March 11-17, 2004

music

Regeneration

Susan Watts keeps up the family business and revives a revival.

by Mary Armstrong

klezmer

A few weeks ago, Susan Watts tore up the Annenberg with Mikveh, an all-women world-class klezmer ensemble -- a rare thing indeed. And Watts’ home band, The Fabulous Shpielkehs, is another (almost) all-women klezmer group. How did she manage to find that many talented sisters in a field that has only lately become friendly to women?

Watts had a definite advantage -- though it took her long enough to figure it out. She swears, "Until seven years ago I didn't know there was a klezmer revival. It was just Jewish music, something we had around the house." She's a fourth-generation klezmer; mom is drummer extraordinaire Elaine Hoffman Watts of the Hoffman family, a Philadelphia klezmer dynasty.

Hankus Netsky, researcher and leader of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, calls the distinct regional style that the Hoffman family preserved "The Dead Sea Scrolls of Klezmer." They handed down, in practice as well as in written arrangements, the dance tunes from the Ukraine village where the Hoffmans first made music. The Philadelphia Folklore Project likewise considered the Hoffman family's musical stash sufficiently significant to sponsor Watts in residency.

Drummers will be inspired to know that Elaine Hoffman Watts is 71 and truly does still, to quote her daughter, "kick some klezmer ass." She was a percussionist, the first woman to graduate with that degree from Curtis. When Duke Ellington's orchestra needed a timpanist for a Dell performance, she'd get the call. The Ice Capades? Same thing. But a plain old drummer with a regular jazz club gig? Forget it. Working the Jewish music circuit was tough. Gigs were only available when her legendary father was part of the band.

When Susan Watts, now 37, found herself drawn to follow her grandfather, Joseph Hoffman, into the brass section, she says, "I noticed that I was the only girl playing trumpet, but nobody said anything." So sure, there was always Jewish music around, but it didn't look like a livelihood to young Watts, who set her dreams on playing in a brass quintet.

While studying music at Temple, Watts hosted an overnight jazz show on RTI. She says you could tell it was her show without waiting for the break by the preponderance of choice trumpet and vocal cuts. About the latter she says, "I'm a total Ella freak. I always wanted to be a jazz singer." With her klezmer groups today, she says she gets to work in some of that scatting. "I do these weird things with old songs like "Joseph Joseph.'"

A decade's detour for marriage took her far from her roots and early dreams. And a year and a half teaching English on a Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana allowed Watts to see what she was missing. She'd never lived in a community completely devoid of Jews before, and it let her see just how much the feeling of community meant to her. Her story of discovering kosher wine at the gas station convenience store and her shock to learn that some folks have other than ceremonial uses for it is priceless.

It was a while before she got back to her trumpet. In the meantime, "I'd listen to Yiddish tapes and cry." About seven years ago she returned home to find Netsky doing research with her mom. This led to an invitation to KlezCamp, the intense week of Jewish music and culture that happens every year around the end of December. From there Watts has gone on to teach her family's repertoire at a number of klezmer events.

"Now my goal is to do this Jewish stuff in my way," says Watts, whose experiments have added Yiddish topical poetry to old style tunes and scatting overtop the Jewish classics. The Fabulous Shpielkehs has mom on drums, Rachel Lemisch on trombone, Katt Flagg on accordion and Jay Krush on tuba. "I'm not trying to re-create any traditional 1850 parlor klezmer. This is not archival music. I'm not trying to do it the way others have done it, though I studied those others like mad."

The Fabulous Shpielkehs, Sun., March 14, 5 p.m., free, The Point, 880 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-527-0988, www.atthepoint.com.