Artie Shaw explains his musical genealogy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

LA Times, Aug. 6, 2000:

Over the years people have asked me, "What's your musical genealogy?" How
was I supposed to answer that? I spent 10 years trying to teach my mother
how to play "My Country 'Tis of Thee." She was like a seal with those
musical pipes at the aquarium--no relation to music. My father could at
least pick out a melody single-fingered. I thought maybe it was from his
side.

When I was fiftysomething, my mother died. She had a Jewish funeral on
Amsterdam Avenue in New York. All my mother's family was there.

"Hey, Artie!" "Gee, Artie! Artie!" They even asked for autographs.

"For Christ's sake, my mother's dead!" I said. "Leave me alone, you
schmucks."

We went into the funeral parlor and sat down. There was a plain pine casket
up there on this little rostrum. Orthodox Jewish funerals don't have
flowers. I was looking at a box with this woman inside with whom I'd had a
love-hate relationship ever since I could remember. There she was, up there
in this box.

I sat there and in spite of myself I was moved. Her life was over,
finished. It was like a big hole in my life for a minute. I was sitting
there with my then-wife, Evelyn Keyes, and this young rabbi got up--not an
Orthodox rabbi, but a young man who spoke perfect English--and he addressed
us.

"Here we have a coffin," he said, "with all that remains of Sarah. We're
here to pay reverence and respect to her for her life. Let us talk for a
moment about these people like Sarah who came to this country . . ." He did
an Irving Howe-style commentary out of "World of Our Fathers": "They came
here by the thousands, expecting sidewalks of gold, and found toil and
travail and exploitation. They lived in the teeming Lower East Side and
worked in sweatshops and struggled to make a living. They married and
brought forth children, some of whom achieved fame and fortune . . . "

He was going good, I thought.

Then an old guy got up from the congregation. A typical Lower East Side
Jew, he wore navy blue pants and a brown double-breasted jacket, open, with
cigarette ashes on his vest, and a big broad-brimmed hat. He went over to
the rabbi and plucked at his pants.

The rabbi did a W.C. Fields take: Get away, kid, you're bothering me. He
was trying to get on with his speech. Then another guy got up and tried to
dissuade the first guy.

The first man was Moishe, my Uncle Morris, my mother's older brother, and
he didn't speak much English. He was speaking in his guttural Yiddish to
the rabbi, and the rabbi didn't seem to understand. The other guy was
trying to pull Moishe away. The rabbi leaned over.

Finally the rabbi turned back to us.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this man is the older brother of the
deceased, Sarah, and he's just been telling me he wants to sing a lament
for the dead, the Kaddish. So with your permission, I'll step down and let
him do that."

Moishe got up on the rostrum--this little old man in that typical uniform
of the Lower East Side Jew--and he stood there and started to sing. My jaw
dropped.

He had no more voice, there was no instrument, it was all gone. But he had
musicality. The Kaddish is a beautiful Yiddish lament. And he sang with
such pathos and musical intonation--a real relationship of note to note,
which is what music is about--that within his own pitch, he was singing
perfectly.

A shiver went through me, and I whispered to Evelyn, "That's where it came
from: my mother's side." This dead, tone-deaf lady had been the one with
the musical gene in her all along.

He finished singing. The other man took him away and sat him down again. It
was a very touching moment, his singing a lament for his dead sister.

It was one of the epiphanies of my life.

Two weeks went by and I got a call from my lawyer. He was the executor of
my mother's estate, which was still in probate, and he asked if I could
come up and help him sort through some bills.

I showed up at his office, and he had a pack of bills in front of him on
his desk: gas bills for the apartment, rent due. She had paid for a plot to
be buried in. Old-country people believe in doing these things.

"I don't understand this one," he said. "It's a bill from somebody named
Morris for $ 150. It's for singing at your mother's funeral."

"What?" I said.

"Did someone sing at your mother's funeral? Did you hire somebody?"

You'd think a brother would sing for free. He had wrung my heart out and
then wanted to be paid. He saw a chance to make a buck. I never talked to
that SOB again. That's me and my family.

It was like a nightingale sending you a bill.


Louis Proyect
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