking 1925 film “His People.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

The Sounds Of Silents: “His People” with Live Accompaniment
When I watched a DVD screener
of the restored print of Edward Sloman’s groundbreaking 1925 melodrama “His People” prior to its re-emergence (courtesy of the National Center for Jewish Film) at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, I had the disadvantage of seeing the film without any music. Make no mistake, the term “silent film” is a misnomer; most films made before the coming of talkies were meant to have a musical score, preferably performed live.
Given that “His People” is a story of a Jewish family divided by questions of ethnic pride and assimilation, what could be more appropriate than to have a new score for the film written and performed by a

self-identified Jewish musician, and given the film’s setting on the streets of New York, why not pick a jazz artist to get that flavor of the city’s bustle?
The musician chosen, Paul Shapiro, is as talented as they come, both a fine sax player and a deft writer.
“I was commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage to write the score for their Silent Film/Live Music series in 2004,” Shapiro recalls. “I had a choice of films to pick from and this was my favorite.”
Shapiro, whose album “Midnight Minyan” is one of the best meldings of jazz and Jewish themes in recent years, had actually written a film score before, for the 1996 independent feature “Watermelon Woman.” But scoring a silent film is a very different experience, he readily admits.
“With a contemporary film you have cues to write for: 30 seconds, two minutes, etc.,” he explains. “Often the music has to stay out of the way of dialogue. But with a silent, we are playing continuously for 90 minutes. It’s a challenge, but also fun to be able to go full throttle without having to worry about getting in the way of other sound sources, like dialogue, sound effects or other music.”
Then there is the little matter of performing the score live while the film is unspooling for an audience, a problem that sound films don’t have.
“I think the hardest part is trying to keep the various pieces in line with the film as it moves along in real time,” Shapiro says. “Sometimes when we play pieces over time we might play them a touch faster than before, then we end up finishing too soon. Other times I might try to hold back a tempo, and then we aren’t finished in time, and have to jump ahead to the next section. But we are getting better and better at this aspect the more we play with the film.”
All in all, “His People” is a rare chance to experience the almost lost art of live accompaniment.
“His People” will be presented with live accompaniment by Paul Shapiro and his sextet on March 1at 8 p.m. at the Abrons Arts Center at the Henry Street Settlement (466 Grand St.) For information, call (212) 598-0400 or go to www.abronsartscenter.org.

Celebrating
Ezra Laderman
Like most composers, one
suspects, Ezra Laderman says that when he listens to the first or second performance of one of his new compositions, he is thinking only of what might need to be fixed.
“I’m not nervous, but I’m anxious to hear where I can make things happen more felicitously,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “And I do, I do go back and make revisions where they need to be made. I’ve done it even after it has been professionally recorded. It upsets my publisher terribly.”
But when the piece is an older one that he has heard many times, Laderman said, “I just sit back and enjoy the moment.”
When the Yale School of Music pays tribute to him on March 3 with a concert marking his 20th year on the faculty, the 83-year-old composer and teacher should be able to bask in many moments.
“I came out of retirement to teach at Yale,” he said. “These have been 20 wonderful years that I never expected.”
Over the course of a career that stretches back to his return from military service in WWII, the Brooklyn-born Laderman has frequently drawn on Jewish themes and sounds.
“It’s somehow embedded in everything I write,” he said. “Many of my works are written with a direct Jewish theme, like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. We’re Jewish-Americans, but Jewish. I’ve gone through the Jewish experience as lived in the United States and that gives one a certain attitude. It permeates what happens musically whether you like it or not. There is no stamp on my music but there’s no question it’s written by a Jewish composer.”
In no small part, he noted, his sense of Jewishness goes right back to his childhood in a Yiddish-speaking home.
“I grew up in an enormously positive Jewish atmosphere,” he recalled. “My parents were both ardent Zionists. My father was the director of Histadrut before the State of Israel was formed. He addressed Knesset in its first year. I was very much part of that. My first job in music was accompanying Shoshana Damari at a Labor-Zionist rally in Atlantic City when I was 21 or 22.”
Since that modest start, Laderman has received many honors, including election as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But it is his teaching that he says keeps him in touch with the evolution of music.
“Through my teaching now, I keep very involved with what is happening with young composers,” he explained. “Although I go in my own direction, working with young composers as they are embarking on their own careers has to have had an enormous impact on my work as well. I remain cognitively aware of the stylistic thrust of the moment. My music has to have been impacted by these wonderful kids over the years.”
And next month, they’ll return the favor.
The Yale School of Music salutes Ezra Laderman on Monday, March 3 at 8 p.m. at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (57th Sreet and Seventh Avenue). For information, call (212) 247-7800 or go to www.carnegiehall.org.

The Metros Go To The Movies
While Paul Shapiro is adding jewish
music to a movie, Metropolitan Klezmer has been reversing the process for many years, deriving some of its repertoire from Yiddish cinema classics. In April, they will devote an entire concert to the Metro/movie nexus. Given bandleader Eve Sicular’s lifelong interest in film, this is a logical development. After all, Sicular was an assistant to the curator on the Museum of Modern Art’s famous Yiddish film retrospective in the early 1990s, an event whose impact on the revival of interest in Yiddish culture has yet to be measured.
Back then, the vast majority of Yiddish film was pretty inaccessible to any but a few scholars and preservationists. Only a handful of key films were available on tape, so a film researcher like Sicular was a secret weapon for a band seeking new and varied material. Indeed, her work with both film and band involved perfect symbiosis, as Sicular explains. She offers the example of the Wedding Tango from Edgar G. Ulmer’s screwball musical comedy, “Americaner Shadkhen”:
“I was watching the film for my research [on hidden gay and lesbian subtexts in Yiddish film], and realized after having seen the clips of germane scenes,” that one had used a tango, she says. “And I thought, ‘Gee, that was a nice tango, let’s go back and look at that again.’ And I eventually added it to the band’s book. Then I realized it was something relating to my research. It’s sung by Leo Fuchs and I realized that it was a song about coming out. So one kind of research feeds another.”
Of course, not every find is that fortuitous. Sometimes a good song is just, well, a good song.
“I was [hearing] things on soundtracks that somehow had never been played by bands,” Sicular says. “Molly Picon’s stuff was [being played], but not the other material.”
In fact, a perfect example of Sicular’s musical archeological digging can be found in one of Picon’s most famous films, “Yidl Mitn Fidl.”
“There is a gorgeous ‘Bobbes Tantz’ in the wedding sequence,” she says. “I had never heard anyone else doing that piece. It was interesting to arrange, with a complex harmonic structure.”
Now the process has come full circle. When the Metros perform an evening of their film-derived repertoire this spring, they’ll be accompanied by clips from some of the films, Sicular notes.
“It’s perfect, we’ll include something from the tenement wedding sequence in ‘Uncle Moses’ and we’ll be right there on the Lower East Side,” she says triumphantly.
“Music from Yiddish Celluloid,” featuring Metropolitan Klezmer, will take place at the Museum at Eldridge Street (12 Eldridge St.) on Wednesday, April 9 at 7 p.m. For information, phone 212-219-0888 or visit www.eldridgestreet.org.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization