Alicia Svigals 2024 Interview: Fidl Afire
Alicia Svigals (00:00):
That that's part of the grand old tradition of folk musicians coming up with forms which kind of imitate somebody else's music because somebody else's music is always inspiring to new creativity, like the Polka and in Klezmer, the Bulgar , pseudo-Bulgarian music, but it's its own thing.
Leah Roseman (00:30):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This episode is a special short Catch-Up episode with the Klezmer violinist and composer Alicia Svigals. I first spoke with her in 2021 in Season 1 of this podcast, and that wide ranging in-depth conversation is linked in the show notes. Today we're focusing on Alicia's new album, Fidl Afire, with several excerpts from the album with her insights. Please check the show notes for the link to this album and to Alicia's website. I have many episodes featuring Klezmer musicians such as Polina Shepherd and Marilyn Lerner and many artists in the folk and world music scene. So please check out my catalog of episodes. Now to Alicia Svigals.
(01:12):
Hi, Alicia. Thanks so much for joining me here again today.
Alicia Svigals (01:17):
Thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman (01:18):
So we spoke three years ago, I think it was the height of the Pandemic, and this episode will be directly linked to that one, and people should check it out if they haven't heard it yet.
(01:27):
We got into all kinds of interesting stuff about your history as a klezmer musician and all kinds of different projects, but today we're celebrating your new album, Fidl Afire.
Alicia Svigals (01:36):
I'm holding up the album for the camera Fidl Afire.
Leah Roseman (01:41):
So this will be linked for the podcast listeners. The album image will be linked right in the show notes, and you can click right on it to go to Alicia's album. So the violin's kind of in the role of clarinet, in the big American big band Klezmer sound, right?
Alicia Svigals (01:58):
That's right.
Leah Roseman (01:59):
And I just happened to be looking at this book about Dave Tarras that Yale Strom wrote.
Alicia Svigals (02:04):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Leah Roseman (02:07):
So you had been playing in this role for many years, but you hadn't made a recording like this yet.
Alicia Svigals (02:14):
That's right, and I always felt like the Klezmer Fiddle revival went in the direction of something that I did a lot of on my first album Fidl, which actually I guess marked the beginning in the way of that revival, which was a much more string friendly settings, what has been called sometimes the early music movement of Klezmer, which hearkens back to a more old world sound, not the American 20th century sound, but the European 19th century sound of the tsimbal, which is a hammer dulcimer, and multiple fiddles playing both melody and rhythm and a double bass. So that's a beautiful setting and the original natural setting in a way for the fiddle. But when I learned Klezmer, I actually studied Brandwein and Tarras, the subject of the book you just held up, the two iconic Jewish American immigrant, American European clarinetists in the early mid 20th century who inspired the Klezmer Revival, and they were who I was listening to. I got to hear some of the fiddlers, but there were very few recordings, and there was one who I worked with who was still around Leon Schwartz a bit when I was young and he was old, but mostly I listened to those old recordings and I ended up kind of playing them sort of an amalgam of them and me.
(04:03):
I realized at some point I had never actually recorded that in that kind of a setting, the same setting that we're used to hearing big party bands in. And I felt like people, a lot of fiddlers didn't think it was possible. And I wanted to kind of get the word out musically that there's no reason why the fiddle has to play second fiddle to the clarinet when it comes to a dance band like that.
Leah Roseman (04:33):
So I thought it'd be really nice to start with Patsch Tants, slap dance, it's Alicia's Patsch Tants. You wrote this tune?
Alicia Svigals (04:41):
Yeah, the middle part with the patsching or the clapping is one of the traditional patsch melodies, but I wrote all the stuff around it, the beginning and the end parts of the three parts or four parts
Leah Roseman (04:54):
As a violinist. I found it very violin friendly. It was kind of fun that way.
Alicia Svigals (04:58):
Oh good. Did you try it out under your fingers?
Leah Roseman (05:02):
I did not. Maybe I should work on my learning by ear skills.
Alicia Svigals (05:07):
Oh, I can send you a chart.
Leah Roseman (05:10):
Okay, awesome.
(05:11):
Yeah, but it is violin friendly. Yeah. I wrote something that I could play for a change. (music)
(05:52):
So in "Mayn ame Ver Ikh" I'm Becoming My Mother, you're featuring the vocalist Vira Lozinsky, and I was really excited to learn about her. Do you want to speak to her singing and her background?
Alicia Svigals (06:03):
She is a wonderful vocalist. I only learned about her recently from Hankus Netsky who produced half the album, the Boston Band. Half the album was recorded with a New York band in New York and a Boston band in Boston. Hankus was actually on both sessions and he music directed and produced the Boston part. So we started out, I sing that song in concert and we started that with me singing it in the recording studio. But then we talked about it and he said, there's this amazing vocalist, Vira Lozinsky, who is a native Yiddish speaker and has a delicious Yiddish accent, which I'll never be able to replicate. And there is this idea of post vernacular Yiddish, which a phrase coined by scholar Jeff Chandler at Rutgers, which is sort of valorizes instead of us revivalists feeling kind of bad that our Yiddish isn't native and never will be because it wasn't our first language.
(07:20):
The idea that there's this sort of new subcultural language, which is post vernacular Yiddish, and it has its own pleasures, value and charm and use, and we can embrace it. So I could have recorded it with that theory behind it, but when I heard the recordings of her singing that Hankus has played for me, I was like, yeah, let's do this instead. And I was super lucky that she said yes, we did a remote recording with her across the world, and it was just perfect to mean that the warmth of her voice and Hankus is was right, like her Yiddish. It's the real thing. So people should definitely Google her and watch YouTube videos. VIRA, last name L-O-Z-H-I-N-S-K-Y.
Leah Roseman (08:19):
Yeah. And the topic of that song, I think most women can relate, and men too, non-binary, everyone can relate to that I'm Becoming My Mother.
Alicia Svigals (08:28):
They have to translate it a bit when they're, yes. And all those who identify as women and who are getting older can probably relate. Yeah. So some years ago I did a residency, which I probably talked about in the last podcast lab. It's called LABA. And honestly, I never knew what LABA stood for LABA, but it was a gathering at the 14th Street Y in New York of artists of various disciplines who studied with a novelist named Ruby Namdar. And we examined Hebrew texts, biblical texts for a year, and made art around our sometimes strange, quirky conversations about them. And every year had a theme. And my year's theme was motherhood. So I took all these poems mostly in Yiddish, wrote music to set them and turn them into songs. And this was the happiest of the poems because these poems about motherhood were not Hallmark cards, let me tell you. But this poem is about the poet's mother, not herself as a mother. And how she looks into the mirror and goes, oh, goes, oh my gosh, that's my mother. And I just loved it. So I made a very happy diddy out of it because what are you going to do?
Leah Roseman (09:57):
Who's the poet?
Alicia Svigals (09:59):
Masha Payuk-Stuker. That's a hyphenated last name, which I find interesting. I never found out why her name was hyphenated,
(10:09):
And she wrote a lot of children's poems apparently. But this one hit the nail on the head and it has lyrics about hair turning gray and for viewers of the video, and you could see that you and I are part of that curly gray hair sisterhood. So it's fun to sing something that's right on point. (music)
Leah Roseman (12:32):
I have been studying Yiddish for a few years. It's still not where I'd like it to be, but being able to read some Yiddish poetry is such a wonderful thing to be able to do that in Yiddish.
Alicia Svigals (12:44):
Oh yeah. Especially since when you're learning they're short, they're shorter than a novel, so you can have the satisfaction of completing learning a poem. So poetry is a great way to study Yiddish.
Leah Roseman (13:01):
And let's talk about Dybbuk Honga. It's a Moldavian dance, right? Honga?
Alicia Svigals (13:07):
Yes. Honestly, I dunno too much about the Ethnomusicology of hunger, but it does evoke Hungary in, its the word. And I imagine that that's part of the grand old tradition of folk musicians coming up with forms which kind of imitate somebody else's music because somebody else's music is always inspiring to new creativity like the Polka and in Klezmer, the Bulgar, pseudo Bulgarian music, but it's its own thing. So the Honga, I think, somehow has got that in there somewhere. But I know the Honga from the tunes with that title that I've learned, and they're always very fast and have certain sorts of phrases which I incorporate in. This one also has some five, four bars, which are never as far as I know in traditional Honga, but it just, the melody cried out for an extra beat in some of those bars and I couldn't deny it. So
Leah Roseman (14:18):
Do you want to explain to people what a dybbuk is? Who don't know?
Alicia Svigals (14:22):
Yes. So a dybbuk is the disembodied spirit of a deceased person who had unresolved business in life and is doomed to wander the world, trying to sort that out. And in the 1920s a century ago, an ethnographer, a Jewish ethnographer from the Soviet Union named Ansky went around collecting folklore, also Klezmer music, that's a whole other story. And there in particular folklore about dybbuks and turned it into a famous play, kind of what they called a folk play called the Dybbuk about a yeshiva boy who falls in love with a girl and they can't marry and he dies and his dybbuk then possesses her, and it's a Jewish exorcism tale. And in the 1990s playwright Tony Kushner turned it into, adapted into his own play called the Dybbuk my band at the time, the Klezmatics did the music for it. We were also on stage and I wrote a bunch of music for it, some of which was used and some of which stayed in the files, but I always wanted to record, and this is one of them, the Dybbuk Honga.
Leah Roseman (15:55):
Wonderful. (music)
(16:51):
So right before we started recording today, I told you I was in the midst of Googling if South Fallsburg was in the Catskills, because I was looking at my notes, you have the South Fallsburg Bulgar, which I don't know if you wrote it or it's from that tradition.
Alicia Svigals (17:06):
The South Fallsburg Bulgar is exactly what we were talking about at the beginning. It's a composition of Clarinettist Dave Tarras and those guys played at the Catskill Resorts. For those who don't know what that is and why, should anybody put the people who lived it? No. That's where Immigrant Jews, New Yorkers in mid-century would go in the summer for vacation. And it was a big party, these giant institutions with big dining halls and everybody would eat together and there would be entertainment and rustic cabins. It was not fancy. It was very community oriented. And so he named it after one of those towns in Sullivan County, New York, and it is classic Dave Tarras. I would love for people who like the tune on my album to just go to YouTube and listen to Dave do it. But since I feel like I kind of sound like that kind of clarinettist, I thought I should actually record a couple of these things and do it for posterity. So it's on the album, that tune and Feter Max's Bulgar are the two examples of that, these sort of mid-century American Jewish compositions with, you could hear the American music influence there in the band arrangement, particularly in Feter Max, the kind of sort of jazzy poppish chords and stuff. I just love those tunes and that's why they're there. (music)
Leah Roseman (19:49):
So you mentioned Hankus Netsky who's also a musicologist and author as well as pianist. Did he?
Alicia Svigals (19:54):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (19:55):
Did he do some of these arrangements or did you work together on them?
Alicia Svigals (19:59):
For Feter Max's Bulgar, I copied the original arrangement for the original recording. No, the arranging such as it is I did, and we worked some stuff out in the studio. It's pretty straight ahead, but it was part that the stops in the Dybbuk Honga, and MacDowell Freylekhs, those are all part of the original composition.
Leah Roseman (20:29):
Okay. Was there anything we didn't talk about that you want to highlight?
Alicia Svigals (20:34):
I could talk about all these tracks briefly if you want here, and then you can decide.
(20:41):
Fidle Afire fantasy is in the tradition of what we call the Kala bezetn, the Kala Bevaynen which means making the bride cry in the first case. In the second. It means seating the bride. Kala Bazetzen means seating the bride and Kala Bevaynen means making the bride cry. These are wedding ritual forms, and I take the vibe of those and I do something which is kind of part that part Cantorial style, because I also like playing Cantorial style like Golden Age cantorial style music on the violin. And it's a pure improvisation. It's not composed. I did that in the moment in the studio. (music)
(22:20):
The Levitt Bulgar is something that no one knows who wrote it, but it was a favorite of another named Marty Levitt who made an album called King of the King of the Klezmers with a cover art with a Crown. And people probably don't all realize who know that album that it was sort of tongue in cheek like King of the Jews. This is Jewish humor, which makes him like the Jesus of Klezmer or something. But also his friends apparently would joke, oh, you're the king of the Klezmers, which is a joke. It's like that. And a buck will get you a cup of coffee, enjoy your royalty. But it's a beautiful album and it is the only time that tune was ever recorded was on that album. So this, its reintroduction into the recorded canon, and it's a virtuoso piece, both for the clarinet and for the violin. I mean, it's not Paganini, but for us Klezmers, it's a virtuoso piece and it's so much fun. And according to his son Dave, who's a Klezmer trombonist in New York, he had it on his stand until the day he passed away. It was the last thing on his music stand. (music)
(24:16):
So that's the Levitt Bulgar and well, what else has got a backstory? That's it. The rest is just music.
Leah Roseman (24:30):
Well, this was just great, so thanks so much.
Alicia Svigals (24:33):
Thank you.
Leah Roseman (24:36):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases and more. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.
