February 4th, 2022. Shabbat is almost here.
And today we will listen to another enchanting piece of old klezmer, recorded in 1921, by the Ukranian violinist Jacob Gegna.
Hello, how are you? I hope well. Today when you are receiving this message, I am again in Lisbon. But the truth is that I am writing on Wednesday from home but I will send it to you on Friday. And I am exhausted. This week has been very strange.
The third dose of the vaccine made me have a very bad night from Sunday to Monday. On Tuesday we had the concert presentation of the new album of my band Vigüela (a very exciting event, of course) and yesterday, Thursday, I travelled to Lisbon with my friend Patricia Álvarez, of whom I have spoken several times before. We came on the occasion of the third and last concert of the series of concerts of music of the Silk Road at the Museu de Oriente, which features the Afghan maestro Daud Khan.
Today I offer you to enjoy again a very old recording, by a violinist born in what is now Ukraine and emigrated to the United States. Surely this story is familiar to you… Yes, there have been quite a few artists who have passed through MBS, who had to leave the land that was once Russia and settle in the new world. Like the master Daud Khan, who emigrated from Afghanistan to Germany many years ago, and now many musicians from his country are having to emigrate to Europe. Horror repeats itself throughout history in multiple directions. We hope to welcome a handful of refugees to the concert today in Lisbom, to whom perhaps Daud Khan’s music will bring a moment of relief to their sad situation, as Jacob Gegna’s surely did to many of his contemporaries with whom he shared exile from their homeland.
I am very grateful to the Museu de Oriente for taking up these ideas and supporting them financially. But well, I seem to be chatty today, but it is time to give the spotlight to our artist of the day.
Then, please, spread the word.And note that these weekly emails are also posted in the website www.musicbeforeshabbat.com
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About Jacob Gegna
If you are interested in learning more about Renair Records and Honest Jons, check this edition.
But I have to warn you that it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. The website they had, http://jewishrecords.co.uk/, doesn’t work and it seems they have lost the domain 🙁
Nevertheless, you can find the full marvellous booklet of that album here. The inner notes were done by Joel Rubin (olé for him!). I will summarise Gegna’s biography.
Jascha M. Gegner was born 1893 “into a well-known klezmer family in the Ukraine. Beregovski mentions his father, Khaym-Meyer Gegner, originally of Belaya Tserkov (b. 1850s) as having been one of the greatest klezmer violinists in the 19th century.”
Jascha Gegner was born in Poltava or Kiev. “Like many of the Jewish violinists of his generation, he went on to a classical career. He was listed as a violin teacher in the 1908 Poltava Province Reference Book and in 1910 he joined the staff of the Poltava School of Music, teaching violin and viola. According to Wollock, he served as Auer’s workshop assistant briefly in Leipzig, and by 1914 had emigrated to New York and changed his name to Jacob Gegna.”
His official ‘New York debut’ was at Aeolian Hall in New York on March 9, 1918 (but he had made many concerts before).
“Gegner was a member of the Russian Symphony Orchestra and taught at his violin studio at 246 W. 73rd Street. He resettled in Los Angeles, where he became a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and remained there until his death in 1944.”
Do you want to learn more about Jacob Gegna’s vision of playing violin? The work Sliding Into Jewishness: A Pentimento of Portamento by Matthew Richard Stein, available here, includes the bio from the same source as mine and also much other information and documented reflections, like:
“Gegna clearly values individual expression over technical perfection, indicative of the preference for an idiosyncratic personal style of playing common in the early twentieth century.”
I really recommend to read it!
About the piece
According to the booklet of the aforementioned album, this piece was recorded for Columbia as Taxim in January 1921, but he had recorded several variations before, already in Europe. He recorded in Poltava for the Extraphon label before emigrating, with other names, like ‘Fantasy on a Jewish Melody’ (which you can find in Youtube). And it is likely Gegner’s own composition.
The recording is on the Youtube channel classicklezmer. It is a non-profit channel and is really worth mentioning and subscribing to. Although he hasn’t uploaded anything for 11 months. I don’t know who is behind it but I hope that generous person is doing well.
About “taxim”
And about the term taxim in klezmer, also from the booklet:
“The word taksim is Turkish for an instrumental improvisation introducing a suite. Within the klezmer context, it appears to have been a term for a non-metric improvisation or – in this case, more likely a set composition – based on one or more of the klezmer modal scales and characterised by virtuosic passage work. A taksim would normally have been played at the table during the wedding banquet. Normally, it would be followed by a lively tune in duple metre, as was the case with Gegner’s New York recording of this composition, but here the recording ends after the non-metric section.”
Another source about the term “taxim” on klezmer is the page of the Jewish Music Research Centre about it, that quotes some parts of the Lexicon of Klezmer Terminology. For instance, this one about Gegna’s taxim: “[…] (A taksim usually refers to the Turco-Arab manner of a rubato exploration of West Asian modes. It means something related to this, but different when referred to as the precursor of the Romanian doina.) Despite the title, Gegna’s performanec seems to be a doina, although with perhaps less accompaniment then [sic] usual…” from “Mel Bay’s Klezmer Collection : for C Instruments”, by Stacy Phillips.
It’s time to enjoy the music:
Click the picture to listen to Taxim by Jacob Gegna:
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