Andy Statman

Klezmer Clarinetist, Mandolinist, Composer
A man plays a saxophone.

Photo by Christoph Giese

Bio

In the words of the New Yorker, "Andy Statman, clarinet and mandolin virtuoso, is an American visionary." The culmination of decades of creative development, his music expands the boundaries of traditional and improvisational forms.

Born in 1950 into a long line of cantors, composers, and both classical and vaudeville musicians, Statman grew up in Queens, New York. His early musical influences included klezmer records played at family gatherings, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway show tunes, his rabbi in Hebrew school singing Hasidic songs, rock and roll, big band jazz, and classical music. When Statman's older brother started bringing home bluegrass records, Statman took up the guitar and banjo, eventually switching to mandolin under the tutelage of David Grisman.

He was soon performing with local bands at multiple venues and on Sunday afternoons in Washington Square Park. At age 17 -- after hearing Albert Ayler -- Statman began to study saxophone, which he played in free jazz, funk, rock, and Chicago blues bands while expanding his mandolin playing in similar directions. In 1970 he joined the experimental bluegrass group, Country Cooking, followed by a stint with David Bromberg's band, and then another experimental group, Breakfast Special.

Still broadening his horizons, Statman took up the clarinet and studied Greek, Albanian, and Adzerbaijani music. In 1975, he sought out the legendary klezmer clarinetist and NEA National Heritage Fellow Dave Tarras. Statman became Tarras' protégé, for whom the master wrote a number of melodies. Tarras wanted Statman to carry on his legacy, and bequeathed four of his clarinets to the younger virtuoso.

In the late 1970s Statman recorded his first albums; Jewish Klezmer Music, a recording that became a touchstone for the 1970s klezmer revival; and Flatbush Waltz, a mandolin masterpiece of post-bebop jazz improvisations and ethnically inspired original compositions.

As a clarinetist, Statman began to zero in on the sublimely ecstatic, centuries-old Hasidic melodies that lie at the heart of klezmer music -- melodies that were embedded in the religious path he had come to follow. This led to his galvanizing klezmer music with the spiritually oriented jazz of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and other musics he had explored.

Statman has appeared on more than 100 recordings, including 20 under his own name. He has recorded and/or toured with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck, David Grisman, Itzhak Perlman, Vassar Clements, Stéphane Grappelli, Paul Shaffer, and Kenny Werner. A Grammy nominee, Statman has been the subject of dozens of feature articles, from the New York Times to Billboard to Rolling Stone. He gives master classes in colleges and music camps, and has authored several music books and instructional DVDs.

Interview by Josephine Reed for the NEA
June 7, 2012
Edited by Liz Auclair

NEA: Can you begin by describing what Klezmer music is?

Andy Statman: Klezmer music is the traditional instrumental music of the Jews of Eastern Europe, in what they call the Pale of Settlement -- Ukraine, Southern Poland and parts of Poland proper, Belarus, the areas around Romania. There were other Jewish musics in Hungary and other places, but they were a little bit different. But this was sort of a unified style of music that was played.

NEA: And what's distinctive about klezmer?

Statman: The emotional content is distinctive. In a nutshell, [klezmer is] Hasidic vocal music played instrumentally, and it could either be actual Hasidic melodies, or melodies that were composed by the musicians themselves that might show their creativity and virtuosity. But the feeling they would invoke is the feeling of a Hasidic melody. Hasidic music is very broad and very, very creative and very deep, and much, much broader than what we consider klezmer music. "Klezmer" is a term that was applied to the music after it was pretty much gone. That's not what the musicians themselves refer to the music as. It's just traditional Jewish instrumental music from East Europe. A lot of the best musicians came to America in the 1890s and up until the '20s it sort of flourished here, became a little bit different, and then sort of became dormant, sort of died in many ways.

NEA: You come from a long line of musicians on your mother's side, correct?

Statman: Yes. [There are] canters going back to the mid-1700s, early 1700s. And when they came to America, some of them went into vaudeville and became well-known vaudeville entertainers -- Willie and Eugene Howard, they were called. They had one or two musician cousins who were classical musicians. Probably the most famous was a cousin named Sammy Fain, usually [known as] Sammy Feinberg, who was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter back in the twenties. He wrote "April Love, Secret Love." He wrote the music to Alice in Wonderland. He wrote "I'll Be Seeing You," "Love is a Many Splendored Thing," "That Old Feeling." He was American-born. He sang in the choir in synagogue, and then in some Yiddish theater productions. He started writing songs, and I think his first hit was a song called "By a Waterfall" [sung] by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. That was in one of the early movies, "speakies," and they brought him out to Hollywood to write for the films. But he used to tell me stories about Gershwin and Cole Porter and Fats Waller, and all these people he used to hang out with. I know at my parents' wedding during the Depression he was the entertainment there. So he was always a presence in the family, in some ways, when I was growing up.

When I started touring nationally, whenever I played out in Los Angeles I'd go visit him and he'd take me out to the Brown Derby. I'd go there and he'd have several Oscars on his piano. It was the old, classic Hollywood. He was very close with Jimmy Durante. They used to go to the horse races almost every day -- it was a whole scene.

NEA: What did you hear when you were growing up around the house?

Statman: I heard Guys and Dolls, Kiss Me, Kate, all that stuff, classical music. We had 78s, so I remember hearing "Three O'Clock in the Morning" by Paul Whiteman, it was a very popular waltz back in the twenties, or we had this Yiddish theater song, folk song, called "Yosel," I remember I loved that one. I remember that was one of the first songs that really got me very energized -- that and "Three O'Clock in the Morning." My aunt had a record of klezmer, if you want to call it klezmer -- traditional Jewish tunes that my father had growing up. The Jews from different areas used to have town organizations and they'd have meetings and balls and dinners. Each town had its own customs and things, and so they used to hear all this music. My father grew up with that, with what we call today klezmer music. So at family gatherings when he got together with his sister and his brother they would put on these records and we would dance around. But I also remember when "Rockin' Around the Clock"came out and when "Hound Dog" came out. I remember really liking that stuff, and so I heard all the really early rock-and-roll and big bands.

NEA: And I know first hearing bluegrass had a huge impact on you.

Statman: I'd been interested in shortwave radio, and also in getting out-of-town radio stations on the AM radio. There were 50,000-watt stations then that broadcast live country music. There was a station called WWVA, from Wheeling, West Virginia, which you could get right around dusk in New York and all night into the early morning. My brother, who's about seven and a half, eight years older than me, he was in a jug band. I loved the live music, but when he brought home some records of bluegrass, I really got excited about it. And he played guitar. There was this guy named Doc Williams. He had a nightly show on WWVA during the weekdays, and then he'd appear on the jamboree. He had what he called Big Note Guitar Method -- "Teach yourself guitar." So I sent away for this thing and I started learning to play guitar. And then there was a banjo player in my brother's band and I really wanted to learn to play the banjo. With my bar mitzvah money I went out and bought a banjo and I started taking lessons. Then I eventually decided I wanted to play mandolin. So this started when I was around 12, 13.

NEA: How did you meet Dave Grisman?

Statman: I saw David play at what they used to call ‘hoots' that my brother's band played at. When I wanted to learn mandolin, I was able to get his number and gave him a call, and that started a lifelong friendship.

Everything I did prior was really setting me up for playing the mandolin. I'd played guitar and then really got into banjo. There used to be, in Washington Square Park in New York on Sunday, groups of musicians [that] would get together and play. And so I began playing in bands, but I was banjo-oriented, so I was mainly listening to people like Earl Scruggs and Don Reno and Bill Keith, and all these great banjo players. But there were a lot of really great banjo players, and I was just another one of them and I was the youngest. All these guys were college-aged kids. I was maybe fourteen.

I started hearing these mandolin breaks on these records and I got the chills when I heard some of them. Earl Taylor played a song called "White House Blues" on a Folkways record called Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, and he basically played his own version of a Bill Monroe solo on that. And Everett Lilly, who just passed away, from a group called the Lilly Brothers, he played with Flatt and Scruggs. He took the very, very simple mandolin solo on there and I got the chills when I heard it, so I decided this is what I want to do. And I went out and bought a very inexpensive Czech mandolin and went to see David [Grisman].  My hands were already developed from playing guitar and banjo, and I had an understanding of the musical language. So what he did was he said, "You have to listen to Bill Monroe, and Jim and Jesse [McReynolds], and the Osborne Brothers," and he basically gave me, intentionally or unintentionally, a course in aesthetics of music.

NEA: While you were still a teenager, you moved in a different direction from bluegrass. You became very interested in jazz.

Statman: David [Grisman] exposed me to Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti and Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt. There were country music parks with transplanted Southerners in Pennsylvania, so I'd go down to see all the musicians. I started meeting musicians, thinking of moving down to Nashville to play there, but at the same time, Richard Greene, who played with Bill Monroe, was telling me about [how] all the musicians were listening to different types of jazz-- Sonny Osborne, the Osborne Brothers, they were all telling me different names. I started going down to jazz record shops and then listening to jazz on the radio, and I started really getting interested in Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and Monk and Mingus, and my brother had some Cannonball Adderley and Jackie McLean records. At around the same time, I remember I heard, I think it was "Strawberry Fields Forever," by the Beatles, and I said, "This is incredible."

So a little before I was 17, I'd realized that, as great as the instrumental tradition is in bluegrass, the deepest emotions in bluegrass are conveyed through the singing. That's the heaviest stuff. Not that the instrumentals aren't heavy; they're great. But the singing, that's the heart of everything, in many ways. And I'm not a singer.

I'd heard Albert Ayler on the radio. It was a record called Live in Greenwich Village. It was on Vanguard. And he did this song called "The Truth is Marching In," and it was him and his brother Donald, and bass and drums and a violinist. He was exploring, at that time, almost like Eastern European folk melodies, and then sort of playing them faster and faster until they became absorbed in a pulse, in the power of the drummer playing. For a 17-year-old in 1967, it was intense and expressive.

NEA: And you began studying the saxophone?

Statman: I could've easily gotten into guitar, but I didn't want to have any of the bluegrass ideas carry over, because I'd already done that, and if I played guitar I'd have "finger memory" coming in. I wanted something completely different, and I felt that that through breathing there could be an additional avenue of expression.

As it turns out, a banjo player named Mark Horowitz, who I worked with in a number of bands in New York, his brother is someone named David Horowitz, who is a genius jazz piano player who was making the scene. I said, "I want to study saxophone. Ask your brother." And so he gave me Richard Grando's phone number, and so Richard, was who was an amazing, amazing person, said, "Okay, listen. Why don't you come out and we'll talk, and I'll see if I'll take you on as a student." So I went out to see him, and I remember the first lesson, we discussed for about an hour whether God existed or not, and then he said, "Okay, I'll take you on as a student." And that was that. And Richard was a brilliant man, a renaissance man, and he had come through the bebop scene, and he was part of what they used to call the "new thing" in jazz back then. He was, of course, very into Coltrane, also very into Sonny Rollins, and I know he had worked a little bit with Art Blakey. I became sort of almost like a houseboy there; I just spent hours there, once, twice a week, and became very close with him. And he was into Carl Jung and also some different types of religious things and music from all over the world, so this all had a big influence on me. And so, practically around that time, I started playing saxophone in rock-and-roll bands, blues bands, free-jazz bands -- whatever I could do. And occasionally I'd bring along the mandolin and adopt it to those situations. But you know, I never thought I'd be playing any sort of bluegrass again or anything like that. I thought I'd be playing some sort of saxophone-oriented music.

NEA: How did you become involved with the group Breakfast Special?

Statman: That came about around 1971. I went to college for a very short time and dropped out, and I wanted to work as a musician. Out of nowhere I got a call to play with a one of the groups -- there was a precursor to Breakfast Special called Country Cooking led by Peter Wernick. In the group were Tony Trischka and Russ Barenberg, two well-known, very innovative musicians, and they were writing their own music, playing pretty much all originals, and playing music that was bluegrass-based, but really reflecting a whole other emotional type of thing -- a very innovative band. So they hired me to do this record with them, which I did. I played the saxophone in one piece and the mandolin on others. And by this time, my mandolin playing had completely changed. It developed into the beginnings of what it is now -- it was very free and a different harmonic language than bluegrass uses, and a different rhythmic language. From there, I started getting gigs and making the scene in the Village. I needed to work. I ran into David Brandberg. I hadn't seen David in a few years. So he invited me down to play with him. He was with Columbia Records at that point. I became his first regular sideman, other than the bass player. All of a sudden, I was on salary working for a Columbia recording artist. We were traveling all over the country and he got me involved in sessions we did with Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Dr. John -- lots of different people. I always felt there was an invisible wall between amateur and professional and going on the road with him, I felt I sort of walked through that door and got to the other end. He hired two other musicians, Kenny Kosek and Roger Mason, and at some point we decided to form Breakfast Special. That was around 1971. And there I was playing mandolin again. Tony Trischka was in the group and Stacy Phillips, Jim Tolles, and Richard Crooks, a great, great drummer.

NEA: What was it that just kept drawing you into different kinds of music? What was that curiosity that just kept you moving all the time?

Statman: First of all, there was a lot of great music that was not very accessible, but if you wanted, you could find it. And this is before the whole world music thing, so there were still lots of master musicians who were unaffected by rock-and-roll and all this other stuff. Not that that's bad, but I'm just saying, you have people who represented culminations of traditions living in the five boroughs. All this music really moved me and I had in the back of my mind an idea of somehow combining all this stuff in my own way. But my first idea was just to learn how to play all this music. At the same time I started taking lessons from Harold Cumberbatch, the baritone player. He was a bebop player from Brooklyn and I was studying with him. Up until around 30, I was just studying with all sorts of different people. I was studying with Adolph Sandole, one of the Sandole brothers. I was always doing different things, studying with different people, and trying to broaden my horizons, and trying to enhance what I was doing. So at one point, I remember after Breakfast Special sort of ended, I was just playing with lots of different bands. I decided that I was getting more interested in Judaism and my own personal family background. I had found 78s of Dave Tarras and Abe Schwartz, and all these great traditional Jewish instrumentalists. I said, "You know, this music is really my heritage, particularly where my father's family comes from. If I was born there, as a musician, this is probably what I'd be playing." So I said, "Just for myself, I want to learn to play it to keep it alive."

I looked up Dave Tarras in the union book and went out to see him, and I had transcribed some of his melodies on the saxophone and mandolin, and at that point I didn't have a clarinet. He was sort of amazed that not only a person much younger than him would be interested in this music, but that I actually did this. And we hit it off, and then I got a call to go down to Nashville and play with Vassar Clements, and so I went on the road and played with Vassar, and when I came back from Nashville, I moved into Brighton. As it turned out, Dave had moved there and he said, "Come on over." And I became like a houseboy there, as well. I wanted to play on the Albert system clarinet, which is what the old-timers played, and he gave me clarinets. He had no real way of teaching. Basically I just slowed down his recordings and of other people. I'd go there and his wife would make us some tea and cookies, and stuff like that, and we'd talk. Maybe he'd want me to take him out for a haircut or to get something for him, and then, we'd sit around and talk a little bit. And then he'd take out his clarinet and play for me for about an hour, and I'd ask him some questions. I'd say, "Dave, would you do this this way?" And he'd say, "No, never this way, only this way."

In what we call klezmer music, there's an oral law of how to interpret songs, when and how to use ornamentations, and it's very logical but it can only be really learned through osmosis. It's something that can't really be written down. And so he was really helpful, and he had very strict feelings about a lot of this stuff, and very strong opinions about a lot of it. And, we became very close. I know that he'd been a very tough character in the music business, but he was, too, sort of like another grandfather to me. And he sort of wanted me to carry on for him, but not to be him. He wanted me to carry on for him in my own way. He understood musicians are individuals and the way to carry on a legacy is not to be a carbon copy of someone, but to take what that person taught you and move on from it.

I'm simultaneously a purist, and also not. There are people who I've heard who would make records and do Django Reinhart solos note for note, or Bill Monroe solos, and you can say, "Why are they doing it? It's not as good as what was improvised." On the other hand, though, they are keeping a certain aesthetic alive. They're really true to a certain aesthetic, and they're trying to keep the beauty of that thing alive. It's an important thing, because you need people who are preservationists, so to speak. And in essence, if you want to be an innovator in a style, you need to be a preservationist also, because until you can speak the stylistic language fluently, you can't really understand how to innovate in the style.

NEA: What was your first recording of klezmer music?

Statman: The first recording I did was with Zev Feldman, and back then Zev was very traditionally oriented, and what we were looking to do was to try and recreate, in our own way, what this music might have sounded like 70 years earlier, particularly if it had been in Europe. I had to have some stylistic blinders put on, because I would hear things, I would see the similarities between Junior Walker whose playing I studied, and Dave Tarras. But I had to keep it within certain boundaries, both on the clarinet and on the mandolin. There really wasn't a mandolin style of this music, and based on my understanding of the ornamentation through the clarinet playing, I developed a mandolin style to go with it. We were doing this really for ourselves. We weren't looking to revive anything. We made a decision when I came back from Nashville. I said, "I really want to do this. This music is not being played, and we should just try and keep it alive for ourselves." I never expected that it would become the focal point for me for a number of years. Also partially it was the economics of the business; the gigs I got playing klezmer music paid better and were better conditions than playing in bars with rock and roll bands or bluegrass bands. With Zev also, we basically did the first klezmer concerts in New York, and the people from Shanachie Records came down and heard us and offered us a recording contract.

NEA: Moving from the saxophone to the clarinet, what's the difference, in terms of expression and what you can do with them?

Statman: Probably because I played mandolin, I loved the wooden sound of a clarinet, and I love the feeling of a clarinet. As great as the saxophone is, there are certain emotional areas it can't cover as well as the clarinet. They're just very soulful instruments, very, very beautiful instruments -- the tone and the music that's been played on them. They can take a lot of the beautiful things that a violin does, but then do whole other things with it. In terms of playing free music on it, they're great, also. It's like if you have a tenor saxophone, you have all these other overtones you can deal with, so you can get a broader type of palette, but there's something about wind instruments that I really like, although I love the saxophone. But probably back in the nineties, I just couldn't do everything, and I realized that I sort of have to limit. So I was mainly into the clarinet then, and that's sort of what I did, and keeping the mandolin going. I go through different phases where I'm more into one instrument than the other.

NEA: You have a trio -- you've been working with a bassist and a drummer for a long time, Larry Eagle and Jim Whitney. You play at a synagogue twice a week but when you arrive there, you really don't have a set planned.

Statman: No, no. We just play. A lot of what I do is improvised, and so we just sort of see what we feel like playing at that moment, and see where it goes. It is really just a matter of the moment and how we're feeling.

I'm just interested in playing music. I can play traditionally in a number of styles, but that's not what I usually choose to do. I usually just play music and just let the music go where it goes. I have my own aesthetic, and I've developed my own languages in the traditional styles I play. Basically, I'm looking to go on some sort of, for lack of a better word, "exploration" with the music -- an emotional exploration -- and get it to the point where the music just sort of happens, and I become, in some ways, almost an observer as well. It's just another form of talking when you're improvising. And even if you're playing a song where you're not improvising much -- it's just melody -- you're still improvising in terms of how you phrase and how you're going to ornament, so everything really is improvisation.

NEA: Where is your musical curiosity taking you now?

Statman: I just find that, for myself, when I start playing, all these ideas come out, and extensions of my own language, which I record. Then I want to go back and learn, so there's a backlog of that. I'm teaching at a mandolin camp, and I'm revisiting some mandolin players who I listen to occasionally during the year, who are big influences on me, and relearning some of their stuff to teach it, and reconnecting with a lot of those feelings and those ideas and those ways of approaching music.

And at the same time, I always listen to Charlie Parker, and I've been very interested in writing songs in the older, '50s rock-and-roll style. I've been revisiting a lot of the old rock-and-roll saxophone styles -- not just Junior Walker and King Curtis, but anonymous guys on Dell Vikings' records, and things like that. These guys, the good ones, could really play. They're really basically coming out of swing and the big bands and some bebop, but they put it in a certain type of way, and it's just an incredibly fun and uplifting and beautiful way to play blues. So I've been re-exploring that, particularly using it on the mandolin, and also listening to people like old Gene Vincent things and there's an energy in that early sort of rock-and-roll, rockabilly, that's absolutely incredible -- super intense and really great. So I've been starting to write some songs influenced by that, and doing them with my band. Also, I've gotten very interested in jazz from the twenties and thirties, the way some of those solos are constructed, and their use of arpeggios and things like that. I'd always been more bebop-oriented, but there's such great color and creativity in the way these guys play. It's really amazing, and so I've been fooling around with some of that language. I'm [interested in] using those ideas as part of the well for my own music.

NEA: You teach at mandolin camp. What do you try to impart to your students?

Statman: On mandolin and on clarinet, the first thing I try and do is to get these students to realize that we're all equals, and that some may have more talent, some may have less, but it's all sort of practice, and practice is all desire. In other words, if the music moves you, then you'll have the desire to practice. And someone who may be supposedly less talented, but really practices, will eventually be more successful than someone who's maybe very talented and doesn't practice. I also try and make them not worry about mistakes. We're not computers, you know? I tell them that when I play a gig, if I start a song and I know it's not happening, I'll just stop it. I'm not playing music to torture myself for the next five minutes. If it's not happening, forget it and move on to something else. If you make a mistake, you make a mistake. It doesn't matter. I try and give them a real basis for relaxing in their playing, I try and do that continually.

I try and get them into the spirit of the music and what the music is saying, and how to make it their own, and how to get behind their own ideas. In terms of, say, klezmer music specifically, at this point I've come to feel klezmer, since it's not part of a living community, so to speak, there's no such thing as "quality control." So it's a style that can be sort of hinted at but not really played, and people will think you're really playing it. So it's a style that's very easily sort of invoked but not really played. There's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it, and this is what I learned from Dave Tarras. I feel a responsibility to teach my students how to really play it and that's a time-consuming way of doing it. The way to teach it is time-consuming, but everyone gets inspired by it, and they really learn how to do it. But it's a slow process. With traditional Jewish instrumental music, I'm looking to convey a literacy in that music, a grammatical and emotional literacy, and overall, to try have the musician feel some sort of self-confidence in their own ability to be able to play what they want to play, and not to worry about all these stupid little things, not to feel pressured. Who cares if you make a mistake? It doesn't matter. I tell my students, "The reason we're all playing is because it makes us feel good."

Podcasts

In the first of two-part interview, National Heritage Fellow Andy Statman talks about his early musical career, including the importance of bluegrass for a boy born in Brooklyn.

Transcript of conversation with Andy Statman 

Excerpt of Hassidic Dance from Galicia

Jo Reed: That's an excerpt from Hassidic Dance from Galicia. It's performed by musician and 2012 National Heritage Fellow, Andy Statman.

Welcome to Art Works the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. I'm your host, Josephine Reed.

This week, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the recipients of 2012 National Heritage Fellowship. The Fellowship award "recognizes folk and traditional artists for their artistic excellence and efforts to conserve America's culture for the future." It's the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Among This year's honorees is Klezmer clarinetist, mandolin-player, and composer, Andy Statman.

Andy is receiving his award for his outstanding work as a performer and a composer in Klezmer. But as great a Klezmer muscian as Andy Statman may be, and believe me, he is, Klezmer only tells part of the story of Andy's musical genius.

Although he was born in Brooklyn, Andy Statman was galvanized as a teenager by bluegrass music and learned to play the mandolin under the tutelage of David Grisman. Never content to stay musically still, Andy Statman pushed the boundaries of mandolin performing with experimental bluegrass groups even as he was drawn to jazz and the saxophone. And then in 1975, as Statman was thinking about his own Jewish musical roots, he met legendary klezmer clarinetist and NEA National Heritage Fellow Dave Tarras, becoming Tarras's protégé. The result was Andy Statman's album Jewish Klezmer Music, which became a touchstone for the klezmer revival. But it's impossible to put Statman in any neat musical box. The year following the success of Jewish Klezmer Music, Statman released Flatbush Waltz, a mandolin masterpiece of post-bebop jazz improvisations and ethnically-inspired original compositions. And so it goes.

Statman's released 20 of his own recordings and has performed on close to 100 others. He has worked with The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck, David Grisman, Itzhak Perlman, and many others. He fronts the Andy Statman Trio which plays weekly gigs around NYC.

Given all he has accomplished and that he continues to do, it is small wonder that Andy Statman was chosen to receive a 2012 National Heritage fellowship.

I was lucky enough to speak to Andy Statman. We talked in the kitchen of his Brooklyn home and you'll hear the sounds of city traffic in the background. In this first of a two part interview, I began at the beginning and asked Andy to define Klezmer music.

Andy Statman: Klezmer music is the traditional instrumental music of the Jews of Eastern Europe. In what they call the Pale of Settlement. It'd be the Ukraine, Southern Poland and parts of Poland proper, Belarus, the areas around Romania. There were other Jewish musics in, also, like Hungary and other places, but they were a little bit different, and also other parts of Poland and Lithuania. But this was sort of a unified style of music that, you know, was played.

Jo Reed: And what's distinctive about it?

Andy Statman: The emotional contact is distinctive. Basically, what it is, is it's instrumental versions of Hasidic vocal music. So it's coming directly out of the religious milieu. In fact, most of the great klezmer musicians came from Hasidic families and were Hasidic. It was only when they came to America some of them sort of went off that path, although some in Europe did, also. But it was basically in a nutshell, it's Hasidic vocal music played instrumentally, and it could either be actual Hasidic melodies, or melodies that would- were composed by the musicians themselves that might show their creativity and virtuosity. But the feeling they would invoke is the feeling of a Hasidic melody.

Music up and hot…

And Hasidic music is very broad and- and very creative and very deep, and much broader than we consider klezmer music. And also, klezmer is- is also sort of a, for lack of a better word, a- a term that was applied to the music after it was pretty much gone. That's not what the musicians themselves refer to the music as. It's just, you know, traditional Jewish instrumental music, you know, from East Europe. And uh a lot of the best musicians came to America in the 1890s and up until the 20s, and uh.. it- it sort of flourished here, became a little bit different, and then sort of became dormant, sort of, you know, died in many ways.

Jo Reed: And you helped resurrect it?

Andy Statman: Well, yeah. so to speak, yeah. I mean, that was not my intention, but, you know, I certainly played a hand in that.

Jo Reed: Well, you come from a long line of musicians, I know, on your mother's side, correct?

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo Reed: Canters way, way, way back, generations and generations.

Andy Statman: Yeah. I mean, canters going back to the, you know, 17- mid-1700s, early 1700s. And when they came to America, some of them went into Vaudeville and became well-known Vaudeville entertainers. I had one or two cousins who were classical musicians. And probably the most famous was a cousin named Sammy Fain, usually Sammy Feinberg, who was a Tin Pan Alley songwriter back in the twenties. He started...

Jo Reed: April Love.

Andy Statman: He wrote April Love, Secret Love, I'll Be Seeing You, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, That Old Feeling. I mean, he wrote, you know, uh.. it goes on and on. And uh...

Jo Reed: I love That Old Feeling. That's a great song.

Andy Statman: Yeah, it's a fantastic song.

Jo Reed: What did you hear when you were growing up around the house? I mean, obviously...

Andy Statman: I heard Guys and Dolls, Kiss me Kate, all that stuff, classical music. We had 78s, I remember hearing, like Three O'Clock in the Morning, probably, by Paul Whiteman, as it was a very popular waltz probably back in the twenties or, you know, this Yiddish theater song, folk song, called "Yosel," I remember that I loved that one.

Excerpt of Yosel

Andy Statman: That was one of the first songs that really, really sent me, you know, I really got very energized when I heard that song, that and Three O'Clock in the Morning, "Yosel," and "Three O'Clock in the Morning," and my aunt had a record of klezmer, if you want to call them "klezmer"-- you know, traditional Jewish- you know, Jewish tunes that my, you know, my father had grown up with, you know, the Jews from different areas used to have like town organizations, if you came from that town, and they'd have, you know, meetings and- and balls and, you know, dinners, and they'd buy a common burial plot for people from a particular town. And, you know, each town had its own customs and things, and uh.. so they used to hear all this music. My father, you know, grew up with that, with you know, what we call today klezmer music, so at family gatherings, when I got together with his sister and his brother, my uncle they would put on these records and we'd dance around and things like that. but I also remember when, you know, Rockin' Around the Clock came out, and when Hound Dog came out, and, you know, all that stuff. I remember really liking that stuff, and so I heard all the- all the early, early rock-and-roll-- you know, big bands…

Jo Reed: And I know when you first heard bluegrass that had a huge impact on you.

Andy Statman: Yeah. yeah, a number of things coincided for me with that. So my brother, who's about seven and a half, eight years older than me, he was in a jug band, I liked it. I loved the live music, but when he brought home some records of bluegrass, that's- I really got excited about it. And he played guitar. You know, we had guitars in the house. I'd been interested in shortwave radio, and also in getting out-of-town radio stations on the AM radio. So there were 50,000-watt stations then that broadcast live country music. There was a- a station called WWVA, from Wheeling, West Virginia, which you could get right around dusk in New York, and all night into the early morning probably going back to the twenties, but certainly still in the sixties, people would buy time on their country music or bluegrass or, you know, singer would- would buy time and have radio shows for 15 minutes-- 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour-- and sell their products. And there was this guy named Doc Williams, who was a sort of traditional country music guitarist/singer/band leader-- you know, had a- had a sort- a show. He had a nightly show on WWVA during the weekdays, and then he'd appear on the jamboree, and he'd travel throughout, say, Southern Canada and, you know, the Midwest; not so much the South. And he had what he called a Big Note Guitar Method-- you know, "Teach yourself guitar." So I sent away for this thing, I started learning to play guitar. And then there was a banjo player in my brother's band, and I- I really wanted to learn to play the banjo. So I guess with my bar mitzvah money, I went out and we bought a banjo, and I started taking lessons, and then I eventually decided I wanted to play mandolin. So this is uh.. this started when I was a- around 13,12, 13.

Jo Reed: How did you meet Dave Grisman, the great mandolin player?

Andy Statman: David I saw play at one of these what they used to call hoots, that my brother's band played at. They were on the bill. And, you know, so when I wanted to learn mandolin, I was able to get his number and gave him a call, and that started a- a lifelong friendship.

Jo Reed: And did he introduce you to Bill Monroe?

Andy Statman: Everything I did prior to playing the mandolin was really setting me up for the mandolin. You know, I'd played guitar and then really got into banjo. There used to be in Washington Square Park in New York on Sunday, groups of musicians would get together and play, and there'd be one group playing bluegrass, one old-time, one topical songs, you know, different things. And so I began playing in bands, but I was banjo-oriented, so I was mainly listening to people like Earl Scruggs and Don Reno and Bill Keith, and all these great banjo players. But there were- there were a lot of really great banjo players, and I was just another one of them, and I was the youngest. All these guys were college-aged kids. I was by that time, maybe fourteen.

Jo Reed: You were the kid? <laughs>

Andy Statman: I was the kid, yeah. And uh.. but I started hearing it on these records, these mandolin breaks, and they started, I got the chills when I heard some of them. And, uh.. you know, the uh.. two players-- one was a guy named Earl Taylor-- played a song called "White House Blues" on a Folkways record called Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, and he basically played his own version of a Bill Monroe solo on that. And Everett Lilly, who just passed away, from a group called the Lilly Brothers, he played with Flatt and Scruggs. He took the very, very simple mandolin solo on there, I get the chills when I heard it, so I decided this is what I want to do. I went out and bought a very inexpensive uh.. Czech mandolin and went to see David, and the thing's that my hands were already developed from playing guitar and banjo, and I had an understanding of the musical language. So what he did was he saw, you know, "You have to listen to Bill Monroe," basically gave me, you know, un- intentionally or unintentionally, really, you know, basically, a course in aesthetics of music. And you know, through getting it to Bill Monroe, a whole different thing opened up for me, musically and emotionally, you know?

Excerpt of bluegrass up and hot

Jo Reed: Now, what was it about Bill Monroe's playing that just spoke to you.

Andy Statman: Well, there are few things at play here---one being that I was 15, okay? There's the great romance of another culture, so to speak. I don't- I don't know if it's exot- exoticism. Of course, in America, everyone heard bluegrass anyway, growing up. We all knew fiddle tunes and things like that, you know, Turkey in the Straw, and we've all- all heard the stuff. But Monroe was presented as being the real deal, so it's like you become sort of an initiate in a small club of people who know the real truth about something, so to speak. You understand what I'm talking about? This exists in all music, and it probably exists in every field. But when you're 15, it's a very, for lack of a better word, empowering type of thing, like, " This guy is it." And coming with that becomes a certain almost uncritical acceptance of this person who becomes a larger-than-life figure. But for a 15-year-old, that's great. You don't really have much understanding beyond that. So what was it about Monroe? I mean, it wasn't just Monroe, but he was a super creative mandolin player. He did all these very subtle and powerful things on the mandolin. You know, he developed his own language and was able to speak it very, very well and very creatively, and at this point in his career, he had a great band and he was super creative. All the great people in bluegrass played with him. He was a great songwriter, he was a great singer, and his music had a tremendous intensity and integrity. And the thing about Monroe was that he like, unlike today, when people really try and peg you as being this or that, musically, to fit into a particular box, Monroe, in many ways, was coming out of the minstrel of the Vaudeville tradition. And in terms of recording, what he did was, you know, well, was he a gospel band? He did a lot of the most beautiful gospel quartets, or gospel songs, that have been recorded. No. was he a fiddle-tune band, he was the avant-garde Southern instrumental band at that point. All the great players who were innovators wanted to play with him, on fiddle and on banjo. He did that. Was he a blues band? He was a great blues singer. Was he a country sort of crooning band? He did great sentimental songs and love songs. I mean, he did- he did all these things, and in fact when he toured, he had comedians with him and other things, so he was really coming out of a much broader picture of doing a whole bunch of things. And what it did, it obviously reflected his interaction with the white and the black musicians in his area as a child, and music that he heard on radio. He played a lot of his stuff was very influenced by New Orleans jazz. You know, was he a jazz band? He basically took all these influences and personalized it, and put it in one package, and it was just part of country music, but I guess commercially became known as bluegrass because of the Bluegrass Boys. But the name really doesn't mean anything in itself. It's bluegrass--

Jo Reed: Like klezmer.

Andy Statman: Or well, klezmer comes from the Hebrew word klezemer which means like "instrument of song." So klezmer is referring to musicians, so to speak or musical instruments. And like I say, the musicians themselves will never refer to the music as that.

Jo Reed: While you were still young, a teenager, though a later teenager, you moved in a very different direction from bluegrass, you became very interested in jazz. And you worked with the jazz saxophonoist Richard Grando.

Andy Statman: Right, right. So, what- what happened was through David, you he exposed me to Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti and Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt. You know, I began hanging out more… there were country music parks with transplanted Southerners in Pennsylvania, so I'd go down to see all the musicians, I started meeting musicians, thinking of moving down to Nashville to play there, but at the same time, you know, Richard Greene, who played with Bill Monroe then-- violinist-- was telling me about all the musicians were listening to- to different types of jazz. So I started going down to jazz record shops, and, uh.. you know, I started listening to Stuff Smith, and then listening to jazz on the radio, and I started really getting interested in Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and Monk and Mingus, and my brother had some Cannonball Adderley and Jackie McLean records. I started listening to them. And uh.. in uh.. at the round- at around the same time, I remember I heard I think it was Strawberry Fields, by the Beatles, and I said, "This is incredible." So a little before I was 17, you know, I'd realized that, as great as the instrumental tradition is in bluegrass, the deepest emotions in bluegrass are conveyed through the singing. That's the heaviest stuff. Not that the instrumentals aren't heavy; they're great. But the singing is the heart of everything, in many ways. And I'm not a singer. I heard Albert Ayler uhm.. on the radio. It was a record called Live in Greenwich Village. It was on Vanguard. And he did this song called The Truth is Marching In, and he was exploring, at that time, basically, almost like Eastern European folk melodies, and then sort of playing them faster and faster until they became absorbed in a pulse, in the p- in the power of the drummer playing colors, you know what I'm talking about. And Albert and Donald would do their thing, and, you know, for like a 17-year-old, you know, in 1967, I mean, you know, this was- it was intense and expressive and yeah…

Jo Reed: And you began studying the saxophone.

Andy Statman: Yeah. So I decided I wanted a, I could've easily gotten into guitar, but I didn't want to have any of the bluegrass ideas carry over, because I'd already done that, and if I played guitar I'd have those- those  "finger memory- memory" type of things coming in. I wanted something completely different, and I felt that that- that through breathing, there could be an additional avenue of expression.

Jo Reed: And was there?

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah. So as it turns out, a banjo player named Mark Horowitz, who I worked with in a number of bands in New York, his brother is someone named David Horowitz, who was or is a a a genius, you know, jazz piano player. And I said I want to study saxophone, ask your brother. And so he ga- gave me Richard Grando's phone number, and so Richard was who was an amazing, amazing person, said, "Okay, listen. Why don't you come out and- and we'll talk, and I'll see if I'll take you on as a student." So I went out to see him, and uh.. I remember the first lesson was <laughs>-- we- we discussed for about an hour to whether God existed or not, and then he said, "Okay, I'll take you on as a student." And that was that. And Richard was like a brilliant man, a Renaissance man, and he had come through the bebop scene, and he was part of I guess what they used to call the "new thing" in jazz back then. So he would- he could play like that, but he was uh.. s- into somewhere a little bit more mainstream. He was, of course, very into Coltrane, also very into Sonny Rollins, and I know he'd worked a little bit with Art Blakey, and so I became sort of almost like a houseboy there, and uh.. I just spent hours there, once, twice a week, uhm.. and became very close with him. And he was into Carl Young, and also some different types of religious things and music from all over the world, and things like that, so this all had a big influence on me. And so, practically around that time, I started playing saxophone in rock-and-roll bands, blues bands, free-jazz bands-- you know, whatever I could do. And I'd bring along the mandolin, and adopt it to those situations. I never thought I'd be playing any sort of bluegrass again or anything like that. I'd thought I'd be playing some sort of saxophone-oriented music.

Jo Reed: Now, when was Breakfast Special?

Andy Statman: That came about around 1971. What had happened was I went to college for a very short time and dropped out, and I wanted to work as a musician, and out of nowhere I got a call to play with a one of the groups-- there was a precursor to Breakfast Special called "Country Cooking," and they were-- that group had a, it was led by Peter Wernick, and then in the group was Tony Trischka and Russ Brandberg , two well-known very innovative musicians, and they were writing their own music, playing pretty much all originals, and playing music that was bluegrass-based, but really Northern and really reflecting a whole other emotional type of thing. You know, very different feelings, different ideas, different-- a very innovative band. So they hired me to do- to do this record with them, which I did. I played the saxophone in one piece and the mandolin on others. And by this time, my mandolin playing had completely changed, it developed in the beginnings of what it is now, it was very free and a different harmonic language than bluegrass uses, and a different rhythmic language. And from there, I started, you know, just getting gigs and making the scene in the Village. I needed to work. And I ran into David Brandberg. I hadn't seen David in a few years. So he invited me down to play with him. He was with Columbia Records at that point. And after the late Steve Berg playing bass with him. He was also a great, great key- electric guitarist, so I became his fir-- you know, other than the bass player, his first regular sideman. All of a sudden, I was on salary, you know, working for a Columbia recording artist. And we were traveling all over the country, and, you know, he got me involved in sessions we did like with- with Dylan, you know, the Grateful Dead, you know, Dr. John-- you know, lo- lots of different people. And I always felt there was an invisible wall between amateur and professional, and going on the road with him, I felt I sort of walked, you know, through that door and got to the other end. Anyway, uh.. he hired uh.. two other musicians, who I would been spending time with in New York Kenny Kosek and Roger Mason and at some point we decided to form Breakfast Special. That was around 1971. And there I was, you know, playing mandolin again.

Excerpt of Breakfast Special up and hot….

Jo Reed: How did you move from being part of a group like Breakfast Special to playing klezmer music. How did that trajectory work?

Andy Statman: Basically through my working with Richard Grando, I began relistening to some of the traditional Jewish instrumental music I heard as- as a child, and began listening to lots of other, you know, related ethnic folk musics, but-- and- and nonrelated, as well. I remember at one of the Breakfast Special gigs, I met Zev Feldman came down to see us, and we hit it off, and we started playing together. He played the Persian santuri, and we worked on a number of different things, and I started studying with different people. There was a santuri player, a Greek santuri player named Paul Linbaris, so I studied on mandolin, and he taught me how to play in different meters and stuff. And I got pretty close Perecles Halkias, an clarinet player, and and then I started studying with two great Azerbaijani musicians. That was Vulnov Shalamov and Adrenic Arestanian. So I was doing all this music, bringing it back and me and Zev we're playing this and working up repertoires and things like that.

Jo Reed: Okay, let me just interrupt you. What was it that just kept drawing you into different kinds of music? What was that curiosity that just kept you moving all the time?

Andy Statman: First of all, there was a lot of great music that was very accessible; not very accessible, but if you wanted, you could find it. And this is before the whole world music thing, so there were still lots of master musicians who were unaffected by, you know, rock-and-roll and all this other stuff. Not that that's bad, but I'm just saying, you know, you have people who represented culminations of traditions, living in the five boroughs. And, you know, if you get recordings of these things and see these people play, and all this music really moved me, and I had in the back of my mind an idea of somehow combining all this stuff in my own way. But my first idea was to just to sort of really learn how to play all this music.

Up until, you know, my around 30, I was just studying, you know, with all sorts of different people. I was always doing different things, studying with different people, and trying to broaden my horizons, and trying to enhance what I was doing. So at one point, I remember after Breakfast Special ended, I mean, I was just playing lots of different bands, I decided that I was getting more interested in Judaism and my own personal family background, and I decided that, you know, I'd found 78s of Dave Tarras and Abe Schwartz, and, you know, all these great, you know, traditional Jewish instrumentalists. I said, "You know, this music is really, you know, my heritage, you know, particularly where, you know, where my father's family come from. This is, if I was born there, as a musician, this is probably what I'd be playing." So I said, "Just for myself, I want to learn to play it to keep it alive."

Music up and hot

That was klezmer clarinetist, mandolin-player, composer  and

2012 National Heritage Fellow, Andy Statman. Next week, I pick up with Andy where we left off, his embrace of klezmer, his relationship with  the great clarinetist Dave Tarras, and Andy's musical marriage of klezmer, jazz, blues, and blue grass  culminating the recently released cd, Old Brooklyn,

And mark your calendar for October 4! That's when the 2012 national Heritage fellows perform in Washington DC! Along with Andy, honorees include dobro Player Mike Auldridge and Tejano Accordion Player "Flaco" Jim´nez. It will be a night to remember!

You've been listening to Artworks produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Adam Kampe is the musical supervisor.

Excerpt from "Yosel" from the album Abe Schwartz, The Klezmer King, used courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.

Excerpt of "Wedding March" from the album Jewish Klezmer Music performed by Zev Feldman and Andy Statman, used courtesy of Shanachie Records.

Excerpt from "The Brothers Ben Chassid" from the album Breakfast Special performed by Breakfast Special, used courtesy of New Rounder, LLC

Excerpt from "Andy's Ramble" from the cd, Andy's Ramble, used courtesy of New Rounder, LLC.

Excerpt from "Hassidic Dance from Galicia" from the album The Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra, used courtesy of Shanachie Records.

Excerpt from "Kazatski" from the album Songs of Our Fathers performed by Andy Statman and David Grisman, used courtesy of Acoustic Disc.

"Yosel" is a traditional yiddish folk tune, performed by Abe Schwartz

All other songs are composed or arranged by Andy Statman who also performs them

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U—just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.

Remember next week, more great music and insight from Andy Statman.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

In part 2 of our conversation, we follow his musical path as he blends klezmer, jazz, blues, and bluegrass into a distinctive musical voice.

Transcript of conversation with Andy Statman: Part Two 

Old Brooklyn hot, under

Jo Reed: That was musician and 2012 National Heritage Fellow, Andy Statman playing  "Old Brooklyn." it's from his latest cd, Old Brooklyn.

Welcome to Art Works the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works. I'm your host, Josephine Reed.

Last week, we heard the first of a two-part interview with Klezmer clarinetist, mandolin-player, and composer Andy Statman. Andt ia receiving the 2012 National Heritage Award for his klezmer music. Klezmer music is the  traditional instrumental music of the Jews of Eastern Europe; Andy defines it as Hasidic vocal music played instrumentally. Andy Statman is one of the people responsible for its revival.  But as we learned in last week's podcast, it's impossible to put Andy Statman in any neat musical box. He cuts an extremely wide musical path, he followed his initial absorption into bluegrass and the mandolin with a  fascination  with jazz and the saxophone. Never content to sit still musically, Statman then took up the clarinet and studied Greek, Albanian, and Azerbaijani music. Yet, Statman doesn't drop one musical style for another, he just keeps adding  to his stockpot of knowledge and sensibility, moving effortlessly from genre to another. For example, he followed his pathbreaking album  Jewish Klezmer Music, with Flatbush Waltz, a mandolin masterpiece of post-bebop jazz improvisations and ethnically-inspired original compositions.  However, in his last CD, Old Brooklyn, however, Andy Statman presents a real marriage of all his musical styles.  You'll hear strains of  bluegrass, klezmer, jazz and blues coming together in this brilliant work.

Statman has released 20 of his own recordings and has performed on close to 100 others. He's worked with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Ricky Skaggs, Béla Fleck, Itzhak Perlman, and many others. He fronts the Andy Statman Trio which plays weekly gigs around NYC.

Last week, we heard about and sampled Andy's bluegrass and mandolin. He spoke about the importance of jazz, particularly Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler to his own musical evolution. 

But by 1975, Andy Statman had begun thinking of his own Jewish  musical roots. We pick up the interview with Andy meeting the man who would become his mentor:  the legendary klezmer clarinetist and NEA National Heritage Fellow, Dave Tarras. 

Andy Statman: I looked up Dave Tarras in the union book and uh.. went out to see him, and I had transcribed some of his melodies on the saxophone and mandolin, and at that point I didn't have a clarinet. He was sort of amazed that not only a person much younger than him would be interested in this music, but that I actually did this. And we sort of hit it off. I became like a houseboy there as well. I wanted to play on the Albert System clarinet, which is what the old-timers played, and you know, he gave me clarinets, and, you know he had no real way of teaching, and basically I just slowed down his recordings and- of other people. And what I would do is I'd go over there, and his wife would make us some tea and cookies, and stuff like that, and we'd talk. Maybe he'd want me to take him out for a haircut or get something for him, and then, you know, we'd sit around and talk a little bit. And then he'd take out his clarinet and play for me for about an hour. I'd ask him some questions, and I'd say, "Dave, would you do this this way?" And he'd say, "No, never this way, only this way." And you know, what we call klezmer music, there's like an oral law of how to interpret songs when and how to use ornamentations, and it's very logical, but it can only be really learned through osmosis. It's something that can't really be written down. And so he was really helpful, and he had very strict feelings about a lot of this stuff, and very strong opinions about a lot of it. And we became very close. I know that he'd been a very tough character in the music business, but he was, too, sort of like a, you know, another grandfather to me. And you know, he sort wanted me to carry on for him, but not to be him. You know, he wants me to carry on for him in my own way.

Music up and hot.

Andy Statman: He understood musicians are individuals, and- and the way to carry on a legacy is- is not to be a carbon copy of someone, but for that, you know, to take what that person taught you and move on from it. And that's probably the way he learned, also, from his uncles, and other people who we said were very great players.

Jo Reed: Well, don't you think that's the only way any art stays vibrant; it has to move into the next generation, and then it gets reconfigured in some ways.

Andy Statman: Yeah. I'm simultaneously a purist and expansive at the sa… I mean, there are people who I've heard who would make records and do Django Reinhart solos note for note, or Bill Monroe solos, and you can say, you know, "Why are they doing it? It's not as good as, what was improvised." On the other hand, though, they are keeping a certain aesthetic alive. They're really true to a certain aesthetic, and they're trying to keep the beauty of that thing alive. And it's an important thing, ‘cause you need people who are preservationists so to speak. In essence, if you want to be an innovator in a style, you need to preservationist also, because until you can speak the stylistic language fluently, you can't really understand how to innovate in the style.

Jo Reed: It's like a jazz musician.

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: If you don't know how to play the instrument, you're not going to be able to improvise. You have to know that instrument.

Andy Statman: You have to know the instrument, but you also have to know the language.

Jo Reed: Right.

Andy Statman: So I'm sure it's still possible to innovate, say, in what they call "traditional jazz," but, you have to learn the language. I mean, they're all equally valid. One is not better than the other. They're all saying different things in different ways, you know, because one is older doesn't mean that it's less valid than something newer. The timeline as seen in terms of progression from not as good or sophisticated to better, is really a fallacy, because it really has to do with the power of expression and the ideas being expressed, and how they're being expressed. So with Dave, you know, he said to me, "You know, there'll never be another Dave Tarras," he says. "But, you know, then, there shouldn't be, you know? He's Dave Tarras." And he said, "'Cause you have a lot of heart, you'll be able to carry this on." So…

Jo Reed: And he left you his clarinets...

Andy Statman: Yeah. I used to get grants for him to write music, so I- I'd try to stimulate, he was a great composer, grants from the record company. I'd try to get him into writing, and he was a great, great musician, and a very, very aware person. And as it turned out, I found out we were distantly related. <laughs> Distant, but definitely related, you know?

Jo Reed: That's funny.

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo Reed: So, what was your first recording of klezmer music?

Andy Statman: ‘Kay, so the first recording I did was with Zev Feldman. And Zev back then was very traditionally oriented, and what we were looking to do was to try and recreate, you know, in our own way, what this music might've sounded like 70 years earlier, you know, particularly if had been in Europe. And so for me, I had to have some stylistic blinders put on because I would hear things. I would see the similarities between Junior Walker and whose studying- playing I studied in, and Dave Tarras. I had to keep it in within certain boundaries, both on the clarinet and on the mandolin. There really wasn't a mandolin style of this music. Based on my understanding of the ornamentation through the clarinet playing, I developed a mandolin style to go with it.

Up and hot

We were doing this just to, you know, really for ourselves, you know? We weren't looking to revive anything. We made a decision. You know, I said, "I really want to do this. No one-- this music is not being played, and we should just try and keep it alive for ourselves." You know, I never expected that it would become the focal point for me for a number of years. And that was also partially by the economics of the business because the gigs I got, you know, klezmer music paid better and were better conditions.

Jo Reed: Plus side.

Andy Statman: Yeah, than- than- than playing, uhm.. you know, in bars with rock-and-roll bands or bluegrass bands or whatever. You know, I was still playing in a lot of different bands at that time.

Jo Reed: I knew you were playing in funk bands.

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah. That was fun. At the same time I was doing the record with Zev Feldman I was doing this record called Flatbush Waltz, which was just a whole other thing.

Jo Reed: Well, describe Flatbush Waltz. That's a very important early record for you.

Flatbush Waltz under

Andy Statman: To make a long story short, I started developing my own music, and I was very interested in doing something that just reflected all these different influences that I had studied. So it was, in a way, it was a bit of a world music record. There's stuff in there from _____ music. There's the song Flatbush Waltz I wrote, which is a combination of a traditional Jewish song and a Bill Monroe song, and it has an introduction that- that owes a lot to traditional or I say classical Azerbaijani music. Then there were just these things that owe a lot to Eric Dolphy and Mingus compositions on there.

Flatbush Waltz up and hot

Jo Reed: When did you start composing, Andy? Was it with Flatbush Waltz?

Andy Statman: No. I started composing when I was about 16, started writing songs. With Country Cooking, I got sort of reinspired to do it, ‘cause all these people were writing songs, and Breakfast Special a bit. And then around the time I was doing the thing with Zev, I started getting and composing a lot more,  just started writing a lot. Goes through stages, and it's just another skill I picked up, you know?

Jo Reed: <laughs> Okay, here come the ignorant questions.

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah.

Jo Reed: I hope you're ready for them.

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: And that is, moving from the saxophone to the clarinet, what's the difference, in terms of expression and what you can do with them, and...?

Andy Statman: Probably because I played mandolin, I loved the wooden sound of a clarinet, and uh.. I love the feeling of a clarinet. And as great as the saxophone is, there are certain emotional areas it can't cover as well as the clarinet, you know, particularly for me the old Albert system clarinets, and the music that was developed on them. They're just very soulful instruments very beautiful instruments you know, the- the tone and- and the music that's been played on them. They can take a lot of the beautiful things that a violin does, but then do whole other things with it. And terms of playing free music on it, they're great, also. I mean, like if you have a tenor saxophone, then you have much more-- it's deep. You have all these other overtones you can deal with, so you can get a broader type of palette. But there's something about wind instruments that I really like, although I love the saxophone. But probably back in the nineties, I just couldn't do everything, and I just sort of you know, realized that I'm, you know, I sort of have to limit. So I was mainly into the clarinet then and that's sort of what I did, and keeping the mandolin going. And I go through different phases where, you know, I'm more into one instrument than the other, so...

Jo Reed: When you're composing, do you, as you're composing, do you think, "Ah, mandolin; ah, clarinet," or when you're done, you weigh it and make a decision then?

Andy Statman: That happens sometimes, but composing is the type of thing where you have to turn it on, and then you have to turn it off. If I'm writing for a records are very much like menus, and you need to have a variety of, say, different types of food: you know, fish, meat, chicken, desserts that-- you know, so it's like you know, you write for specific types of melodies expressing certain types of feelings. Well, you need this type of song, you want this type of song, so you write going by that feeling. And I find that once I start writing, then whenever I pick up an instrument, I just start writing. So, like, I know like when I'm recording records, I'll wake up in the morning, have breakfast, and as I'm about to go to the studio, a song pops into my head, and I say, "Yeah, we need one of these," and I'll write it in the- in the taxi on the way to the studio, and then we'll record. The problem with writing is that it then- it- for me, is it can take over my whole musical thing, and I need to practice. So at some point, I have to stop writing and not follow the ideas, in terms of songs, and it takes a day or two, and then just get back into practicing. And then when I need to write, I sort of have to turn that on again, it's not difficult-- and then just let it go. But it interferes with my practicing. So it's a uh.. but, you know, professional songwriters, you know, a lot of them nine to five, you know, they get up, go to the office, and they write all day, and they don't have to turn it off. I guess they turn it off when they go home, <laughs> but...

Jo Reed: <laughs> This is jumping around a little bit, but you've been working-- you have a trio.

Andy Statman: Right.

Jo Reed: You've been working with a bassist and a...

Andy Statman: Drummer.

Jo Reed: Drummer...

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: For a long time.

Andy Statman: Yeah, about 11 years now.

Jo Reed: Larry Eagle and Jim Whitney.

Andy Statman: And Jim Whitney, yeah.

Jo Reed: And you play at a synagogue twice a week?

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: You said in another interview. I was really intrigued by this. You guys arrive there, and you really don't have a set planned.

Andy Statman: No, no. We just play. A lot of what I do is improvised, So we sort of see what we feel like playing at that moment, and see where it goes, and sometimes we'll do more, depending on the melody or whatever we picked, more little interpretations, we just really expand on them. And it is really just a matter of the moment and how- and how we're feeling.

Jo Reed: So that's a lot of the jazz influence, no? I mean, that's sort of in the jazz part--

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. See for me, I'm just interested in playing music. I can play traditionally in a number of styles, but that's not what I usually choose to do. I usually just play music and just let the music go where it goes. I have my own aesthetic, and I've developed my own languages in the traditional styles I play, sp I just sort of play. Basically, I'm looking to go on some sort of "exploration" with the music, an emotional exploration, and get it to the point where the music just sort of happens, and I become a, in some ways, almost an observer, as well. It's just another form of talking when you're improvising. And even if you're playing a song where you're not improvising much it's just melody you're still improvising in terms of how you phrase and how you're gonna ornament, so everything really is improvisation.

Jo Reed: What I think is so neat about your music--many things--but the way it somehow combines the Hasidic tradition of music being transcendent, and recognizes that that's what John Coltrane was doing, as well. <laughs>

Andy Statman: Right.

Jo Reed: And it really comes together with you, I think, in a lot of ways.

Andy Statman: Well, I went through a period basically, you know, after after me and Zev got more into academics, I formed my own band, and we were quite successful. But after a while, like with bluegrass. It's just your traditional music can become just another melody to play. What do you do with it? So I had sort of lost my interest in- in- in- in- in playing, you know, the traditional music. And uh.. <clears throat> it's when uhm.. you know, when I became involved in religious community and Hasidic music, it sort of rekindled my interest in in Jewish music, and I realized that, on many levels, this is where the what we call klezmer is coming from, except that it- it, in many ways, it was deeper and even broader, and I realized a lot of the feelings that I was experiencing from klezmer music were really feelings of, you know, Hasidic melodies. So I began wanting to explore a commonality with some of Coltrane's approach to modal music, and the thing is, with traditional music, even though it's very powerful, it's also very fragile. And once you start putting chords to modal melodies, they can very easily distort, they can change the feeling and the idea of what the music is supposed to be. A good example would be if you listen to a lot of Irish music now, they'll take basically modal tunes and put many different chord changes to it. And in some ways, it gives a different emotional color to different parts of the tune, and it's very nice.  In other ways, it destroys the original intent of the tune, because the chords determine what the melody is saying. That's like someone like Bill Monroe. He would take a fiddle tune and keep it as un-chordy as possible, while in Texas, they put lots of passing tones and things. It's a whole- a whole other different aesthetic, so coming from Bill Monroe. So I was very interested in the way McCoy Tyner's, like, sort of stacked fourths created a very compelling emotional feeling under modal music. So I looked for musicians who could play that and would have some understanding of the traditional Jewish music.

And I always loved Elvin Jones. I used to go see Elvin play all the time, it'd be incredible, and I there's like maybe 10 people in the place. And I was, you know, like, "There's Elvin Jones!" I remember one time he's looking right at me, playing, and I'm saying to myself, you know, "He can't really be looking at me. Is he really looking at"-- you know, and, you know, and I was like, you know, "No, he" I was really scared. but anyway, so Elvin's music had a big influence on me. So I began putting together ensembles to play versions of Hasidic music with this- with these types of approaches, and I guess the most well-known was this record called Between Heaven and Earth. Actually, it was picked by the Times as one of the top ten records of the year. I remember we I got a great drummer, friend of mine I worked with for many years, a guy named Bob Weiner, and Harvey Swartz. Or he calls himself Harvey S., the bassist. And Kenny Werner, piano player, and myself. And I remember getting together with Kenny, you know, the first time I met him, to do this. And, you know, I was there with another of my another of my friends, who's very, Hasidic dressed, you know. So we're playing these things, and I remember he said, "These like stride behind it." And I said, "No, no." I said- I said, "Kenny, look," I said, "When you play, some stacked fourths behind this thing, and be free with them." He was like sort of like, you know, "What a shock," like he goes, "Oh, yeah?" I said, "Yeah." And we really hit it off. And I remember we did this record. In fact, the first cut on the record was a song I discovered by supposedly by the Magad of Mesuresh who was the inheritor, I guess the second generation of the Hasidic movement. Very beautiful song, and it went into a sort of an open improvisation, and it was like really magic.

Maggid up and hot

Andy Statman: We sold out town hall. We did some concerts, and it led to a contract with Sony. And around that time I started doing these things with Perlman. Anyway…

Jo Reed: You and Itzhak Perlman, you mean, made records together?

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Yeah.

Andy Statman: And touring, an around the end of this time I started exploring this sort of jazz-Hasidic connection. I wound up getting like a weekly gig at the Housing Works, down in downtown. It's a bookstore. And they raise a lot of money for AIDS and things like that. And I started doing it as originally duets, you know, of improvised music with Bob Weiner or some other, you know, different drummers. And at that time, I had started using a pianist named Brendan Dolan, who was a really great traditional Irish musician, but understood how to play in these you know, in these fourths. And the series became successful, and as things evolved I decided I wanted to play a little bluegrass, and then we started two nights, and one night would be Jewish, one night bluegrass. And then I just said, "You know, I just want to mix everything up and- and not make the separation." And after a while, you know, I- you know, I realized that the chords were just limiting me too much. Chords become king, you know? Chords really determine how you play and what you play. And I didn't want to be tied to what the chordal player was playing. <laughs> Hence the trio, which is sometimes a duo and sometimes just solo. And that's how that whole thing came out of these duets I did at the Housing Works.

Up and hot

Jo Reed: In 2006, you had a pair of very different CDs come out, Awakening from Above, which is Hasidic music and East Flatbush Blues, in which you return to bluegrass. That was a very interesting pairing.

Andy Statman: And the East Flatbush Blues was sort of the more American-type thing I'd done in years. The last thing I did was a record called Andy's Ramble. It was a bluegrass record, probably back in the, it was recorded, actually, in the late eighties, came out in the early nineties. So it'd been a long time. It was sort of my reintroduction to the American, <laughs> you know, music world, outside of the, you know, outside of the sort of Jewish-American music scene.

Andy's Ramble up and hot

Andy Statman: You know both records were very well received.

Jo Reed: And Old Brooklyn, which came five years later...?

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: In a way, it seemed like a bridge

Andy Statman: Yeah.

Jo Reed: Between those two CDs.

Andy Statman: Well, what I wanted to do was to just put a record out which just reflects a lot of what I'm doing, and not worry about labels or styles. And the other two records were basically live. These were studio records, and I decided I wanted to bring in some of my friends who, you know, <clears throat> to play with. So we brought in Byron Berline and, you know, and Bruce Molsky, and, you know, John Schull and, you know, Paul Shaffer and Ricky Skaggs, and Bela Fleck.

Jo Reed: Love Bela Fleck.

Andy Statman: A bunch of other people.

Jo Reed: Now, Ricky Skaggs does a very interesting song

Andy Statman: Oh, The Lord Will Provide? Yeah. Yeah, it's powerful. Yeah.

Jo Reed: How did-- was that his idea or your idea? How did...?

Andy Statman: Well, he had once sung it for me over the phone, and  I was very moved by it. And then we did a house concert at his house in Nashville, and as we were leaving, I said, "Ricky, why don't you sing this song for the guys?" And he sang it, and then when he was gonna come to do the session--we were gonna do some duets, maybe some mandolin duets and whatever-- and he- and he said he would-- you know, "Why don't you sing one?" I wanted him to sing a little-known Bill Monroe song called Along About Daybreak. Anyway, when he got to the studio, he said, "You know, I really don't know it that well, and how about if I sing The Lord Will Provide?" I said, "Great." And he had told me he had tried it in different ways, and I think, he called it an Eastern Baptist style. He hadn't had the style down to his liking, although it always sounded great whenever he sang it. Now he felt it was the time. And I said, "Let's just do it with clarinet and voice." And to me, it sounds like some old field-recording from somewhere.

The Lord Will Provide up and hot

Andy Statman: And on the clarinet playing, it's, you know, aside from the Jewish thing, there's a lot of the Epert sound in there, and there's also a bunch of Charlie Parker in there if you listen. It's funny, ‘cause after we did this, you know, we felt like anything else we could do, would just pale. We felt we did what we were supposed to do, and that anything else would just be, you know, superficial, so we just left it and that was it, ‘cause we'd originally had intended to record a few things, but this was so strong, we just left it.

Jo Reed: Left it as is.

Andy Statman: Yeah, yeah.

Jo Reed: Where is your musical curiosity taking you now?

Andy Statman: You know, there's a lot that goes on, and there's not enough time.

Jo Reed: How true.

Andy Statman: Yeah. So, I mean, I just find that, for myself, when I start playing, all these ideas come out, and extensions of my own language, which I record, and then I want to go back and learn so there's a backlog of that. I'm teaching at mandolin camps, and

I'm sort of revisiting some mandolin players who I listen to occasionally during the year, who are big influences on me, and relearning some of their stuff to teach it, and, you know, reconnecting with a lot of those feelings and those ideas and those ways of approaching music. And at the same time, you know, I always listen to Charlie Parker, and I've been very interested in writing songs in the older, fifties rock-and-roll style that we play with- with the band, you know? And I've been sort of revisiting a lot of the old rock-and-roll saxophone styles, not the, like, just Junior Walker and King Curtis, but anonymous guys on Del-Vikings records, and things like that. And particularly on YouTube, there's a tons of stuff, they're really classic blues solos or extensions of blues solos. These guys could the good ones could really play. They're really basically coming out of, you know, swing and the big bands and some bebop, but they put it in a certain type of way, and it's just an incredibly fun and uplifting and beautiful way to play blues. So I've been sort of re-exploring that, particularly using it on the mandolin…

Andy Statman: And also listening to people like, you know, old Gene Vincent things and stuff, and there's an energy in- in that early sort of rock-and-roll, rockabilly, you know, that's absolutely incredible, super intense and really great. So I've been starting to write some songs influenced by that, and doing them with my band. Also I've gotten very interested in the way just sort of you know of jazz from the twenties and thirties, the way some of those solos are con- are constructed, and their use of arpeggios and things like that, and I'd- I'd always been more bebop-oriented, but, you know, there's such great color and creativity in the way these guys play. It's really amazing, and so I've been fooling around with some of that language, and you know, I'm not interested in playing that music as playing that music, but using those ideas as- as part of the the well for my own music?

Jo Reed: You teach, as you said mandolin camp, what do you try to impart to your students?

Andy Statman: You know, on mandolin, you know, and on clarinet. I mean, the first thing I try to do is to get these students to realize that we're all equals, and that some may have more talent, some may have less, but it's all sort of practice, and practice is all desire. In other words, if the music moves you, then you'll have the desire to practice. And someone who may be supposedly less talented, but really practices, will eventually be more successful than someone who's maybe very talented and doesn't practice. I also try and make them realize that, don't worry about mistakes. You know, we're not computers. I tell them that when I play a gig, if I start a song and I know it's not happening, I'll just stop it. And, you know, I say, "Well, you know, I'm not playing music to torture myself for the next five minutes. You know, if it's not happening, forget it, you know, and move on to something else, you know? If you make a mistake, you make a mistake. It doesn't matter." I try and give them a real basis for relaxing in their playing, and that, I mean, I try and do that continually. And then, in terms of mandolin, we might be working on certain stylistic things. But I try and get them into the spirit of the music and what the music is saying, and how to sort of make it their own, and how to get behind their own ideas. In terms of, say, klezmer music specifically, at this point, you know, I've come to feel it's uh.. klezmer, unfortunately, is, since it's not part of a living community, so to speak, there's no such thing as "quality controls." So it's a style that- that- that can be sort of hinted at, but not really played, and people will think you're really playing it. It's a style that's very easily sort of invoked, but not really played. There's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it, and this is what I learned from Dave Tarras. And I sort of feel a responsibility to teach my students how to really play it, you know, and that's sort of a time-consuming way of doing it. The way to teach it is time-consuming, but everyone gets inspired by it, and they really learn how to do it. But it's a slow process. So with traditional Jewish instrumental music, I'm looking to convey a literacy in that music, a grammatical and emotional literacy, as well, in terms of mandolin styles, but overall, to try and have the musician feel some sort of self-confidence in their own ability to be able to play what they want to play, and nnot to worry about all these stupid little things, not to feel pressured. Of course, I tell my students, "The reason we're all playing is because it makes us feel good." And what can happen very, you know, of on- very early on is that you become a prisoner of technique and a prisoner of the music business. And then, you know, you sort of have no musical identity. You'll just play whatever people want you to play, and, you know, what's... you know, we all know great, great technicians, who, if you ask them, "What do you really like to play," they'll say, "What do you mean?" The music it's just something they do.

Jo Reed: It's a job.

Andy Statman: It's a job, yeah.

Jo Reed: Well, no one can say that about you, Andy.

Andy Statman: Well, thanks.

Jo Reed: Not at all. So many congratulations.

Andy Statman: Thanks, thanks.

Jo Reed: And thank you for everything you've done.

Andy Statman: Well, thank you.

Jo Reed: Truly.

Andy Statman: Well the truth is, it's really and, you know, it's really nothing, to tell you the truth, so it's, you know, it's just what I do. It's not such a big deal.

Jo Reed: Oh, well. It is for some of us. <laughs>

Andy Statman: Well, thank you. <laughs>

Jo Reed: That was klezmer clarinetist, mandolin-player, composer and 2012 National Heritage Fellow, Andy Statman.

Don't forget to mark your calendar for October 4! That's when the 2012 National Heritage Fellows perform in Washington DC! Along with Andy, honorees include dobro player Mike Auldridge, The Gospel Quartet, The Paschall Brothers, and Tejano accordion player "Flaco" Jimenez. It will be a night to remember!

Go to arts.gov and click on National Heritage Awards for more information.

You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Adam Kampe is the musical supervisor.

-  Excerpt from "Wedding March" and from "Gypsy Music and Sirba" from the album Jewish Klezmer Music: Zev Feldman and Andy Statman,  arranged by Zev Feldman and Andy Statman,used courtesy of Shanachie Records.

-  Excerpt from "Flatbush Waltz" from the album Flatbush Waltz, used courtesy of New Rounder, LLC.

-   Excerpt from "Maggid," and from "Purim," from the album Between Heaven and Earth performed by the Andy Statman Quartet,used courtesy of Shanachie Records.

- Excerpt of "East Flatbush Blues" from the album East Flatbush Blues, used courtesy of New Rounder, LLC.

Excerpt from "Forsphiel/Improvisation" from the album Awakening from Above, used courtesy of Shefa Records.

- Excerpt from "Old Brooklyn," "Ocean Parkway After Dark" and "The Lord Will Provide" from the album Old Brooklyn, used courtesy of Shefa Records.

All music performed by Andy Statman

Ricky Scaggs is the singer on "The Lord Will Provide" which was written by John Newton, and arranged by Ricky Scaggs and Andy Statman.  All other music was composed or arranged by Andy Statman.

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U—just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.

Next week, curator Sarah Cash takes us through the American Wing of Washington DC's Corcoran Gallery.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

ADDITIONAL CREDIT:

 "The Lord Will Provide" used by permission of Heartbound Songs, LLC. (ASCAP)

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