Steve Schwartz is a Providence resident, a Brown alum, and a friendly face around campus. I sat down with him to ask some questions about his background, Klezmer music, and Brown’s own Klezmer band, Yarmulkazi, in which I play viola and Steve plays drum set.
Question: Tell me a bit about yourself, your relationship with Brown, and your musical background.
Steve Schwartz: I went to three or four colleges before I ended up at Brown. When I first went to school, I sort of poked here and there. Then, I needed some stuff on my own, so I stopped going to school, and I started working. Even when I was working, I was going to school part time. It was in New York City, so I studied for a while at Juilliard. They allowed people to take classes, so I did that and got a lot of good [music] theory. Also, The New School, which was an interesting place downtown, at least it was interesting back then. The company that I was working for moved me up here [Providence] because they had a manufacturing plant, and I had a couple of skills that they thought would be helpful for a problem they were having. I was just renting a place near here, near Brown, and I met these people, and I felt like ,“I want to be like these people.” This was the right place for me. The job ended a year or two later, and I applied to Brown, and I finished my school here. I did three years [of college] here. I had already done two years, but there was a limit to how much [Brown] would take from those other places...
... I've been playing an instrument since I was three or four. I noodled around at the piano, but it never took. When I was six, I started drums; that took. When I was a teenager, I picked up guitar. I always noodled at the piano. I started learning recording skills. I was kind of like a nerdy kid with a soldering iron; I built a little tape recorder, and that got me going. By the time I got here, I had some pretty serious recording skills. I had interned in a studio part time to just learn that. I’d played in various jazz and pop bands. So that's the musical background. I had a really great theory background from Juilliard. When I ended up in school here, I was able to actually TA some of the courses and even teach some of the music labs... the year I graduated and then for a couple of years after, while they were doing a search for a new person. They needed somebody, and I got to fill in, which was an honorable experience. It was a good thing to do.
Question: How did you get involved with Klezmer music?
Steve Schwartz: Some years later, around 2010 (this was after I had graduated), a friend asked me if I would sit in with them and play the drums with their Klezmer band because their drummer was not showing up, and they had a gig coming up. I was glad to; I thought it would be fun. I really didn't know much about it, or anything about it, at all. I might or might not have recognized it if I heard it on the radio, for instance. I instantly found that this band had a slew of really cool, beautiful tunes, and I was very engaged. At the end of that year, they asked me to stay on as their drummer. Everybody graduated except one other person. I was living in town, so that didn't matter to me. I was playing as an alum, which is fine. I chatted with them, and we did this thing where I said, “Look, the only way I'll keep this going is I'm going to have to transcribe this, because there's not going to be a body of people to teach the incoming people.” Originally, [the music] was always [taught] by ear. I sent everybody a note, everybody who graduated. I said, “Is it okay if I keep this going, but I'm going to have to do this [transcribe the music]?” They said, “sure,” so that worked out very well. I've been able to recruit people. Up until the pandemic, I was able to keep a pretty steady crew going. It's been tough since the pandemic, because everything sort of stopped, and [we lost] two years of recruiting people and having them play. There were some people who were still around, I patched together these videos where I recorded everybody separately… I try to keep it going. It's been a little bit of a struggle. I'm trying to find a way to make it happen even more. It’d be nice to get back to the point where we had a sort of steady crew of people, who showed up every other week for rehearsal. It would be more engaging and then we might be able to find more things. Although, I've been very lucky. So far, we've made these things happen one way or another. We get our two or three, two or three events this semester.
Question: You said that you joined an existing Klezmer band at Brown. Do you know when that band was created?
Steve Schwartz: I actually don't know. I came in around 2010, and they had already had a couple of CDs. There's a box of old CD's someplace in my house, because they just left everything when they graduated. I'm guessing it started in the early 2000s, but I don't know for sure.
Question: What is special about Klezmer music at Brown?
Steve Schwartz: Well, one of the things I like about what we play is that we're playing it in a certain kind of traditional style. We're not turning it into Klez-jazz or Klez-pop. I've heard a lot of people, including some of the people that were in the early groups that I was in, who were doing stuff that I… It's kind of like just not as good jazz as real jazz. That would be one way of describing it, when they do very jazzy versions. Some of the people were really virtuosos, but they didn't fit the virtuoso into the klezmer; they just used Klezmer to play virtuoso. That doesn't quite work either, for me. I kind of like the traditional stuff that we do.
… A lot of the bands that I know, some people who have graduated from this band, the people who were in it before I was, have gone on and formed bands in Boston and other places. They're much more… musically literate. There's all this stuff going on that doesn't feel like Klezmer to me. It's a little too fancy. It's a little bit like the difference between real folk music and Nashville folk music. That's very different, and I appreciate some of both, but in this case, mostly I kind of like the traditional stuff for Klezmer. That's what we do. One of the graduates once heard us, maybe six or eight years ago, and he said, “Nobody's doing this anymore. Everybody else is… adding all these other things to it. I think you guys are the only ones still doing this kind of straightforward style,” which surprised me. It’s kind of an interesting thing to hear.
Question: Do you have a favorite memory of playing Klezmer music?
Steve Schwartz: Well, there are a few… We used to always play what was called—maybe still is called—Java Spook. Java spook was an alcohol free, coffee-fueled Halloween party at Tech House. Those were very fun. Sometimes we would dress up, sometimes we would not, but that was always our kickoff, and those were great. Then we got hooked up at some point or another with a congregation in South Rhode Island, someplace near Narragansett, that heard about us and knew about us. We started going to those for Purim. We would go down on Sunday morning and play a three hour show… That is a Purim party where the little kids are doing the kinds of things like throwing wet sponges at the teacher, circus type stuff. That was a lot of fun also.
… Just before the pandemic, we did something like that for a local school, maybe in Pawtucket. Somebody found out about us and asked us to come. They had like 200 little kids, and we explained what Klezmer music was about and played it for them. They had a fun time, and we had a fun time. Those are some [times] that stick out in my head.
Question: What do you envision for Klezmer music at Brown in the future?
Steve Schwartz: I would love to get to a point where I can spend a little bit of time and create real arrangements, which we did sort of as a group, when we were meeting before the pandemic, but that's been a little harder now. That thing that we just did [a performance for Violins of Hope], was a really nice big band. It worked really well, but it would be nice to have real arrangements of those tunes, which I have to write out and then people have to read them. Or, I like the way we did it before, which is that we created it as a group. It was kind of group improv, but you started to understand, “Okay, so for this tune, you're going to be playing bops in the background. Then the two of you will figure it out and do your thing there.” It was always a bit of an improvisation, but it was kind of massaged. We knew what the form was going to be. We knew who was going to do what, this time or that time. That was very fun, and that's ideal. I would love to get it back to that point. The struggle is getting enough folks together to want to do that and rehearse. A lot of the people I end up with are fabulous musicians… [who are] playing in the orchestra and like nine other things. So, it's very hard to get that kind of commitment. For a while, I was lucky. I found some people who were really good players and really interested in this, and they weren't already in seven other things. This was a really fun thing for them to do, and it didn't feel like a major commitment, but it satisfied them.
… It would be nice to come up with one other steady gig in early winter, so keep your eyes open. We played for the orchestra ball last year; that was fun… Having at least two or three things each semester that we can count on helps the group stay together.
*Note: Steve also mentioned wanting to record some CDs with the Klezmer band.
Question: Can you talk a little bit about the instruments used in closer music, and whether or not our band at Brown has the typical arrangement of instruments?
Steve Schwartz: I think originally, it did not have drums, which is what I play. I keep a beat. Mostly, I'm just sort of doubling what instrumentalists are doing, or emphasizing a little bit. It’s kind of the opposite of pop music, where the drums drive it all. I don't. I try to just match it all. I think the traditional instruments would be… originally violins and some other things, including something called the cimbalom. Then clarinets started to work their way in later in the development. This would have had something to do with the instruments that were available in the area that [Klezmer music] was developing. Then as it moves out of Romania and up into northwestern Europe, it's going to start picking up those instruments. At some point or another, I think it wouldn't be unusual to find trumpets or other brass instruments along with it… Drums did exist in Klezmer music before it came here [the U.S.]. At some point the drum set became part of it. I don't know enough of the history of it to tell you when it started to be typical for there to also be a bass, a bass fiddle or or an electric bass… so all sorts of instruments, but they were portable. They were instruments, at least traditionally, that people could have in the 1700s or 1800s (I'm not sure exactly what the timeline is for this stuff).
… Typical instrumentation started out with violins and other things. It eventually sort of settled in on strings; violins are usually the lead. It's not unusual to find brass instruments, whatever is around. Trumpets, sometimes trombones, eventually became kind of typical once those instruments became typical. I don't know when the drums or percussion were added to it. I think that was relatively late, but I think it was before the Second World War. There's a sort of a notion of an empty period of Klezmer music [because] the Second World War ended so much of that. Then it sort of reestablished, in this country at least, in the 60s or 70s… The revival that created the kind of Klezmer stuff that a lot of people think of now was in the 70s. I remember reading that it was actually in this country that the revival started because there just weren't many people in Europe left to do it anymore, but there were a lot of Jews who had moved here. Suddenly, for whatever reason, people sort of picked up on it.
… I think it's common to have this sort of an open range, at least certainly for this band. When I first joined it, there was a cello and maybe a bassoon, and that was fine. It worked great. Typical are wind instruments of one sort or another, or brass, and strings. We've had flutes. Partly because modern music, especially modern pop music, is so used to a “rhythm section,” a drum and a bass is almost expected, although that was not the tradition before 1900, for sure.
Click on the link below to view a recording of Brown’s Klezmer band, Yarmulkazi, performing at the 2023 Brown Street Park Halloween Party.