FEATURE ARTICLE
Andy Statman's Hasidic jazz
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 21, 1997) -- The first thing Andy Statman wants you to understand about his new CD, "Between Heaven & Earth: Music of the Jewish Mystics" (Shanachie), is that it is most definitely "not" another "klezmer" album. "What we're playing is Hasidic music, it's not klezmer music," said Statman in a phone interview from his home in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, N.Y. "I don't like to use the word `klezmer.' It becomes very limiting."
For the last 25 years, Statman has been identified as a primary force behind neo-klezmer -- the revival of the instrumental dance music of Eastern European Jews. After achieving critical acclaim as a bluegrass mandolinist in the early '70s, Statman learned clarinet and went on to record albums including "Jewish Klezmer" (Shanachie), "Klezmer Music" (Shanachie), "Flatbush Waltz" (Rounder) and "Songs of Our Fathers" (Acoustic Disc), a duet album with David Grisman of traditional Jewish melodies. Most recently, Statman's Klezmer Orchestra has appeared alongside other neo-klezmer groups such as the Klezmatics, Brave Old World and the Klezmer Conservatory Band, on tour and on two bestselling "In the Fiddler's House" CDs on Angel Records featuring classical violinist Itzhak Perlman.
With "Between Heaven & Earth", however, Statman is putting some distance between himself and the popular brand of traditional Jewish instrumental music. Motivated in part by his own personal religious awakening, as well as his longstanding affinity for exploring the spirit through jazz improvisation, Statman has gone back to the roots of klezmer in the "niggunim", or Hasidic prayer-melodies, that are used by Jewish mystics to induce heightened spiritual awareness.
Statman and his quartet, featuring pianist Kenny Werner, bassist Harvie Swartz and drummer Bob Weiner, use these melodies -- which are still sung daily in synagogue or at table by Hasidic Jews like Statman -- as raw material for their spiritually-oriented jazz improvisations. Statman likens his approach to some of John Coltrane's later excursions into Indian music. The result, on songs like the dramatic "Atah Nigleisah (You Were Revealed)" and the darkly enigmatic "The Maggid's Deveykus Niggun," is a sweepingly elegant intersection of ancient and modern modalities.
Statman says that in its original form klezmer music in fact did have a spiritual function above and beyond its role as the secular party music of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the Old and New Worlds. "There was tremendous spirituality built into it," he said. "It was music created to serve a particular religious function -- to make a bride and groom happy at a wedding. The musicians of old had in mind that they were fulfilling a particular "mitzvah" when they were playing at weddings."
In a sense, "Between Heaven & Earth" reclaims for klezmer its original function as sacred music. In the process, Statman and his bandmates -- along with mandolinist Grisman and banjoist Bela Fleck, who appear on a few cuts -- create a sort of Jewish/new-age fusion. The alternately laughing and weeping tone of the klezmer clarinet is recognizable in Statman's playing, but here it is the trancelike voice of the "chazan", or cantor, and not the party maven. And rather than providing dance music, the band here is "davening", or praying, improvising a kind of collective, call-and-response session patterned after the communal worship of religious Jews.
Klezmer is often erroneously referred to as "Jewish jazz." With his new album's undeniable foundation in Jewish religious melody and its instantly recognizable, modern jazz approach -- it's not a far leap from the "Chassidic Waltz" to some of Dave Brubeck's Eurasian- influenced compositions, or from "Purim Niggun" to the MJQ's Bach treatments -- has Statman accidentally stumbled on the "real" "Jewish jazz" on "Between Heaven & Earth"? "It's jazz, it's Jewish music, it's a number of different things," said Statman. "Is it the real Jewish jazz? I don't know."
(On Thursday, March 27, the Andy Statman Quartet performs at Johnny D's in Somerville.)
[This article originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix on March 21, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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