[78-L] The Jewish Caruso

[David Lennick]

Oy vay..ve're out of business!

 

Lennick, Newton, Pomeroy, Bunting, Salerno and [Your Name Here]
 
> Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:01:33 -0400
> From: jraymond at alumni.princeton.edu
> To: 78-l at klickitat.78online.com
> Subject: [78-L] The Jewish Caruso
> 
> This article from today's New York Times may be of interest to members 
> of the List.
> 
> ******************************************
> 
> July 20, 2010
> Bit by Electronic Bit, a Cantor’s Voice Is Restored
> By JOSEPH BERGER
> 
> He was called the Jewish Caruso. Indeed, fervent enthusiasts sometimes 
> referred to Caruso as the Italian Yossele Rosenblatt.
> 
> Mr. Rosenblatt, who died in 1933, was regarded as the greatest cantor of 
> his time. But his was a time when music was recorded on heavy shellac or 
> celluloid 78 r.p.m. records. The quality of those recordings was never 
> that faithful in the first place and wore away over the years.
> 
> Enter Mendel Werdyger, a lush-bearded 52-year-old Hasidic Jew who runs a 
> record shop on 13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn. With no college 
> degree and no professional training in sound engineering, Mr. Werdyger 
> has used advanced audio restoration programs on the ordinary computer in 
> his ragtag office to patiently clean away the crackles, hisses and other 
> distortions on those creaky old 78s.
> 
> The result: three compact discs with Mr. Rosenblatt singing 35 tracks, 
> including prayers and even a folk chestnut, “Mein Yiddishe Mama.” The 
> first CD has sold 15,000 copies; the third was released a few weeks ago.
> 
> “It never sounded so clear,” said Bernard Beer, director of the Philip 
> and Sarah Belz School of Jewish Music at Yeshiva University. “I was 
> brought up with this music and I know those recordings from childhood, 
> and I listened to it and I told my associate there’s no comparison to 
> anything that was done before.”
> 
> The achievement would have been striking had it been that of a sound 
> engineer. But what sound engineer would spend 5 to 10 hours per song to 
> produce CDs for the rarefied world of cantorial buffs? It was, for Mr. 
> Werdyger, a work of love and zeal.
> 
> A tall, broad-shouldered father of 6 and grandfather of 10 who, like 
> many Hasidim, wears a double-breasted frock coat known as a rekel, Mr. 
> Werdyger has cantorial DNA. His 90-year-old father, David Werdyger, is a 
> cantor who succeeded another superstar, Moishe Oysher, in East Flatbush, 
> Brooklyn. His brother Mordechai Ben David, 59, is a popular singer of 
> what Mr. Werdyger laughingly calls “Hasidic rock.” With a sonorous voice 
> of his own, Mr. Werdyger leads prayers at his shtibl, or room-size 
> synagogue, in Borough Park.
> 
> Growing up in Crown Heights and Borough Park, Mr. Werdyger had a yeshiva 
> education, going all the way through kolel — a Talmudic institute for 
> adults. At 21, he went into his father’s business, Aderet Music, a 
> wholesaler of Jewish recordings.
> 
> About 20 years ago, he found himself at the old 47th Street Photo store 
> buying his first computer — with a now-ancient 20-megabyte hard drive — 
> but was captivated by the other equipment around him, including a 
> machine the salesman had to explain was a fax.
> 
> “He told me you put it in one end and it comes out the other,” Mr. 
> Werdyger recalled. “I was totally awe-struck and I got hooked on 
> technology.”
> 
> About five years ago, he started dabbling in audio restoration, cleaning 
> up recordings of his father’s music. Rosenblatt became his Everest.
> 
> Mr. Rosenblatt was born in Russia in 1882 and toured Eastern Europe as a 
> child prodigy. In 1912 he immigrated to the United States and became the 
> cantor at Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue then on 116th Street in 
> Harlem. Blessed with a penetrating bell-like tenor with a range of two 
> and a half octaves, and a gift for coloratura and falsetto, Mr. 
> Rosenblatt had the ability to squeeze the pathos or elation out of every 
> prayer.
> 
> “The key to Yossele Rosenblatt’s kingship is he knew how to light a fire 
> under the soul,” Mr. Werdyger said.
> 
> Mr. Rosenblatt earned large concert fees, and his fame extended beyond 
> the Jewish world, leading to meetings with Charlie Chaplin and a singing 
> role in the 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer,” in which a renegade Al Jolson 
> delights his ailing father by taking his place at Kol Nidre, the solemn 
> Yom Kippur prayer that is the high point of the cantor’s year.
> 
> Mr. Werdyger listened to CD reissues of Mr. Rosenblatt, but “they were 
> duplicates of the 78s and the sound was not what I wanted — with every 
> generation it deteriorates greatly,” he said.
> 
> So he searched out collectors willing to lend him their 78s, people like 
> Charlie Bernhaut, the host of a Jewish radio and Internet program, and 
> institutions like Florida Atlantic University, which has one of the 
> largest libraries of Jewish music. He found mentors like Alan Silverman, 
> an engineer who advised him on making transfers from 78s, and Adam 
> Constantino, who taught him to put recordings into a 24-bit digital format.
> 
> Mr. Werdyger transformed Mr. Rosenblatt’s voice into electronic bits — 
> sometimes taking the same recording off as many as seven 78s to get the 
> clearest passages, then splicing them together.
> 
> Working with a half-dozen restoration programs like iZotope Rx, he broke 
> each song into frequencies that appeared as waves on a computer screen. 
> Such programs make the crackles and hisses implanted by the original 
> recording equipment or by the ravages of old phonographs visible as 
> anomalous patterns. With a few clicks of the mouse, Mr. Werdyger could 
> strip those away, and the restoration program filled in the voids, much 
> as a Photoshop program patches in the missing color.
> 
> “It sounds better than when it was recorded in the room,” Mr. Werdyger 
> said. “I don’t think Rosenblatt would have recognized how well we 
> preserved and enhanced the original recording.”
> 
> The title of the Rosenblatt series is Od Yosef Chai, which means “Joseph 
> is yet alive” and echoes the patriarch Jacob’s words in Genesis about 
> his son. The double entendre suggests that Mr. Rosenblatt, whose formal 
> first name was Joseph, has been brought back to life.
> 
> Cantorial music is growing more popular among Hasidim, whose prayer 
> services typically emphasize ardor rather than vocal flourish. Many 
> Hasidim, like Mr. Werdyger’s friend Menashe Silber, sometimes sneak away 
> from their own synagogues to hear Benzion Miller, the cantor at a 
> non-Hasidic synagogue, Young Israel-Beth El of Borough Park.
> 
> So Mr. Silber said of Mr. Werdyger, “By doing this work, he’s bringing 
> back cantorial music to his generation.”
> 
> And to earlier generations as well. The other day, Yosef Klein came in 
> to Mr. Werdyger’s shop, Mostly Music, to buy the latest Rosenblatt CD. 
> He is 81 and remembers when his grandfather took him to hear the great 
> Rosenblatt sing. Now he would hear Cantor Rosenblatt again, the voice as 
> true as when he was a little boy.
> 
> 
> 
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