Interview with Stuart Rosenberg, 1994
“All of this is borne of the human desire for a greater sense of self-understanding and connection with the infinite.”
My father died on May 7. It feels wrong to be writing one of these posts, knowing he won’t read it. He was always a devoted reader of anything and everything I wrote, but he especially loved my Tchotchkes, and never failed to follow one up with a long complimentary text which usually included a line about how “perfectly Allegrish” it was. It will be to my enduring regret that I didn’t manage to get my shit together enough to post one last Friday for him to read.
In lieu of a regular post I’d like to reprint an interview with him conducted by Janet Ginsburg, for the program of a concert he put on at the Chicago Cultural Center in February 1994 (over a year before I was born). I had never read this interview before my mom handed me the booklet yesterday. It contains much of his musical backstory, and an explication of his whole life philosophy, one that was fully formed by this time, yet continued to evolve and deepen into a layered richness that surrounded me as I grew into who I am today.
It’s long, but I really hope you take the time to read the whole thing. I want everyone to be able to learn from my father the same way that I was lucky enough to. For all the hours upon hours of deep conversations I had with him about my life, his life, music, everything, I had never experienced his approach to music and art and living expressed so clearly and movingly as it is here.
Janet Ginsburg: I first came to know Stuart Rosenberg through his radio shows, The Earth Club and Radio Gumbo, and from the Navy Pier concerts he produced. Last fall, while working on a story for the Chicago Tribune on ethnic music clubs around the city, l used him as an expert reference. I found in Stuart a friendly guide through uncharted (at least for me) musical waters, and a natural teacher who couldn't help telling me things like the word "lute" was a corruption of “al ud,” meaning “the ud," an ancient one-stringed instrument from Africa and the granddaddy of all lutes. Although the line between trivia and knowledge can sometimes be a blurry one, I found that knowing this sort of thing helped me appreciate music on a whole new level.
Music is a language we all understand instinctively, whether it’s blues, jazz, country, Middle Eastern, Irish, Jewish, whatever. Stuart’s gift is an ability to enjoy the individual song, yet hear how it is a part of the whole.
JG: Did you grow up in a musical home? Were you always musical?
Stuart Rosenberg: I've always been fascinated by sound. My brother started piano lessons when he was 5 or 6. I was about three or four. I would sit underneath the piano when the teacher came. She would begin by playing a little prelude, a little rhapsody on the piano, just to sort of establish a musical tone for the lesson. I was just completely overwhelmed by this experience—sitting under the piano, being in the music. I did not speak at that age. I did not have words then. But I'd heard the word "God" around the dinner table and I figured that this feeling I was getting while sitting under the piano while she was playing her little bit of Brahms or whatever was—that this was God. I was in God.
You've talked before about the concept of "the architecture of music." Is this what you mean, being in the music?
You can listen to the great musical traditions—the Gypsy tradition for instance, or the West African drumming tradition—and you if put yourself in that music, you wil discover that the great artists and the great musics are specifically addressing the same questions. Music is the expression of the ineffable connection of the human spirit with the larger questions. What I mean is that music has a way of defining our spiritual architecture, our emotional architecture. And because it is such a powerful thing, such powerful experience, music is used in every part of our lives. It's used to accompany our changes in consciousness. It's used to accompany the rites of passage. It's used to accompany pain and joy. It's a way to bring us closer to a true understanding of our true selves.
Lets talk some more about your own musical evolution. Where did you go after you crawled out from underneath the piano?
This is great, I spent a good 15, 20 years realizing that I was little something of a square nut in round hole. Or a square peg in a round...whatever. I was a little different than most people because I had grown up trained to play classical violin but l had this undeniable passion for blues music and ethnic music and all different kinds of music. I had this yearning for something that I wanted to hear but didn't hear anywhere. And so I began to play it myself. As I got older and began looking at what l had come from, I made a very interesting realization. It took me along time to really fully understand the magnitude of my very early upbringing.
I was a child of the late 50s and early 60s in the suburban milieu. My mother had four boys under the age of 5—I was the second of the four. By the time my next youngest brother came along, we had live-in help. Mary Ella was from the deep South. She'd put us to bed at night with the radio station tuned to the clear channel stations of the South. So I would listen every night to B.B. King out of Memphis, to The King Biscuit Flour Hour out of Helena, Arkansas. I would listen to The Grand Ol' Opry and The Louisiana Hayride. Every Sunday morning she’d play gospel music on the radio, from the South side of Chicago. So I grew up having a full, solid dose of black-American musical culture.
Piped straight into the middle of suburbia.
In addition to that, I was also part of a fairly religious family and I grew up hearing the melodies of the great cantorial repertoire. We had a wonderful chazan who sang at the synagogue and these melodies were incredibly passionate and moving to me. I was 4, 5, 6 years old and wide open to this stuff. And then the other point on the triangle was a strong classical background. I began studying violin at the age of 4 1/2. By the time l was 6 or 7, I was playing Vivaldi and Bach and the easier pieces of Beethoven.
I have this wonderful picture of you and your brothers tucked in at night with this electronic link to another world. The power of radio was impressed upon you about the time the power of music was revealing itself to you. The two have been connected from the start.
You better believe it. There's no doubt about it. I would spin the dial all night long and discover some amazing things. In addition to the great radio heritage of the early 60s, I also discovered The Midnight Special (an eclectic mix of music and comedy broadcast on WFMI-Chicago), which I listened to religiously every Saturday night for the next 10 or 15 years. What I understood later was, as you say, that I had opened up a window that led from my somewhat bland suburban bedroom to a world that would take me the next 30 years to comprehend.
The funny thing is that in the same way a child can hear a foreign language that you or I could never master and within three months be speaking full sentences, I got something that was more profoundly deep out of that experience than any formal musical training could give me. Years later when I was standing on a garbage can outside Alice's Revisited, putting my ear to the window so I could hear Sugarcane Harris play the blues violin, I realized that I knew this. I knew what he was doing! I had no intrinsic understanding of what was going on. He was using the violin, an instrument that I had mastered in the Western tradition, to play the blues, an idiom that was as deep within me as any of my own traditions.
You once said that stringed instruments are like noodles—every culture has them. I was recently invited—unfortunately I wasn't able to go—to an Indian violin concert. Not only does there seem to be a diversity of instruments but a diversity of how a particular instrument can be played—as diverse as language.
The great thing is if you bring yourself—with just a tiny bit of effort— to understand how that came to be, you'll understand huge volumes about the nature of the world in the process. If you say to yourself, "Who did Indians hear the violin from?" and then you go back and look, you find out that they got the violin from the Portuguese colonists who settled the west coast of India. And then you ask, "Well, what were the Portuguese doing there?" And then you learn that it was a stop on the Spice Route. Through the influence of the Portuguese, the violin, which was a European instrument, made it to India and was immediately adapted to the Indian culture. Then you understand how cultures influence other cultures and the ramifications of commerce and trade on culture, and you begin to understand how al of these things are ultimately totally connected to each other.
You’ve spoken before about the importance of port cities as musical juncture points. I'd like to bring that around to Chicago, which isn't a port city in a traditional sense, but is, perhaps, in a 21st century sense.
You take a look at the Beatles who came from Liverpool, which is a big port city in England. You take a look at the Argentinean Tango, which swept the world back in the teens and twenties, which was the product of Buenos Aires, which was a port city. You take a look at the rise of jazz, which originated in New Orleans and then moved out across the country. You take a look at the American Broadway show, which originated in New York City, one of the great ports of the world. And you begin to understand that there's some link there—you realize that a port city is a logical place for new influences to be first expressed.
So in the case of New Orleans, for instance, you have a stew of the French tradition—the tradition of the French colonialists who originally settled New Orleans— the Spanish, all the African Caribs, the slaves that came to New Orleans, all of the Mississippi river traffic that came to New Orleans, the Kintucks (note: from Kentucky), the inlanders who came through, the Scotch-Irish who came bringing their musical traditions. You realize you have this incredible plethora of dynamic traditions existing simultaneously in the same place. People were open to hearing new things, so when somebody came off a boat and had a new rhythm or a new melodic conception, or somebody pulled into town with something different, it was not quite as inaccessible as it would be to a culture that was not accustomed to the "other." In port cities, the other was accepted.
You’ve brought up several things. You’ve talked about jazz in New Orleans, Broadway shows in New York—different places. In Chicago, I suppose, if there is one type of music that people tend to identify with the city, it would be blues. But there’s more going on here.
The thing that characterizes Chicago it that it really is a "City of Neighborhoods." It's a collection of diverse ethnic groups that came here because things looked a little better here than back wherever people came from.
There were jobs here.
Correct. Jobs of a particular kind, too, it's important to recognize. Chicago was not a town where everybody could get rich, like New York. But Chicago was a town where everybody could work. So this is a city of working people. Typically in the second generation of settlement here, people would move away from their traditions. But at some point it became apparent that something important was about to be lost. There’s a little-known law of folklore—I don't know whether you're aware of this—that when people leave their culture of origin and settle in another place, the culture is stopped dead at the time they leave and preserved at that point. These groups, from the Irish onward, realized that there was something intrinsically valuable about maintaining a connection. And so from the very beginning, Chicago has been a center for the preservation of cultural traditions.
Look, for instance, at the great Irish tradition. The great bulk of the Irish who came here immigrated after the famine in the late 19th century. By 1900 it was apparent that their culture was going to be lost unless it was preserved. So Francis O'Neill, who was Chief of Police at the turn of the century, decided he would make it his personal task to record all the fiddle tunes of all the fiddle players in Chicago's Irish community. And he did so in a collection called "O'Neill's Book of Irish Fiddle Tunes." The Irish fiddle tunes that O'Neill wrote down at the turn of the century stopped being played in Ireland. So when Irish fiddle players of today want to learn the really cool old tunes, they come to Chicago.
Why did this music stop being played?
Because culture is dynamic. Culture’s based on style and fashion. But when you displace it and put it in another place, it takes on a different set of values. In a city like Chicago, culture acquires a dynamism that's unmatched. Within the context of all these ethnic communities you find the expression of the traditional culture influenced by contemporary culture. It's a synergy between contemporary cultural values and the power and weight of tradition. They come together and explode in ways unimaginable. One of the great examples, of course, is Chicago blues. The culture of rural black America from the deep South ran smack into the energy, the power of 1950s urban America. These guys came up here and tried to get work in little funky clubs playing acoustic guitar and they got laughed out. "You’ve got to play an electric guitar and you have to have a band." This was something that didn't exist back on the plantation where they came from. But they said, "If that’s what I got to do, that's what I got to do." And ten years later we have the Chicago Blues—literally, ten years. The fact of the matter is within ten years after the displacement of rural black America from the South to the North, this new form, this new way of experiencing the black American tradition began to make itself heard. And after it starts making itself heard in the 1950s, it wasn't long before it started having a profound influence on the London hipsters, the people from Liverpool.
They were cruising that little riverway you discovered, the radio.
The radio and the ports. Those people were hearing that stuff on records before it made it on the radio.
Do ports have the significance they used to?
Well, no. I think that one of the things that's changed over the years is that the immediacy of culture has been transformed by technology, which is a big subject all by itself.
For another day… Were going ot stay focused here. One of the things that struck me about your shows is that you would mix and match music from what one would think were radically different traditions, yet there would be some connecting thread. There was always an underlying logic.
Yeah. And it's a logic that is very difficult for me to describe in words to you now. The best way that I can sort of describe it is to say that for me the progression of information is best served when there's some synergy involved, when the thing I heard before will allow me to understand the thing I'll hear next a little better. So if there's a particular emotional thread that elucidated, say, by the great mass of shifting dark harmonies of Wagner, that speaks to me about a particular kind of angst and power and majesty, and I'm able to hear that same expression in Howlin' Wolf’s "Moanin' Low," then it makes perfect sense for me to allow Howlin’ Wolf to illuminate Wagner. And for Wagner to illuminate Howlin' Wolf. The fact that their music comes from radically different cultural traditions is not nearly as important to me as that they both illuminate what it means to be human.
It’s curious to me—obviously, what were doing right now is using this filter of words to make some sense of something that is inherently beyond words.
Ineffable. Unspeakable. Indescribable. Without a doubt.
And yet part of what I enjoyed about your shows—what The Earth Club was really about— were these musical essays that would evolve. I remember listening to some Irish music one day and it suddenly occurred to me, oh my god, that’s where bluegrass came from. Most of us grow up thinking there’s jazz, rock n roll, classical, whatever.
To me one of the great goals of aesthetic expression is the sense of inclusion. I try to construct musical landscapes that connect the current with much more ancient threads of experience.
This concert is a way to redefine—or refine—the ideas of The Earth Club. This is a sort of “dim sum” concert, isn’t it?
This concert is an opportunity, I think more than anything else, for people to come together in celebration of this way of understanding music. I used to describe that the music l played was from around the world and around the block. We’re going to have a chance to experience, right here in Chicago, people who live here, who work here, who play music of a very high quality and calibre of other cultures. Kathleen Keane is an award-winning traditional Irish musician and dancer. She'll bring that world to us. Mark Zerang and Hamid Drake play the traditional music of the Middle and Near East on frame drums. We’re going to hear music from Raices del Ande, who are proponents of the South American Indian tradition, the tradition of the Andes mountains. They'll also be teaching their traditional dances as well. There’s awhole slew of contemporary musicians. In the same way that it's possible to take ones musical traditions and to make them live again, it's also possible—like Michael Smith has done—and take ones own experience and make it universal. His value and his work as a songwriter have been incredibly powerful to so many people. He’s going to sing some of his songs that are part of the new show he's doing. We’re going to have a reunion of the Golden Fleas, the house band from the old Live from the Flea Market show that I used to produce out at Navy Pier. Willy Schwarz and Miriam Sturm are going to be here. Jim Post. Howard Levy. Johnny Frigo. A real mix.
Let’s go back to your own personal experience with music. I know that you’re in a band—The Otters—and that you have produced a number of records and concerts. You seem to have a desire to kind of get things together and make them happen. Like a conductor plays an entire orchestra—that’s his instrument—you seem to be a kind of educational conductor.
If I have a mission, I would have to say that it would be to share my understanding of the value of certain kinds of expression.
Well that, to me, is the definition of a teacher.
It’s interesting that you say that because I think that's what was missing in my life. I never had anyone who could bring together all these different worlds I lived in. There was never anyone to do that for me. There was someone who had this little piece of knowledge. And someone who had that little piece of knowledge. I had a classical violin teacher, who was wonderful. I had a jazz mandolin teacher, who was wonderful. And I had a friend who showed me the depth and the value of the Yiddish theatrical tradition. I had all these different people in my life, but no one who ever took me aside and said, “All of this is borne of the human desire for a greater sense of self-understanding and connection with the infinite.” And I guess that’s the message that I got. That’s the message that I try and give.
Are you still in some way looking for that kind of mentor?
Well, paradoxically, I now find that mentor in everybody I meet, you know?
Tell me.
Every time I play a gig. Every time I get a letter from someone who I’ve moved in some way. Every time I meet someone who has put another link on that chain. It’s kind of like I sensitized myself to such a great degree about not having this in my life that I brought it into my life.
Let's talk about the name, The Earth Club, which I understand you copyrighted. Does it mean getting down to grass roots, down to earth?
Well, it was a complicated issue. The program had been called The Flea Market for many years. I'd do these live shows out of Navy Pier. Inevitably there'd be a pick-up truck full of a bunch of guys from northwest Indiana that would be full of studded snow tires and they'd say, "Where's the flea market? Where do we set up our stall?" That got to be a little frustrating, and I always thought that calling it The Flea Market sort of demeaned the musical content of what I was trying to do on the air. That was always a little bit difficult for me. I didn't want musicians of the calibre I was inviting on the program to think that their music was "the leftovers," the remains.
Gotten at a bargain price.
Yeah. It always seemed to me a little demeaning. That whole folk music community and mentality has been a little bit hard for me to understand because it is cleaved into a vision of itself. I've tried to avoid identifying with myself with any one particular musical stream. But that's a stream that has a tendency, paradoxically, to be more open to what I'm doing and also, in a sense, more rigidly self-defined than many.other musical communities. When I was looking for a new name, I wanted something that would be completely inclusive and at the same time convey a sense of universality.
Well, we have to finish this up. I understand there's a new technology you're quite taken with these days. What's your e-mail address in case anybody else has some questions for you?
Radio Gumbo @ AOL.com. That's an Internet address. Anyone can get through. Anyone who's in any way on the Internet can get me. Then there's my P.O. Box, too: Box 6257, Evanston, IL, 60204.
So anybody on the earth can actually be a member of The Earth Club, then?
Yeah. Actually everybody is!
Ah, hell. I'm so sorry, Allegra. Everything you ever said about him painted a picture of such a loving, compassionate and funny man, and this just confirms it. Can't wait to give you a hug soon. <3
Thank you for sharing this, Allegra. I was in your dad's klezmer class for many years and always enjoyed when he shared his deep knowledge of music history (and other bits of wisdom). My development as a musician owes a lot to your father; I'm lucky to have known him. This article is a nice reminder of all those lessons.