The missing LPs

When I picked up the 2008 book “And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost” by Roger Bennett and Josh Kun, my reaction was instantaneous:

I’d been trying to concoct a book concept based on the American Jewish LPs I’d accumulated. Meanwhile, Bennett and Kun had gathered a superb collection — much more extensive than mine — of the first generation of LPs from the 1950s to 1970s and had written about those cantorial, Yiddish, holiday, Jewish Latin, Jewish black, comedy, celebration, Holocaust, Israeli folk, gentile-performed and folk records.

Bennett and Kun are knowledgeable about Jewish LPs, yet their book stops short — omitting the three final important styles of Jewish music recorded onto LPs: the Debbie Friedman-led burst in Reform liturgical folk and folk rock; the klezmer revival; and Israeli rock ‘n’ roll and modern pop.

To use a seasonal analogy, that’s like removing matzah, bitter herbs and reclining from the Four Questions.

Reform music reforms

Reform congregations generally sang English-language hymns to organ accompaniment until the 1970s. Reform youth of the 1960s began to change all that.

“Sing unto God” (1973), Debbie Friedman’s first album, represented this new approach to prayer, featuring her folky melodies to traditional prayers and her own new songs of praise.

The choir sings harmonies straight out of the rock opera “Hair.” Even the cover — a white posterized photo of a folk singer on a black background — seems radical for an LP of Jewish prayer.

Her second album from the following year, “Not by Might, Not by Power,” highlights her compositional growth. The title song is a catchy rocker that kids still love to sing. Her syncopated dreidl song “Nes Gadol” remains popular.

Friedman writes on “Not by Might” that she developed her groundbreaking music while working at Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, the Reform movement camp in Oconomowoc.

Friedman inspired dozens of liberal Jewish singer-songwriters whose songs appear on the National Federation of Temple Youth annual LP series. “NFTY at 40: This Is Very Good” includes music by Jeff Klepper and Danny Freelander (who would record albums as the duo Kol B’Seder) and “Yom Zeh LeYisrael” by David Cohen, the future rabbi of Congregation Sinai in Milwaukee.

Contemporary liturgical CDs by Julie Silver and Peri Smilow, among others, and by rockers such as Rick Recht and Yom Hadash all have roots in the work of Friedman and her early collaborators.

As the new music of Reform began to spread on record, an old style of Jewish music made a surprising comeback.

Klezmer is the wedding music of eastern European Jewry that developed in the 15th or 18th centuries, and included or excluded vocals — all depending on which histories of the music you read.

No doubt, though, that klezmer thrived in 1920s America and mixed with jazz, maintaining popularity through the 1940s. The style went into hibernation in the 1950s.

It revived on US records in the late 1970s. In San Francisco, the Klezmorim released the earliest klezmer revival album I’ve seen — “East Side Wedding” (1977 on the national Arhoolie label). It’s an eclectic mix of styles from the nearly frantic “Trello Hasaposerviko (Crazy Dance)” to the melancholy “Doina.”

Klezmorim founder Lev Lieberman wrote in 1987 that he had begun researching klezmer in 1971 “when I deduced that a single unknown genre had linked Russian and Rumanian folk music to Depression-era cartoon soundtracks, early jazz and the compositions of Gershwin, Weill and Prokofiev.”

Meanwhile in New York, mandolin and clarinet player Andy Statman was studying with Dave Tarras, one of the great early U.S. klezmer clarinetists.

Statman played both of his instruments on his first klezmer album, “Jewish Klezmer Music” (1979, Shanachie) co-featuring Zev Feldman on cimbal, a hammered string instrument.

Four years later, “The Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra” LP (Shanahachie) sounded less studied and featured bass, horn and guitar.

The Klezmer Conservatory Band formed in Boston in 1980 to play a combination of klezmer and Yiddish theater music. The band’s first album, “Yiddishe Renaissance” (1981, Vanguard), presented a 14-piece ensemble that included founder Hankus Netsky, a scholar and composer; clarinetist Don Byron, an African-American who branched out to jazz; and trumpeter Frank London, a founder of the modern klezmer band the Klezmatics.

The Klezmatics and other bands blended klezmer with modern sounds, even experimental jazz, spawning a New York-based avant-garde Jewish music scene led by Tzadik Records.

Israel may be the only Mideast country to play rock ‘n’ roll well. Maybe it’s the Jewish affinity for the blues, maybe it’s all of the Americans and Brits who made aliyah.

Israeli rock ‘n’ roll began in the mid-1960s. The first Israeli rock song I heard was “Yo Ya” by Kaveret AKA Poogy. Poogy’s 1970s LPs and others produced by the Hed Arzi label of Tel Aviv made their way into the dorm rooms and co-ops of US Jewish college students.

Occasionally I find an Israeli rock album with English liner notes, meaning the LP was targeting Anglo audiences. Kaveret’s “Poogy in Pita” (1974) has cover art featuring the band perched in a half a pita bread in front of a wall of vegetables.

It’s a collage style reminiscent of the cover of the Beatles’ “Revolver.” The music is a melodic, less shmaltzy version of the Beach Boys, though in Hebrew.

The Diaspora Yeshiva Band, which mixed country rock with Jewish religious themes, played the first notes of Jewish rock upon forming in 1975. The “Live from King David’s Tomb” album (1980, CBS Records) includes, somewhat ironically, a blistering setting of “David Melech Yisrael.”

Singer Ofra Haza released half a dozen albums in the United States before her untimely death in 2000.

Her 1984 Hed Arzi LP, “Yemenite Songs,” opens with “Im Nin Alu,” Haza’s big hit that layered modern dance rhythms, played partly on hand drums, over a Yemenite folk song. The LP made her Israel’s first international pop star.

OK, completists, now you know why records of Reform folk, klezmer revival and Israeli rock music are different from all other records. Listen in good health.

Andrew Muchin is a freelance writer and former radio host who’d love to return to Milwaukee’s airwaves with his Jewish music collection on a new version of the “Jewish Waves” radio show. He is a former Chronicle editor.