Ottawa XPress - Music - Spin - From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs From 1914-1950

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August 8th, 2002
Various artists - Sony

From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs From 1914-1950
Josh Dolgin

Put together by archivist and "Klezmer revival" guru Henry Sapoznik, this is a glorious collection of some of the faded sounds of turn-of-the-century Yiddish American theatre, and the music of vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood. The first disc is all straight-up Hebey stuff, and is a great - if cursory - introduction to the work of seminal Yiddish stage rockers like Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff and Seymour Rexsite, composers like Olshanetsky and Schwartz, and performers like Moskowitz and cantor Yossele Rosenblatt. A four-part harmony piece by the Jewish Art Quartet is worth the price of the whole package, and serves as an exemplar of the attempts being made to Americanify Old World modes and tropes. The remastering of Aaron Lebedeff's classic Roumania is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The second disc is Yiddish stuff with an American tinge: Jewish performers doing gentile material, Jewish composers writing tin pan alley stuff with a Yiddy flavour, non-Jewish groups doing their take on Semitism, and goyish versions of classic Yiddish melodies. You just get nibbles of these flavours, but these noshes may well stimulate an appetite you may not have known you had. (Josh Dolgin)


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CDspin/Various Artists/From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs From 1914-1950

I don't think I'm terribly out of order when I say that this compilation is only going to be blip on the radar for a very select buying audience...and I do mean, very select. Next to polka, gregorian chants and accoustic nature sounds Klezmer and Yiddish CDs are a very niche market that almost no one grooves to. To say that this has the words 'fringe appeal' written all over it is an understatement. Am I saying that it sucks? No but I am saying that even if you were to listen to this and admit that it isn't that bad that the odds of you paying good money to own it are rather slim. The replay value is rather slim. I've got a friend who's into this but even he admits that he only replays the same 3 compilations CDs he already has and feels little or no need to add to it yet. Take that for whatever you will.

Pedro Eggers

September 14th, 2005

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