Words Without Music: A Memoir (3 page)

Eventually I was allowed to take additional music lessons, so on Saturday afternoon I studied with Mr. Hart, the head percussionist of the Baltimore Symphony. This was not solo instruction but a class for six to eight children, and it was a particular joy for me to play the timpani. I write today with great pleasure for all percussion instruments, but then there were also classical score reading and ear training classes, which I detested for no particular reason. As a grown-up and, now, even as a mature musician, I have noticed something odd about the way I hear music. I can’t put my finger on it. It must have been something about hearing that was not, well, common. Nadia Boulanger, the great teacher with whom I would spend more than two years studying in Paris, worked tirelessly on “hearing” exercises for me. I suppose the problem was solved, though I never really understood what it was in the first place. And now there is no one left to ask.

MY BROTHER, MARTY, AND I STARTED WORKING
at the store when we were eleven and twelve years old. Our job was to break—
actually break
—78 rpm records so that Ben could collect the “return privilege” allowed for broken records in those days. In the late 1940s, the big record companies paid retail dealers about ten cents a record for goods damaged on the way to the stores, or really for any reason whatsoever. To collect the money, the broken records had to be segregated by company and have at least the label intact. Marty and I were given boxes and boxes of records that simply didn’t sell. And they were not all from General Radio, our dad’s store, either. He made a second business by buying up unwanted stock from other small stores all through Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. I remember he bought them, still whole but unsold, for five cents a record. Marty and I broke them, repackaged them in boxes by company—RCA, Decca, Blue Note, Columbia—and Ben sold them back to the companies for ten cents, doubling his money and keeping us quite busy and reasonably happy. Marty and I were almost always in the basement of the store, either sorting records or breaking them or else working with John in the radio repair department testing tubes, trying to be some help in the repair of those old tube radios.

Ben also had clients who listened to what we called “hillbilly music.” He advertised his record store on Appalachian radio stations in West Virginia and people would write him and he would send them records. I don’t think he particularly liked that music, but he knew about it, and I knew about it, too.

One summer, when Marty and I were not much older, he opened up a storefront in the African-American part of town and my brother and I spent that summer selling R & B records to other kids not much older than we were. I listened to all of the popular music coming out at that time. I liked the vitality of it, I liked the inventiveness of it, I liked the humor of it. Later on, when musicians like Buddy Holly came along in the mid-1950s, early rock ’n’ roll sounded to me like versions of Appalachian music. I think that’s where it came from. Electric guitars replaced banjos and electric basses, along with off-beat drum playing, built up the bass lines. I loved the raw power of it.

At home my brother and I shared a room. We had a walk-in closet where we kept our clothes, we had two beds separated by a little night table, and we had a window that opened onto the steps that led to the second floor of our duplex house. It was very easy to go out at night and not be seen, so we would sneak out to buy Good Humor bars—we could hear the ice cream man with the little bell going down the street. When we got older we did more mischievous things. One of our gang had a BB gun and we’d shoot out lights going down the alley. Then we would sneak back into the house. I don’t think we were ever caught.

My sister, Sheppie, had older friends, and the difference between twelve and ten seemed very big at the point when she was in high school and we were still in junior high. Also, Sheppie was much more sheltered and supervised than Marty and me. She stayed in private schools and she had her own social life until she went away to Bryn Mawr for college.

I saw Sheppie more when we went to Quaker summer camp in Maine. The place wasn’t really a camp so much as it was a big old house with six or eight bedrooms in it. They would take kids from the age of twelve to eighteen, and I was among the youngest. There were no real counselors, but there were three or four older Quaker women who looked after us and it was like a big family. We played tennis, we went boating, and we went to the Grange dances every Thursday night.

The school we went to when we were very young had some Quaker teachers, and Ida liked them a lot, as her Quaker friends were involved in education. They were pacifists, of course, and very socially conscious. I don’t remember ever having attended a Quaker meeting, but I knew something about what the Quakers believed in, and I was always sympathetic—as Ida and Ben were—to those ideas. They were committed to social responsibility and being connected to the world.

The Quaker philosophy is consistent with ideas that developed in me later. I never wanted to be a Quaker, but I did send my first two children to a Quaker school in Manhattan, Friends Seminary on Fifteenth Street off Second Avenue. I liked their philosophy of life, work, and spirit. Bedrock ideas of social responsibility and change through nonviolence came to me through the Quakers. When people’s lives reflect ideas like that, their behavior becomes automatically part of a bigger picture.

Going to the movies every Saturday was part of growing up in Baltimore in the 1940s. We would see a double feature and previews and newsreels. This was how we learned about the war. After the Germans were beaten, when I was eight years old, I remember clearly seeing newsreels of American soldiers entering the concentration camps. The images the cameramen had filmed were shown in movie houses all over the United States. No one thought anything about it—there were no warnings that you might be upset if you watched it. In those films you actually saw skulls and piles of human bones. You saw what the soldiers saw when they walked in, because right behind the soldiers were the cameras.

The Jewish community had known that there were extermination camps in Germany and Poland. They knew because they were getting letters and messages from people who were getting out now and then, but it was not commonly known or believed by others in America, nor was it addressed by the government. After the war, refugees were arriving in America and my mother immediately began to help. By 1946 our house had become a halfway house, a place for the survivors who had no place to go. We had any number of people who would come and stay for a few weeks and then they would be resettled. As a young child, I was frightened. They did not look like anyone I knew. These were men who were skinny with numbers tattooed on their wrists. They couldn’t speak English, and they looked like they had come back from hell, which is literally what had happened. I knew they had survived something terrible. We had seen what the camps looked like in the newsreels, and then we met the survivors who came from those very places.

My mother had a vision of society, much more than almost any of the people that were near her. Others were not inviting these people into their homes, yet Ida became very involved with resettlement of refugees who were pouring out of Europe. She developed educational plans for them so they could learn English, develop skills, and make a place for themselves in America. Both of my parents embodied values of kindness and caring—values that were passed on to their children.

My sister, Sheppie, has spent most of her professional life doing the same work. For many years she was with the International Rescue Committee, which responds globally to humanitarian crises. More recently, she’s worked with KIND—Kids in Need of Defense, which is responding to the current immigration crisis on the southern border of the United States.

Like many other secular Jewish households, there was no religious instruction in our home, though we might occasionally go to a relative’s house at Passover. Our neighborhood was a Gentile one. At Christmastime, there were Christmas lights on the trees in front of the houses, as well as Santa Claus and his reindeer on the roofs. My classmates were not Jewish, and whenever I would visit their homes during the holidays, I envied them because they had Christmas trees and stockings.

There were parts of Baltimore where people had signs up in their yards that said, “No Dogs, No Jews.” As a kid, I didn’t know what it meant that people had such signs in front of their houses. But if I took the city bus that went from southeast Baltimore to where we lived in the northwest, going across a large swath of the city, I would pass through Roland Park. This upper-middle-class neighborhood not far from Johns Hopkins, with nice, big houses with nice, big lawns, was a place I saw such signs. It didn’t make any sense to me, but prejudice like that never did.

Thinking back, we did know a lot of Jewish people. In fact, not one person came into the house who wasn’t Jewish. It was a very close-knit community, not that we were observant or spoke Hebrew—no one did. But every Sunday morning my father would say, “C’mon, kid, we gotta go get some bagels,” and we would drive down to East Baltimore to some of the old delis and buy bagels, sauerkraut, and pickles out of the barrel to bring home. My mother’s brothers wanted us to go to Hebrew school, so Marty and I went a couple of days a week until we were thirteen. But instead of attending the classes, Marty and I—Marty being the ringleader—spent most of those afternoons at a pool hall a block from the temple, playing pool until a quarter till six, when it would be time to go home. My mother was in the school library, my father was in his record store, and nobody knew what we were doing.

The Yiddish or Hebrew words we did know we had learned from our grandparents. My mother’s family came from Russia and my father’s family came from Latvia. My mother’s family lived on Brookfield Avenue at number 2028, and we were at 2020, so they were very close by, and my mother would often visit her parents. As far as I remember, they weren’t observant either, but they spoke Yiddish to one another, and if we were in the room, that’s what we heard. In fact, I never heard them speak English. During the years when I knew them, and that would have been when I was very young, I understood everything they said.

My mother’s father had started as a ragpicker, which was very common in those days. They’d go out on the street and pick up anything of value. Later on, Ida’s father began making cinder blocks from a mold and selling them, and that turned into a building-supply shop. Then he began selling plywood. By the time he died, it had become a business. He started with a little store and by the time I was grown up, his sons, my mother’s brothers, owned property and had become businessmen.

Most of the musicians in the family were on my father’s side. My cousin Cevia studied classical music as a pianist, and there were other people who were in vaudeville. Some family members were classical musicians, and some were in the world of popular music. My father’s grandmother, Frieda Glass, was Al Jolson’s aunt, so there was a bloodline there. The Glasses and Jolsons were cousins. I discovered this when, years later, I was playing in Cincinnati and a well-dressed man gave me his card. His name was Jolson, and he was a dentist.

“I’m one of your cousins,” he said.

“Oh, you’re one of the Jolsons,” I said.

“Yes.”

“So the Jolsons and Glasses really are related?”

“Yes, we are.”

On my mother’s side, as I indicated, they really didn’t like musicians. To them, the fame of Al Jolson was no big deal. Baltimore wasn’t like New York, where the whole Lower East Side was filled with Italians and Jews, and one of the ways of getting out of the ghetto was the entertainment business. It reached all the way to Hollywood, where entertainers like Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton, and the Marx Brothers were symbolic of that generation.

When my father started to sell records, he didn’t know which were the good records and which were the bad. Whatever the salesmen gave him, he would buy. But he noticed that some records sold and some records didn’t, so as a businessman he wanted to know why some of the records didn’t sell. He would take them home and listen to them, thinking that if he could find out what was wrong with them, he wouldn’t buy the bad ones anymore.

In the late forties, the music that didn’t sell was by Bartók, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, the modernists of that time. Ben listened to them over and over again, trying to understand what was wrong, but he ended up loving their music. He became a strong advocate of new music and began to sell it in his store. Eventually, anyone in Baltimore who wanted to buy new music would have to go to there. He would walk them through it. He would give people records and say “Look, Louie, take this home. Listen to it. If you don’t like it bring it back.” He was converting people. They came in to buy Beethoven and he was selling them Bartók.

My father was self-taught, but he ended up having a very refined and rich knowledge of classical, chamber, and contemporary music. Typically he would come home and have dinner, and then sit in his armchair and listen to music until almost midnight. I caught on to this very early, and I would go and listen with him. Of course, he had no idea I was there. At least, at that time, I didn’t think so. Until I was nine years old, we lived in one of the row houses with the marble steps that were the rule in the downtown Baltimore residential neighborhoods. The children’s bedrooms were only one floor above the living room where my father sat for his evening music listening. Somehow, I would find myself awake and would quietly sneak part way down the stairs behind him and, sitting there, join him in listening. My childhood nights were spent with him in this way from a very early age. For me, those years were filled with the music of the great Schubert string quartets, the Opus 59 quartets of Beethoven, piano music of all kinds, and quite a lot of “modern” music as well—mainly Shostakovich and Bartók. The sounds of chamber music entered my heart, becoming my basic musical vocabulary. I thought, simply, that was how music was supposed to sound. That was my base, and quite a lot of everything else eventually became layered around it.