Remembering two musical greats

 This morning I woke up to the news that Bob McGrath of Sesame Street had died. I once had a phone conversation with him. January of 1986 I started a new job as the assistant program director of my synagogue. In those days my synagogue ran a giant event called the Hanukah Arts Festival. The festival included a juried craft show, films, a book sale and a big concert for kids.

The festival was such a giant event that you started to plan for the next year almost as soon as the old festival was put to bed. Someone had passed on Bob McGrath's number to me and asked me to call him and ask if he would be willing to perform the following December.

I had assumed that I had been given the phone number of his management office. I was stunned to hear that the voice on the other end of the phone was the great man himself. I stuttered and stammered and fan girled  for several minutes. Bob McGrath was lovely. He was unable to perform at my synagogue though . He already had a gig scheduled in Florida. I was so touched that the sweet man he played on Sesame Street was so close to who he was on that phone call.

A little later in the morning I read that the great Klezmer musician Pete Sokolow had died. I met Pete also in my role doing programming for my synagogue. We used to host a Klezmer dance party every Purim after megilla reading. Pete often played keyboard or piano in the Klezmer band put together by Henry Sapoznik. Henry wrote the following beautiful tribute.

It is with a heavy, broken heart that I share the very sad news of the passing of one of the last giants of classic klezmer music, the brilliant pianist, bandleader, orchestrator, teacher – and dear, close friend — Pete Sokolow (or, as he liked to say: "Peyskah Duvid, der organ shpiller.")

Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Sokolow’s father was a devotee of the music of George Gershwin and taught Pete to play piano in that style. But the young Sokolow was too in awe of the great reed players of early New Orleans (a “moldy fig” was how he referred to himself) so learned clarinet and saxophone to emulate his idols.

But it was when Pete started working in Jewish bands in the 1950s Catskills, that he discovered the widespread inadequacy of keyboard players universally unskilled in any nuance of Yiddish music harmony, so switched gears and returned to the piano.

Pete’s instincts were, of course, correct as he soon became the preferred accompanist of klezmer icons like Dave Tarras and Max Epstein and the Epstein Brothers making him, as Pete joked, the “fifth” Epstein brother.

Despite his love of the music, Sokolow turned to teaching in the New York City school system to raise his young family, but the growing Hasidic music business drew him back into performing despite his low opinion of the music.

It was around this time in the early 1970s that I first met Pete when my late father Cantor Zindel Sapoznik (z”l) assumed his post as the cantor of Brooklyn’s Marine Park Jewish Center and where Pete was a member of his choir. (Pete and I did not exactly hit it off, I was playing old time country music at the time and Pete referred to me as “the cantor’s hippie son.”)

However, with my own subsequent discovery of klezmer music, I learned of Pete’s already deeply accrued knowledge so soon became a willing supplicant and regular visitor to his cluttered basement listening to old 78s and LPs, looking at sheet music and first hearing of players — Sid Beckerman, Howie Lees, Paul Pincus, Max Epstein, Ray Musiker, Irving Gratz and many more — who I would soon count among my close friends and bandmates.

Co-founding Klezmer Plus! in 1982, Pete Sokolow built the band around these musicians and, under his leadership, brought a fully formed instant visceral presence to the early days of the klezmer renewal. Pete’s intimate knowledge of these veteran klezmer players who time and taste had cast aside but who he eagerly sought out with a singular vengeance, reignited their long dormant playing, and restored to them the dignity of being celebrated for their singular musical prowess while simultaneously affording me the singular lifetime thrill to regularly share bandstands with them and, in the best possible way, learn the nuances of the music from the very players who fully lived it. I was the worst musician on the bandstand and I couldn’t be happier!

As Köchel did for Mozart or Francis James Child did for English balladry, Pete Sokolow sat down with the old guys and meticulously and systematically transcribed all their old time Yiddish music thereby creating an easily assessable library of a generation of mid-century New York klezmer repertoire. The transcriptions would become a basis of our book “The Compleat Klezmer,” the first modern klezmer anthology.

The band quickly added to its weddings and bar mitzvahs by playing at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the National Folk Festival, the Seattle Folklife Center, and periodic concerts for the Library of Congress. In 1991 we produced the award-winning CD: “Klezmer Plus! Featuring Sid Beckerman and Howie Lees” the basis for our subsequent book “The Klezmer Plus Folio.”

When I started KlezKamp in 1985, it was, of course, to Pete Sokolow whom I first turned and who instantly became the head of the music faculty not only plugging in the Sids, and the Howies and the Pauls (enabling them to become beloved folk icons in their own right) but who found his own joyous outlet for his love of music and his love of teaching. Pete would come to 29 of the 30 KlezKamps, missing only the last one due to ilnness.

For those three decades, Pete’s colorful character (“A circumcised W.C. Fields” one old friend called him) and his enthusiastic (and at times, sandpaper-y/36 grit) demeanor could – and did — put off some students. But the smart ones who persevered would quickly find that beneath the gruff and jagged exterior was a deeply passionate and lovingly generous holder of a beloved tradition who would happily put every one of his students into a direct connection to the unbroken continuity of the music he adored

Pete’s passions (old cars, trolleys, airplanes, movies, etc) extended to old time radio, so, we worked together from 1990-1996 on the last iteration of WEVD’s long running all-Yiddish signature program The Forward Hour, Pete became the show’s regular musical co-host enthusiastically playing audience requests on the station’s long unused Hammond B6 organ.

Pete would also be my music director for several NPR series: a short lived but delightful 1995 NPR program dedicated to the cartoons of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer featuring Jerry Stiller, Joey Faye, Brother Theodore, Joe Franklin and others and the 2002 Peabody award winning NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project.” Pete not only created all the music for the 10-part series (including a delightful klezmer version of the “All Things Considered” theme!) but led the orchestra on the Yiddish Radio Project’s six city nationwide tour with Yiddish theater veterans Seymour Rechtzeit, Claire Barry, David Rogow and others.

And when Pete was a member of Kapleye, he was on the 1995 loving CD tribute to old time Yiddish radio, "Kapelye, On the Air" and the same year for the PBS Itzhak Perlman special "In the Fiddler’s House" to recreate a radio segment featuring Fyvush Finkel singing my English translation of his hit 1942 record "Ikh Bin a Border Bay Mayn Vayb."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBvTWpKzR0

Yet, for all the gigs and projects and undertaking we eagerly co-conspired on, it will be the numerous small things which inform my deepest, loving memories of Pete: our car rides to and from gigs where he would fill the time and the air with stories about gigs past, people he played with and then, after we had set up our bandstand – always at least an hour early — he would get the old guys to add their own delightful amazing stories. Or going around the city taking pictures of locations where Yiddish radio stations used to exist, visiting old musicians and recording their stories, a trip to Blimpie Blank’s Bargain Music store on a dilapidated Lower East Side and Pete putting together a clarinet for me or haunting junk stores looking for klezmer 78s.

Pete’s last record was for KlezKamp’s “Living Traditions” series a 2011 tribute to his long involvement as a klezmer musician on which he plays all the instruments. (The CD’s inter-generational cover is reproduced here)

On June 19, 2017, the Yiddish Artists and Friends staged a sold out all-star musical tribute to Pete which featured top players (Michael Winograd, Ken Maltz, Aaron Alexander, David Levitt, Jordan Hirsch, Joanna Sternberg, etc.) with me on banjo and MC and coordinated with his son Daniel.

Despite some setbacks, Pete triumphed as a towering presence to the emerging era of klezmer music, passing the baton to a generation he helped make more literate, insightful and passionate.

It is impossible to think of any Yiddish music projects which I ever undertook for which I did not first think of Pete as an enthusiastic and eager collaborator, enabler, critic and inspiration.

It is impossible to think of a time that Pete was anything less than an encouraging and devoted friend, a forthcoming Dutch Uncle, and a sympathetic, generous, and supportive soul.

It is impossible to think of a world now without Pete Sokolow: a once in a generation musician and a virtuoso mentsh.

Boruch Dayan Emes: May your memory be an eternal blessing.

Several years after those Purim concerts I had organized at my synagogue, I attended KlezKamp with my daughter and my younger son.

Pete taught classes at KlezKamp, he organized bands with old timers and the younger folks. I would often hang out and chat with him in the hotel lobby as we waited for the dining room to open for meals. Pete was funny and warm and irascible. I had been told that he once slugged a bar-mitzvah boy at his own bar-mitzvah party because the kid was either annoying Pete or had done something terrible to his piano.

So I was sitting next to Pete in one of the giant lobby chairs. I asked him a question . "Pete, would you do me a favor and listen to my kid play recorder?" I knew that Pete was fond of me so he didn't say the nasty things that he was thinking out loud. I swear I could see the curses that he was thinking floating above his head.

My son was about seven and had just discovered that he could play double nasal recorder. I thought that Pete would either find this odd ball talent amusing or he would never speak to me again.

My son played the dreidel song out of both nostrils. Pete laughed. Then he called out in his gruff voice, "Kid!!Come with me!" He then brought my son to one old Klezmer musician after another in that lobby and called out " Kid! Play!", as he brought my son to each old timer. The kid played.

I haven't seen Pete in many years. All day my head has been running a slideshow of memories accompanied by the sound of Pete's voice and his music.