The life of a musician is full of ups and downs. Well, not just ups and downs – there’s also an enormous amount of sideways. A room opens, a room closes (I think we covered this last time). You nail a song at an open mike, but your fly is open. Your latest single advances from 100,265th on iTunes to 99,672nd. And then retreats back to 100,154th.
Life is like that.
But every so often, something happens that can’t be parsed, sliced, diced, or otherwise dismantled into an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand sort of thing. For me, it’s almost always part of the creative process, and almost always involves dancing around my living room, convinced of my songwriting genius. But this time, it’s a little different.
You may recall the musical tale of Shlomo the Dreidel Shark. This is the little ditty that I wrote as my submission to a collection of original holiday music a few years back, only to learn that one of the organizers was concerned that it would “cast the Jewish religion in an unflattering light”. Now, I’ll grant you that as a snippet of social commentary, it’s not in the absolute best of taste – but as a song, I will admit it to be nothing less than a masterpiece. One, I might add, that’s being committed to vinyl, or whatever it is that kids today commit their recordings to.
As I’ve mentioned, perhaps interminably at this point, my newest album is in the process of being carved out of sonic granite at the Root Cellar in Westminster, and one of my long-term challenges has been instrumentation. Briefly, I like schmaltz. I trend toward schmaltz. I must be restrained from schmaltz the way a Doberman must be restrained from a raw steak. There is no recording which I do not instinctively believe can be enhanced with a sweet, tuneful, resonant, barely moving piano part – which, of course, I play myself. (This is why, by the way, I don’t play the piano more often. I don’t want to be George Winston. Well, I do want to be George Winston. But I don’t. I think you know what I mean.) One of the things I’ve been gently coaxing out of Jeff Root, my producer, is feedback about when I should, and shouldn’t, indulge myself, and I think, so far, I’ve been pretty good at taking his advice.
With one song, however, no advice was needed. The concept for Shlomo was something I knew in my gut from the day we started the album. Shlomo was going to be a bonkers ska/klezmer extravaganza – that’s the way I wrote it, and that’s the way I was going to record it. And what was going to make it a bonkers ska/klezmer extravaganza was a bonkers ska/klezmer piano part. Which, regrettably, I had no idea how to play.
Fortunately, there’s YouTube. And on YouTube, I found more than enough examples of bonkers klezmer piano parts (the ska thing I already knew, from my days with the-now-legendary-in-our-own-minds ska/rock band Agent 13). And I must say, I’m pretty proud of how I distilled these examples into the keyboard track that, today, has me dancing around my living room. It’s perfect, absolutely perfect. It’s bonkers, and klezmer, and ska, and once we get the three-part harmonies on the final chorus, I think I’ll explode from satisfaction.
Those of us who are among the chosen people say, jokingly of one’s bar mitzvah, “Today I am a fountain pen.” When I was thirteen, I was a fountain pen. Today, on the other hand, I am a genius.