This Sunday night will be the final evening of Lincoln Center's Out of Doors Festival, and will close with a live performance of a recently re-released pop music album from the early 1960's. Mazel Tov Mis Amigos is a 1961 recording of "Yiddish favorites in a Latin tempo," proving that truth is stranger than fiction. Headlined by Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen, and produced by Riverside Records, this gem of American pop music was discovered by the folks from the Idelsohn Society, "a team of 21st century music fiends turned musical archeologists, dedicated to digging up forgotten American Jewish pop."New York Press had the pleasure of speaking with Idelsohn co-founder Roger Bennett about the album's discovery and this Sunday's performance.
What is a Lantzman?
That was their joke. It's a Yiddish term for someone who is from your town in the old country. Everyone came to America and joined a Lantzmanschaften.
How did you find this unique album?
We spent the last eight years mining bins of used records for music. We found this in vinyl and it sounds unbelievable. Most of [American popular Jewish music] has been forgotten aside from Neil, Barbara and Barry, the holy trinity. But yes, we spend our time digging around in crates.
So there was popular Jewish music before Babs?
They are standing on the shoulders of giants! There are lots of amazing records out there, and we're trying to reissue them and make people understand the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, we often leave the best bits out.
So what's the appeal of Mazel Tov Mis Amigos?
The names involved in it are some of the giants of 1950s and '60s Latin music: Ray Barretto, Wilie Rodriguez, Charlie Palmieri. And they're playing alongside African-American jazz greats Clark Terry, Doc Cheatham, Lou Oles and Wendell Marshall. The playing on this album is masterful.
The musicians are masters of their trade and the album itself is a symbol of community boundaries being porous.
So this is as much about music history as it is about the appeal of a hava nagila samba?
These guys are bona fide legends, so this frames a lot of questions: Why did these guys go into the studios, why at this time and then the big one why has it been written at all?
Then you ask, what happens when you bring it back? It makes you realize how malleable community and identity really are.
What's going to go down at Lincoln Center?
We're going to going to recreate the album, and reinvent the reinvention we invited Arturo O'Farrill, a Grammy-nominated Mexican jazz musician, Larry Harlow is a Jewish salsa legend. Then there's Jeremiah Lockwood of Balkan Beat Box, Sandra Vasquez of Pistolara, Antibalas
Now that we're all plotzing over this pop rediscovery, what should we be excited for in the future?
This music has been written out of history. In the beginning of 2010, we'll be releasing an album called Heeby Jeeby, a compilation to follow with famous black jazz musicians who did Jewish songs; Lena Horne, Cab Calloway Billie Holiday, and Jonny Mathis, who released Kol Nidre in the 1950s.
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