Authentically Inauthentic
Violinist Cookie Segelstein talks about her trio, Veretski Pass, and the ever-evolving history of Jewish music
Cookie Segelstein is a child of Holocaust survivors who originally hail from the area of the Veretski Pass, which is today in western Ukraine, and grew up immersed in the Jewish music of the region. She started on violin when she was five years old, and played Jewish music at her father’s behest, or, as she jokes in our interview below, “I was expected to play the melodies that my father sang, or yelled, to me.” Yet, despite the compulsory nature of those early experiences, she dove headlong into music, took up viola, earned her masters degree as a classical violist from Yale, and amassed an impressive curriculum vitae of performance and teaching credits.
But the fiddle was calling, and that became Segelstein’s primary focus as she started exploring the Jewish music she first played as a child. She founded her trio, Veretski Pass, about two decades ago with Joshua Horowitz on chromatic button accordion, cimbalom, and piano; and Stuart Brotman on bass, basy—a type of three-stringed cello tuned more like a bass and played standing and with a strap—as well as a number of other traditional instruments.
In the popular imagination, Jewish music is often associated with the clarinet, but that instrument—at least in relation to the long history of Jewish music—is a relative newcomer. Traditionally, Jewish music, especially from the area of Veretski Pass, was stringed-based, and that is the focus of Segelstein’s group.
“The music guilds in many towns in the Veretski region made it illegal for Jews to play loud music,” Segelstein says. “In some places, there were a lot of restrictions on Jewish musicians, so you didn’t have a lot of brass instruments or a lot of loud instruments. Strings were really the primary instrument there.”
Segelstein’s knowledge of Jewish music, and its history, is deep, although she bristles at the idea of being labeled throwback or traditionalist. Her band uses traditional instruments and is rooted in a more classic aesthetic, but, as she sees it, that’s just their point of entry. “We’re not married to the ‘A’ word, ‘authenticity,’” she says. “In a way, we are considered to be a traditional group because we use those styles, but it’s just what we like.”
I spoke with Segelstein from her home in the Bay Area, and we talked about the distinguishing characteristics of Eastern European Jewish music, the gray area between improvisation and composition, the heavy toll immigration and antisemitism has taken on the transmission of Jewish folk styles, and how music from disparate cultures and regions has worked its way into the DNA of Jewish music, and visa versa.
The Veretski Pass sounds like it was something of a multicultural mecca, with many different peoples coming through and settling there?
Yes, Hungry claims it as important. Prince Árpád [probably the first Hungarian ruler] came across in, I think, 895, and settled what became the empire there. My father was born at the base of the Pass, and my mother was born in Munkács [today called, Mukachevo, in western Ukraine, and the home of the Munkatch, or Munkacs, Hasidim], which was not far from there. It was a big mecca for Jewish thought, and the site of the first secular Jewish day school. As far as music goes, it was between the Polish and Hungarian border—they claimed they were brothers even though they kept invading each other. At the time my folks were born, it was Czechoslovakia. Many ethnicities lived there. The music was really mixed with probably a strong Hungarian and Ukrainian flavor, and that’s what I grew up with.
Were musicians from that area familiar with many of the different local styles?
Most likely, because the musicians would have worked in groups that were of mixed ethnicity. There would have been Gypsies—or Roma as people call them, although I don’t know if it would have been the Roma tribe—but Jews, Gypsies, local Hungarians and Ukrainians, and they would have known each other’s music. It’s like any musician who needs to make a living. Some researchers claim that a klezmer band was not a klezmer band unless all the members were Jewish, but I vehemently disagree with that. I know, as a musician, that wherever you are, you are that musician, and if you can hear the differences between different styles, then you work more. It wasn’t any different there, especially with musicians who would play for nobility or government officials who came into town, if they could play the Polish style or the Hungarian style, they were valued as musicians.
What gave the Jewish music its Jewish flavor?
That’s the $64,000 question. I know, when I was little, and I was expected to play the melodies that my father, sang—or yelled—to me [laughs], if my mother heard it, she’d say, “That’s not Jewish.” I think that what makes it Jewish is the people listening to it. Does it affect them? But that being said, there’s a vocal quality, also, and the Jewish style is not flashy. For example, if I’d play something too fast, my father would say, “Why are you playing like a Gypsy?” And I know he would say that if the children of the Gypsy fiddlers played too slow, their parents would say, “Why are you playing so Jewish?” The Jewish sensibility is internal, although these days we dress it up with all kinds of ornaments. Growing up, I did not learn a krechts, I did not learn trills. I learned a certain way of playing, which was like my father sang it. If a musician wasn’t classically trained, that’s what you got.
These days, the music is called klezmer, which sounds like a catchall for any Jewish music that came from Eastern Europe. But was there a lot of variation between the different regional Jewish styles?
I think so. My family never called it klezmer music. The musicians were klezmorim, but they called the music Yiddish music, or Jewish music, or the music from back home. My understanding is that the term klezmer is from some of the ethnomusicology researchers in the early 20th century, maybe Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, maybe Moisei Beregovsky. I don’t know who termed it, but yes, it’s a big catchall, and the melodies for the different prayers vary—now it is a big global village, and with the internet everything is mishmashed—but it wasn’t always that way. A song like “Avinu Malkeinu” might sound different in one place as opposed to in another place 500 kilometers away. But I think the musical styles were similar. The way I grew up playing, to satisfy my father, was probably a mixture of a Hungarian and a Ukrainian style of fiddle playing, with a lot of open strings, and some rhythmic bowing.
Do you use alternate tunings?
I have yes. I love to do that. When we were touring a lot, I used to carry two fiddles, so I could have one that I messed around with the tuning.
Will you pull out viola as well?
For the first record, I pulled out viola. I love viola, that’s my classical instrument, and what my masters degree is in, but it’s not as satisfying to play. It’s more bulky. Viola was traditionally used to play chords, and often held sideways with three strings. The bridge was flat so all the strings could be played.
Did they strum it?
No, instead of parallel to the floor, it was held perpendicular, and it was bowed up and down. The viola player was a chord player—chord and rhythm.
In some of your videos online, you’re playing music that was originally composed for dancing, but the audience is sitting quiet and polite. Do you find that unnerving?
Audiences in different places are different, and their listening depth is also different. There is some listening music, like doinas, which are very similar to cantorial recitations. That’s a listening form, but it’s still part of the wedding—everything is centered around the Jewish wedding—and in its true form, Jewish music is functional. But like I said, the audiences in different places are different. It’s interesting because in Germany—we’ve done a lot of work in Germany—people listen very carefully there, and they’ll have questions about a specific part of the performance. After a concert is over, even if they’re not jumping up and dancing—there is so much of a political and emotional load playing this music in Germany, still—they’re a very good audience. They’ll come up after a concert, and say, “The third song you played after the intermission, in the middle, about one-and-a-half minutes in, had a Turkish melody. What is that all about?” [Laughs].
Watching you play, where do the composed parts end and the improvisations start? It’s different from, say, jazz, with a head and then a solo.
It’s more like Baroque music. In Baroque music, if you have a skip of a fifth, you fill that with a scale.
And how you fill that is up to the musician?
Right. There are different variations of how to do it. You move around the melody, and then the harmony follows the melody. We never make arrangements. We did when we first got together, but then realized that we can’t remember, and said forget it. As the years have gone on, we have our licks that we do in a certain kind of phrase, but most of the time when we’re playing something that we’ve played for a long time, one of us will do something different. The others will go, “Whoa, what’s that?” There’s always an element of surprise. Both Josh and Stu will get a wild hair, and start doing something that I’ve never heard before. It’s really fun. It is really up to the musician, and each musician has their own set of licks and styles of exploration.
If you're going to go from, say, the A section to the B section, do you signal that or does the band intuit what you’re about to do?
If I am going to do something, I’ll anticipate the beginning of the next phrase. It’s very common. If they don’t know what tune I am going to go to—but I’ve given them a raised eyebrow—the first measure will just be me, and then they’ll go, “Oh.” That is very typical in folk music anyway, in dance styles, because if you’ve got a group that’s dancing for 45 minutes. You’re not going to stick on one song, and the lead player has the tunes in their head, ahead of where they’re going to go. I’ll give a signal, and then I’ll give an intro or start to play the first measure.
So when I see you play a tight unison line, that’s the actual song and not improvised?
Usually. The song is usually pretty recognizable. It’s not like jazz where you do a whole new melodic line over a set of changes, it’s more like you take the melody and you embellish it.
You mentioned doinas earlier? Is that a Yiddish term?
It’s a Romanian word and it means song. It’s a shepherd’s song. It was a fad—Romanian things were very attractive—and you hear a lot of melismas that are maybe Romanian-based in cantorial music from that era. The Jewish doina is much more simplified than the Romanian one, because the chords of the Romanian one go all over the place. They’re very melismatic and played classically with orchestras, but the Jewish doina is simpler. For example, the key structure would be something like D-minor, G-minor, D-minor, then it would repeat, and then it would go to G-major. It could also use something like a D-minor scale, but with a raised fourth, which I would call a Ukrainian dorian.
How does klezmer work rhythmically?
It’s in two or three. That’s it, and that’s because it’s for dances. We don’t do the sevens or 11s or the 13s. However, for instance, take the Romanian hora, which is now considered to be a klezmer form. The Jewish hora—not the Israeli hora, which is in four—but the Jewish hora, which takes from the Romanian hora, sometimes those Romanian tunes were in seven. What the Jews did was they took that last grouping of three and shoved it into a triplet. In that way, when we play rhythm for a hora, sometimes we indicate that seven by playing the third beat a little early. In a lot of cases, we’re also pushing the melody a little bit, so the lead voice is a little ahead of the bass and the rhythm. That’s because if you play for dancers, they drag, and if you stick with them they’ll get mad, because they’ll keep getting slower and slower. I might push it a little bit, but the bass and the rhythm is going to stay where it is, so I am always a little ahead of that. It’s subtle, but it sets up a feeling of, “I have to rush,” and that’s part of it, too. Even though Jewish dance music is in two or three, we kind of diss the bar line. Also, if we’re going from one phrase to another, I’ll often anticipate the second phrase. Not only to let the musicians know that, “Yes, I do remember the form of the song,” but also so the dancers don’t get a sudden break.
What happened with Jewish music as Jews began immigrating to America? Between that, the Holocaust, and anti-Jewish sentiment in the USSR, much of the music’s natural transmission disappeared. Were the new immigrants influenced by American music?
Absolutely. They had to work. People like Dave Tarras, Naftule Brandwein, and any of the European musicians, they had to work. Some of them played in marching bands, and some played in jazz bands. For example, Ziggy Elman played with Benny Goodman. A lot of these klezmer musicians, some of them played in orchestras—Jews value education, and if a family could afford it, they sent their kids for lessons. It really started getting mixed. And someone like Dave Tarras, he could play any society stuff. Also, some of the violin players took up trumpet, because they could get work that way. It definitely started getting mixed with swing time. There’s a whole Americanized style from, say, the 1950s, because the Holocaust survivors—my family, too—they didn’t want to hear that music too much.
It was too painful?
Too painful, and then, for instance, when I was little and was handed a violin and was expected to play, I thought it was like taking caster oil. I was like, “I have to suffer by playing the violin right now for all these Holocaust survivors.” I would play something—I was a seven-year-old—and I’d play “Sha Shtil” or something, and they’d cry. Well what seven-year-old likes that? But after Fiddler on the Roof and this whole American cultural awareness of village shtetl living—although there was no klezmer in Fiddler on the Roof—it started to feel like Jewish music, at least I think this is what some of the academics who have studied the progress of klezmer say, that is when Jewish music became ok to play again.
When was that, in the 1960s?
Yeah. I was born in 1958, and by 1968—I was handed a violin in 1963, I was five. My teacher was the child of another survivor—they stuck together—and my father would sing to me and I would be expected to play it back. But the Americanized part, the fact is, music morphs. People who say, “I want the old style,” it doesn’t work that way. Music lives because it morphs. It has to, or else it dies out. You can keep the old style—in Veretski Pass, we like the old European style—but we change it. We have our own style, too. We’ve taken some of the older melodies and morphed it also in our own way.
Meaning there’s no way that recordings of Jewish music from 1900 sound anything like what Jewish music sounded like in 1600. The music obviously changed and evolved.
Correct. People will claim otherwise, but no. We do have recordings from some of the field work done by Sofia Magid, who went into Belarus and northern Ukraine with her team and a wax cylinder and collected over 600 melodies, 95 or so which are instrumental. And also Moshe Beregovsky—these are Soviet ethnomusicologists who were funded by the Soviet Union—we do have access to some of those recordings as far back as the 1920s. You can hear a little bit of what the style was, and what’s interesting is as more of these recordings are being cleaned up and released, we get a little more of an idea of, for instance, of what the accompaniment style was like. When we did our project on the Sofia Magid collection (The Magid Chronicles), we were listening deeply to some of these recordings, and I was blown away by the accompaniment style. In the klezmer world, we’ve been teaching as a way for string players to play backup for another melody to play low chords, to stay in the lower part of the instrument so you’re not in the way of the melody. But what I heard in those recordings, was a different style played higher up. It blew the top of my head off, and I was really excited by it.
I call it a sleeping beauty. When the Holocaust, immigration, and the pogroms happened, the music went underground. During the holocaust, so much was stopped and so much was lost. Music has its lifeline, and with ethnic music, as more influences come in, it changes. But Jewish music stopped. It picked up again, say, 20 or 30 years later, and it’s now going through its lifeline of being influenced by all kinds of things. That’s how it works, that’s just life.
Did the non-Jewish styles in that region, in the Veretski Pass, have they evolved? Are the local people still working with those styles?
Oh yes, with Polish music, definitely. With Hungarian music, during the response to communism, young people started a tantz house movement in Hungary. What they did was go into the villages, find local musicians, learn from them, and bring that music back to the city. They basically took the very regional—the Transylvanian and Hungarian styles—and brought them to the dance clubs in Budapest. Also in Poland, musicians wanted to find the “national sound” of Poland. They would go into the small villages, find these fiddlers and accordion players, and learn from them. Jews don’t have that opportunity. A lot of the older musicians were killed. It’s very rare, and we find some, like German Goldenshteyn, who was a Moldavian clarinetist who came over to the States [Goldenshteyn came to the US in 1994]. He came to the US with a gig book. Jewish klezmer musicians met him, and brought him into the scene. He started selling his gig book. We’ve got those tunes, and it was a mix of Ukrainian, Moldavian, Hungarian—what he had to do to play gigs. With Jewish music, it’s rebuilding things. It’s putting the bricks back together.
Nowadays, it’s a free-for-all. Everything from revivalists and archivists, to the jazz musicians and hipsters in New York City who are doing one thing, to people combining it with house beats, or doom metal. Pretty much anything.
Anything. Everything is happening. Free jazz is doing it. Danny Blacksberg does some wonderful free jazz. I tell him, “I love you so much, and I didn’t understand a thing you just did.” I watched him come up in the scene. He really became, very quickly, a really requested bandmate, because he’s such a natural musician. Now he’s a very educated natural musician. Michael Winograd, too. A lot of these guys are important bandleaders now. I think that when there’s a revival, it’s almost like you first get the music back on the tracks, and then it can start to do its own thing.
You see it in the Hasidic world as well, where they’ve been embracing EDM.
Absolutely. And then there’s the mitzvah of taking a secular song and making it holy. We took that very seriously, not in a religious way, but in the promiscuous music way. For instance, on some of our recordings, we’ve taken Romanian brass music, and changed it a little bit, because it sounds so much like Jewish music. Well, we made it Jewish. We slow it down, and we make it work for the dance, the Chussidel. That was very common. People took music and made it work for their cultural needs. For instance, there’s a tune that was collected by Beregovsky, which was a little Cossack dance, that’s actually “Fisher’s Hornpipe.” There is all this music that was traded. In the port cities, the sailors from the UK would come in and they’d play music together with the locals, and they traded melodies.
We find these things. I was once teaching at a fiddle festival in Port Townsend, Washington, and there was a Mexican Indian fiddle player named Juan Reynoso, who was in his 90s, and he was also teaching the style of his music. The staff played a few little concerts, and after one I was called up to Juan Reynoso’s house. I went up there and with his translator, they said, “There’s a song you play that he knows.” I don’t remember what song it was, but I played for him, and he said, “Stop, yes,” and he played a little bit of a version that was very similar. Who knows how he got that melody, but it was amazing. You had to really listen to find the familiarity with it, but they were definitely related melodies.
Are you strict to only use traditional instruments? Like the basy, or that old-time accordion that doesn’t have piano-like keys?
That accordion from is from 1889. It’s like an old car, it’s always being worked on. We do it because we like it. We do some projects, for example, my son is a guitarist and he helped me make a pedalboard. I have that somewhere, and it’s really fun. We do use traditional instruments, but that’s just because we like the sound of the older instruments. It’s personal preference, we have nothing against people using modern instruments with modern styles. We enjoy horsehair, wood, and gut. That’s our thing.
It’s an aesthetic choice, you’re not purists.
No way. We’re not married to the “A” word, “authenticity.” In a way, we are considered to be a traditional group because we use the styles, but it’s just what we like. We use the traditional instruments, but we will sometimes be so outside the style, that it’s maybe into another.
Photos: Color, Dana Davis; Black & White, Lloyd Wolf
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