Klezmer master Michael Winograd's dedicated research allows him to bridge 21st century and distant ancestors
Appearing with the Honorable Mentshn and Socalled at the Chutzpah! Festival, the Brooklyn clarinet virtuoso approaches his work as a “repairer of chains”
Michael Winograd
The Chutzpah! Festival presents Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentshn, with special guest Socalled, at the Norman & Annette Rothstein Theatre on November 4
EVERY SO OFTEN, you’ll be researching an interview and come across a piece of music so startling or so beautiful that you absolutely have to own it in physical form. A download or stream just won’t cut it: you have to hold it in your hands, read the liner notes, and play it on the good speakers, not on the computer.
That’s exactly what happened to me this week, as I was preparing to chat with Michael Winograd. Thanks to a video of a concert from Krakow, Poland, I witnessed the klezmer clarinet virtuoso and his band, the Honorable Mentshn, performing a piece so striking that I was sent sprinting to Discogs, cash in hand. Unfortunately, Winograd won’t see a penny from my investment, but he doesn’t mind—and my discovery opened a useful window into the Brooklyn resident’s creative methodology.
The piece in question was borrowed from legendary clarinetist Dave Tarras’s groundbreaking klezmer-jazz fusion LP, Tanz!. It’s an album Winograd adores, to the point where he occasionally pays tribute to Tarras’s 1955 classic by playing it in its entirety. But his connection goes deeper than simple admiration: he’s formed a warm friendship with one of the two brothers, Sam and Ray Musiker, who backed Tarras on Tanz! and pioneered the idea of mixing Jewish music from Eastern Europe with African-American music from the United States.
“Sam died young, just a few years after that record was made, but his music is a major, major influence on me. Maybe the most,” Winograd asserts. “And it’s interesting that you bring up his use of the accordion and his sense of orchestration. That’s the thing that just drives me wild all the time, and what is cool in terms of my connection with that music is that his younger brother, Ray Musiker, who plays tenor sax on that record, is still around, at 97. I studied with him as a teenager, and saw him as recently as February. I went to his house and brought a camera and interviewed him about Tanz! and everything. I learned a whole lot about the musicians on that record, and the accordionist, specifically, is a fascinating character. And one of the reasons he’s fascinating is that I couldn’t find any other credits to his name. So I was like ‘Who is this guy?’
“His name was Seymour Megenheimer, I believe, but Ray said ‘Oh, yeah, that’s his given name, but he usually performed under his stage name, which was Sy Mann.’ And Sy Mann, it tuns out, was a champion of the development of the Moog synthesizer throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. He put out all these really crazy Moog records and experimental stuff on different organs and all sorts of weird, crazy things. So that is nuts! It’s been so fascinating to go even deeper into Tanz! than I already had been—and it’s lucky for me that Ray is still around.”
On his Bandcamp page, Winograd proudly displays an endorsement from Vancouver’s own klezmer innovator, Geoff Berner, who writes “Michael Winograd is a living embodiment of the repair of the broken chain. He is not a dabbler. He isn’t an aspiring 12-tone composer who can play some klezmer. He isn’t a punk-rocker looking for a new angle on approaching his songwriting. He IS a klezmer. He knows klezmer. He fucking blows away the room at klezmer.”
Berner, as usual, gets it right, and Winograd’s research allows him to be both a 21st-century performer and a dutiful time-traveller, seeking out ancestors to honour. That occasionally lands him in some curious spots, like the New Jersey diner shown on the cover of his latest release, Early Bird Special. Between the hard-boiled regulars and the indie film shoot that was going on during his visit it was apparently an odd scene—but an appropriate one, as Winograd is aware that music isn’t the only way of carrying a cultural legacy forward. Food helps, as Early Bird Special titles like “Prelude to a Knish”, “Schmear Tactic”, “Lox Automatically”, and “Sable Genius” make obvious. Sometimes painfully obvious.
“I think that Yiddish cultural identity is something that’s very precious to people who live in it, and a lot of that is centred around music and food—and other things, too, like language, and relationship to tradition, and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “So much of Ashkenazi culture and the nuances that make it so rich have been lost to assimilation, or to post–World War II culture, but food is one of the things that have stuck around. I just find it something that is very relatable. I don’t know why it makes its way into my song titles so easily, but that continues to be the case, and I can’t seem to get away from it.
“And also,” he adds, “if you’re a bandleader like I am, playing weddings and bar mitzvahs and stuff, the first question anybody in a band asks when they get there is ‘When do we eat?’”
More seriously, Winograd approaches his work as a repairer of chains with sincere dedication, and he’s quick to offer a shout-out to those musicians who started the process even before he was born. “The people that have been making klezmer music—and Yiddish music, specifically—starting in the late ‘70s really had an understanding, upon taking that journey, that they had a unique challenge,” he explains. “They were picking up on something that was part of a culture that had, quite recently at that time, faced its own mortality and faced an existential threat. That’s putting it lightly, of course, but a lot of damage had been done to it….And along with just the tremendous loss of population in the place where the culture had originally come from, the resulting PTSD gave a drive to assimilation that is pretty unique to this situation.
“So when these folks really got into making this music and rediscovering their own traditions, they realized that there was a special responsibility on them,” he continues. “It wasn’t just booking tours and playing tunes and recording stuff; it was also deep, deep cultural work. Deep repair. And I think that that is a pretty unique kind of responsibility, and also one that has been passed down, now, through a number of generations—and it’s fascinating, because you always have to have at least one foot in the world that came before you. That’s a pretty heavy, heavy thing to have, but it doesn’t leave.”
On stage, however, Winograd and his fellow virtuosos do their best to bear that responsibility lightly. The Honorable Mentshn are among the finest dance bands of our time—something that no doubt would bring Tarras, the Musiker brothers, and their Tanz! colleagues great joy.
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