 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: ruben
Date: 2013-10-16 21:51
When I was a child, one of my music teachers was Sam Musiker. He was a great Klezmer musician, but never played this music to us or spoke to us about it. As a tenor-saxophonist, his style was pure Lester Young. In a nutshell, he was a klezmer musician when this music had gone out of fashion with the demise of his parents' generation and he was playing in a jazz style that had been superseded by Charlie Parker's bop. He was also a Classical musician and composer. His teaching could be summed up as every note had to be heartfelt and mean something. There are worse messages to bring across. He died of a heart attack in his forties. The latter period of his life was spent teaching ghetto kids, one of whom was me. Does anybody know anything about him?
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2013-10-16 22:57
From what I've read, Sam was the son in law of the great klezmer clarinetist, Dave Tarras. While Tarras lived to the ripe old age of 92, Sam (1924-1967) wasn't as fortunate.
Sam, his brother Ray, and Tarras collaborated in the 50s to produce a klezmer/jazz fusion style, and they produced Tanz! (which is available on Amazon). Some of their selections are on YouTube, including Sam Shpielt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNQ2f3Wg6yc
It's nice music, but it never really found an audience in the 50s. Styles had changed, and few people were interested in klezmer/jazz fusion at the time. Today, there seems to be a renewed interest in this music.
Very interesting that he got into teaching in his last years--I never knew that. I'm wondering if he was financially successful in his younger years, but perhaps there was less interest in his style of playing in the 60s.
I know very little about Musiker, and I'm glad you shared this with us. He must have been famous in the 40s and 50s, but he's almost forgotten today. Did he ever seem to be bitter about teaching (as some once-famous performers are), or did he take it all in stride? Did you ever meet Ray, or hear anything about him? He was a klezmer clarinetist with a fairly long career, but I couldn't find much else about him.
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Author: ruben
Date: 2013-10-17 06:54
Dear Clarinetguy,
You actually know more about Sam Musiker than I do! Many thanks. To answer your question, he was never in the slightest bitter about teaching and I might add that this seemed to have given him renewed vigour. Where he got the degrees and credentials to teach, I don't know. He composed and arranged a lot for wind band and he took an interest in Mexican music as he was living in Tucson, Arizona on the Mexican border. Tucson was a town of about 200 thousand people in the 60s. There is a piece for symphonic band that he wrote called "Bravura" that combines a jazz band and regular wind band; great stuff probably gathering dust in somebody's closet. The date of his death doesn't sound right: it must have been before 1967. He didn't die in poverty, as he played the stock market almost as well as he played music.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2013-10-17 11:20
Ruben, thanks for sharing this information. My information about Tarras and the Musiker brothers comes from Henry Sapoznik's The Compleat Klezmer, which has a very long and interesting introduction and some great klezmer tunes. It's possible that Musiker died before 1967, but that's the date Sapoznik gives.
I never knew about his compositions. It's a shame that there's so much great music out there that's just sitting on shelves, gathering dust.
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