Opening night of the Jewish Music Festival is fast approaching, and for director Ellie Shapiro it is crunch time. At 9 p.m. on a Monday, Shapiro is still on the clock.
The festival opens Saturday, March 19, and runs through Sunday, April 3, at venues across the Bay Area.
This being the 20th anniversary of the West Coast’s most prestigious Jewish music festival, Shapiro is trying to mark the milestone with the best event ever. But she still needs an emcee for the Jewish hip-hop concert, and travel arrangements are pending for some of the headliners. So she’s up late working the phones.
Shapiro actually holds several titles at the Jewish Music Festival, including director and booker of talent. She holds another title too, though it doesn’t show up on her resume: Keeper of the Scrapbook.
Among the many artifacts crammed into her office at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center is the official festival scrapbook filled with fliers, brochures, press clips and other souvenirs spanning its history.
As she flips through the pages, memories of festivals past come flooding back. The program for the very first Jewish Music Festival in 1985 is a simple Xerox job that resembles a PTA bake-sale announcement and elicits a chuckle from Shapiro. “We’ve sure grown enormously from this haimish event,” she says, pointing to the flier. “In terms of festivals like this, we are the biggest in the country.”
With headliners this year like Theodore Bikel, the Klezmatics, Yair Dalal and Emil Zrihan, she makes a persuasive case.
But even in its inaugural year, when the festival was little more than an underfunded project of the BRJCC, the festival attracted major talent. Chalk it up to luck, or to the vision of the festival’s late founder Ursula Sherman, the event has been a hit from the start.
Sherman, born in Germany, served as a translator at the Nuremberg trials before immigrating to America and becoming a fixture in the East Bay Jewish community. “Ursula was very smart,” remembers Shapiro. “She saw the Jewish Music Festival not just as a week of entertainment but as a way of building community.”
Recalls Stan Klezmer, “When we proposed putting on a festival of Jewish music, it was like an old MGM musical: ‘Hey let’s put on a show.’ We didn’t know what we were doing. We started on a Sunday at 10 a.m. and ended late that afternoon.”
Klezmer (yes, that’s his real name) is a former BRJCC board member and Jewish music fan who helped Sherman develop the festival in its early days.
“In the auditorium there would be a quartet of klezmer musicians performing,” he remembers of the first festival. “Then down the hall a professor would be discussing some aspect of Jewish music. In the courtyard, someone was demonstrating Jewish cooking, or people who brought instruments would have a jam session.”
Augmenting that folksy atmosphere were performances by world-class Jewish musicians such as Klezmorim, the band often credited with launching the klezmer revolution of the 1980s.
Among musical treasures to participate in the first festivals is Ben Bayzler, who started his career as a drummer and tummler (fun-maker) in his native Poland decades before. Also attending — the frail Bronya Sakina, who performed previously unknown Yiddish songs she had learned in her shtetl childhood.
Berkeley klezmer musician Gerry Tenney remembers her well. “Bronya was a wonderful person. Her song ‘Boots’ became a hit. If it weren’t for that one person, the song would have been forgotten. Now it has a life of its own.”
Yiddish music dominated the first few festivals, but over time the wider world of Jewish music began to have an impact.
“In the early days, we had a klezmer emphasis,” says Klezmer. “Then we brought in Ladino and Mizrachi artists. We began picking themes like interaction between Jews and blacks. Soon the talent was coming to us.”
Tenney ran the festival for several years and saw it grow in stature. “This was the first chance West Coast players got to play with East Coast players,” he notes, citing artists like Michael Alpert, Bill Rubin and Ben Goldberg as some of those early participants. But credit for the festival’s success goes in equal measure to the audiences.
“The Berkeley Jewish community’s cultural music scene is pretty amazing given the amount of Jews here,” he adds. “It’s very forward thinking, very inclusive of what is good music.”
Laura Sheppard served as director for a couple years in the mid-1990s. She helped in the transition from a mostly volunteer-driven effort to a professionally run cultural event.
“I could see [the festival] had the potential to make a larger impact,” she says, “but the organization was still working as very grassroots. I had a vision of the impact on the community at large, that this could be like the San Francisco Jazz Festival.”
That’s exactly what happened. Professional stage managers and concert promoters took the helm. Local sponsors like the Koret Foundation, the Taube Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Foundation and the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Foundation, the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay, and the Oakland Tribune joined forces with major entities such as the National Endowment for the Arts. Finally, the resources were in place to expand the festival beyond the East Bay to cover the entire Bay Area. Sheppard also commissioned the first official festival logo.
Highlights from her tenure include Yiddish singer Eleanor Risa at San Francisco’s Theater on the Square, a concert of Italian Jewish renaissance music performed on period instruments, and Moroccan-born Rabbi Hyim Louk, who played Berkeley’s International House. “He sang liturgical music influenced by Arabic,” Sheppard remembers fondly. “His voice was so soulful and he put Moroccan rugs on stage.”
By the time Shapiro arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, the festival was a well-oiled machine. But she still saw the need for a tune-up.
A former Israeli folk dance enthusiast, Shapiro lived in Israel for most of the 1980s, during which time she “missed the whole klezmer revival.” But once she discovered the music, it “tapped into something. I always believed music was a good way to shape Jewish identity, and here I discovered another way to be Jewish besides living in Israel.”
After relocating to the Bay Area, she teamed with Sherman as co-chair, starting in the late 1990s.
Now, festival attendance routinely exceeds 5,000 each year, with numerous workshops, classes, lectures and performances dotting the region. The festival draws top international talent and showcases local artists as well (Tim Barsky, Hyim and Kid Beyond are among those featured this year). Shapiro even launched an “instrument petting zoo” where anyone can pick up a tambour, oud or accordion and try to squeeze out a tune.
But of all the highlights of her tenure, she says, nothing comes close to her discovery of Arkady Gendler, an aging Jewish singer from Ukraine. Gendler was performing at a St. Petersburg music camp attended by Shapiro. She knew immediately he was a walking treasure trove of unknown Yiddish folk music.
She brought him to the 2000 Jewish Music Festival, where he was a big hit, and also got him into the studio to record a CD of his songs, titled “My Hometown Soroke.” For Shapiro, the making of that disc remains a signal achievement.
For Stan Klezmer, highlights over the years include staging the opera “The Jewess ” by Jacques François Halévy (composer George Bizet’s father-in-law) at Berkeley’s Wheeler Auditorium and at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He also loved a program that covered “700 years of Jewish music,” held in Kensington. “So much talent wanted to participate,” he recalls. “People were showing up to play right in the middle of the show.”
What keeps artists like Tenney coming back for more year after year? “I feel the most Jewish when I play the music,” he says. “Spiritually, when I play the tunes, I’m gone. I feel my DNA code has heard these songs before.”
As for Shapiro, she feels inspired not just at festival time but year-round. In fact, she spends much of the “off-season” (50 weeks a year) traveling the world and attending other music festivals. “I do a lot of active scouting,” she says. “I’ve been to Russia, Canada, Poland and Israel looking for talent.”
She strives to make the festival a 12-month presence for others, as well, bringing Jewish music into the region’s public and private schools. The project has, in Shapiro’s words, opened “a whole new constituency” for Jewish music, particularly in Oakland and Berkeley schools.
Sheppard remains on the festival’s advisory board, looking forward to the event annually. “It keeps us connected to our heritage,” she says. “The music speaks to people and ties us together in a language we can all love and appreciate.”
And for Shapiro, the Jewish Music Festival will always be a second home, especially when she burns the midnight oil in the days leading up to opening night.
“Last year was the first time I actually enjoyed myself,” she says as she puts the scrapbook back on the shelf. “This year is most ambitious, with our community music day showcasing local artists, 15 workshops and nine performances. But we’ve proven ourselves. We’re now on the map as a major cultural resource in the Bay Area.”
JEWISH MUSIC FESTIVAL
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