Shabbat is almost here.

 And today we will listen to a Romanian melody by one of the old masters of klezmer: Abe Schwartz with his Orchestra.

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About the artist: Abe Schwartz

This picture is from Discogs and it is described as “Abe and Sylvia Schwartz, New York ca. 1921. Archive Joel Rubin and Rita Ottens”.

Abe Schwartz appeared in the previous edition, because he registered his arrangement for the melody of Di Grine Kuzine, that was the piece we learnt about the last week.

There I mentioned that he was a Romanian violinist and composer. He was born in 1881 outside of Bucharest, Romania.

He emigrated to the USA at the very end of XIX century or very beginning of XX century. He was one of the klezmer pioneers in the USA.

Neil W. Levin wrote a more extended biography on the website of the Institut Européen Des Musiques Juives, of which I will bring some data:

• “He obviously acquired his musical knowledge on his own”.
• “After establishing his reputation as a conductor of dance bands in New York Jewish circles, it was the day he was hired to supervise instrumental recording sessions for the Columbia label that marked his entry into the recording industry. It was also around this time (1917 or so) that his studio career was launched with the release of two supposedly Russian dance tunes: a sher and a bulgar, played by his Oriental Orchestra.”
• “In 1920 alone he edited and recorded more than 35 klezmer melodies, including shers, bulgars, freilachs and khosidls.”
• “The American recording industry even came to regard him, unofficially, as an A&R or talent scout (A&R being the acronym for Artists and Repertoire, which is the section responsible for talent scouting within a record company or music publishing company), leading to the recording of a number of future young artists including Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras.”

Both Brandwein and Tarras have had their own editions of MBS. Click on their names to check them. And you can listen a recording with Tarras and the Schwartz’s orchestra here, and the orchestra with Brandwein, here.

In the text by Neil W. Levin, between facts of Schwartz’s life, there is an interesting explanation about the fantasy of Russia at that time and how it impacted on the music industry and how it fed the music back:

“Neither of these songs was Russian, but the exotic perception of ‘mysterious Russia’ that was fashionable at the time made everything feel Oriental. Score publishers and record companies of the time turned to Jewish immigrant musicians to present them as the authentic carriers of “new” tonalities. These composers and arrangers, supposedly “fresh from Russia” although mostly from the Ukraine, Belarus, Galicia, Poland, Romania or Bessarabia, were seen as transmitters of culture. Moreover, many of these Jewish musicians, playing with Gypsy, Romanian or Russian musicians, ended up assimilating some of their style. And again, many of these melodies or styles were simply those played by klezmorim in different parts of Eastern Europe, regardless of their possible early alterations to their original traditions.”

There is a work by Oksana Bulgakowa, called “The “Russian Vogue” in Europe and Hollywood: The Transformation of Russian Stereotypes through the 1920s“, available in Academia.edu, that provides a good vision about this romantic idea. Theses about the cinema can be significant to understand what happened also in the music:

“The Russian filmmakers who moved between Warsaw, Rome, Paris, Prague, Berlin and Hollywood were forced to adapt their culture and history to a variety of cultural expectations and clichés, or they would not be recognized as Russian. That is why their films tend to project a foreign phantasmagoric “style russe.” […]
Soviet critics and Russian émigrés alike were shocked by the American vision of Russia—a country of Imperial ballet dancers, terrorists, “polar bears, snowy steppes, and Grand Dukes.” And all the critics—Russian, Soviet, German and French—noted in 1927 the emergence of an international “Russian vogue,” a “Russian fashion” that coincided with the institutionalization of Soviet power in the first decade after the Revolution.”

Back to Abe, according to the Wikipedia entry about Schwartz, and quoting the obituary from the New York Times, he died in 1963 in New York.

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About the recording

The bad thing about the public domain music you find on Youtube is that the information given by the owner of the channel may not be correct and this recording could be from an orchestra that does not belong to our protagonist.

Why do I say this? First, I’ll tell you what other information supports that it is the Abe Schwartz Orchestra. The owner of the channel says in the description that this piece is called by other bands “Schwartz’s Sirba”. You can listen to that melody, for instance, in this wonderful recording of Di Naye Kapelye (by the way, this band has a wonderful edition of MBS, here). And I am sure Di Naye Kapelye know well that this is the “Schwartz’s Sirba”.

But, could another orchestra at that time have recorded this melody? Now I will tell you why my doubt. On the website of Muziker this melody is acredited to Orchestra Româneasca, and the author, Kurt Bjorling, explains about the sources of the recordings and about this recording he says that “The other side has four tracks by Abe Elenkrig’s Orchestra from 1913 and 1915 and several more recordings (1916-17) by anonynmous Jewish and ‘Romanian’ orchestras which I believe are actually the Abe Elenkrig Orchestra.” This other Abe, Elenkrig, had also his own edition of MBS.

On the other hand, in the album Klezmer Pioneers: European & American Recordings, 1905-1952 there is a “Orchestra Romaneasca” that plays this piece, and it is explained that they are the Abe Schwartz’s Orchestra.

There is a very useful source to turn to in these cases, which is the Discography of American Historical Recordings, but the entry for Abe Schwartz’s Orchestra has nothing 😭.

At this point I don’t think there is much more to go on. Enjoy the music.