What can a 1957 Mickey Katz album, with the comedian posing on the cover as a kosher butcher, tell us about the American Jewish experience?
Actually, a whole lot, says Josh Kun, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and co-author of the new book “And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl.”
In the book, Kun and co-author Roger Bennett make the argument for the importance of Jewish album covers from the 1920s to 1970s as a historical narrative. Kun will bring his musical expertise, some key albums and a PowerPoint presentation to the JCC of San Francisco on Nov. 19.
Although Kun and Bennett have amassed more than 1,000 vinyl records in their quest for Jewish music knowledge, Kun says he still hopes people will bring albums to the lecture. He’s collecting them for future projects and urges people to hand over those “30 rotting records collecting dust in the basement.”
One of those future projects is an exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco that will be on display from Jan. 29 through mid-April. “Jews on Vinyl,” the exhibit’s working title, will include important record covers from Kun’s archive, along with listening stations so visitors can hear specific songs.
Kun’s ultimate goal is to create a physical Jewish music archive, but he already achieved another big goal last week: launching an online, Wikipedia-style site of Jewish musicians (www.idelsounds.com).
Creating a Jewish music archive is an idea that has been brewing for quite some time, he says.
It all began in the 1990s when Kun, then a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley, began researching a project on Katz, the 1950s clarinet-playing comedian who posed as a butcher at Cantor’s deli on his “Mish Mosh” album cover.
Kun, a Los Angeles native, had grown up in a Jewish home, but he never really felt a connection to his religion. Collecting records had long been a hobby of his, and discovering the Katz record gave him an interest in finding more Jewish-themed records, Kun explains.
“I thought Jews only made synagogue music and really bad folk records,” Kun jokes. “[After learning about Katz] I realized I needed to find out more about these musical troves of Jewishness that I never knew existed.”
Kun focused on Latin American relations while studying ethnic studies at U.C. Berkeley, so he also became interested in the connection between Jewish music and the 1950s surge of popularity in Latin music. The record that jumpstarted his interest was Irving Fields’ “Bagels and Bongos.”
“It was unquestionably a provocative artifact — it was interesting to see the interracial musical dialogue,” Kun says.
In 2005, Kun, Bennett and their friends Courtney Holt and David Katznelson started a nonprofit record label, the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation (formerly known as Reboot Stereophonic), to re-release these Jewish artifacts. Kun notes that of all the vinyl records (Jewish and non-Jewish) created from 1947 to 1980, only 17 percent of them have been digitized — which makes re-release labels an important ingredient in musical restoration.
The first album the label put out was “Bagels and Bongos.” Three more have followed, and next up is a re-release of “Our Way,” the Barry Sisters’ 1973 album of Yiddish covers of pop songs.
On a treasure hunt for lost Jewish music, Kun and Bennett have scoured record stores, thrift stores and garages (they’ve been especially lucky in Boca Raton). Their extensive collection is now scattered across the country, stored in Kun’s California garage, Bennett’s New York office and Florida Atlantic University’s Judaica Sounds Archive.
Kun says the idea for the book came when he realized that his label couldn’t re-release all of the records they’d found, but still wanted to share the artwork from the covers.
“We thought the covers were so visually interesting, they told such a story,” Kun says. “Neither of us are trying to make universal claims — as two music-obsessed Jewish listeners, we’re saying ‘look what we’ve been able to find.’ We want it to be a springboard for new analysis.”
“And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl” (a play off the name of indie rock group …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead) is separated into distinct musical genres that were popular in American Jewish life. The book begins with early cantorial records created by immigrants and examines changes and shifts in the American Jewish story through the hippie folk scene of the early 1970s.
Kun dedicates a chapter to Latin Jewish music, and also includes chapters on black-Jewish relations, celebration and holiday LPs, comedy albums and the “sounds of Jewish suffering” (including Holocaust remembrance albums).
As an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and the department of American studies and ethnicity at USC, Kun teaches courses on topics ranging from globalization to popular culture. Each year in his course “Popular Music in American Culture” he discusses music as a way to understand race and ethnicity in our culture, with a large part of the discussion focused on his Jewish music findings.
“My Jewishness lives in these albums,” Kun explains. “I consider myself a very spiritual person — though my spirituality doesn’t necessarily lead me to synagogue, but back to my turntables.”
Josh Kun will speak 8 p.m. Nov. 19 at the JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. $10-$12. Musical clips, interviews and more information at www.idelsounds.com.