By Richie Unterberger
When Theo Bikel recorded Songs of a Russian Gypsy in the late 1950s, he'd already issued folk songs in several languages for Elektra Records, including Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. However, the album would be more successful than anything either Bikel or Elektra had previously released. Instrumental in both bolstering the career of the artist and the establishing the longevity of the label, it also paved the way for a second Bikel album of Russian songs shortly afterward, Songs of Russia Old & New. Both of the albums are combined onto one CD in this reissue, featuring some of the most popular material that Theo recorded in any language.
When Theo Bikel recorded Songs of a Russian Gypsy in the late 1950s, he'd already issued folk songs in several languages for Elektra Records, including Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. However, the album would be more successful than anything either Bikel or Elektra had previously released. Instrumental in both bolstering the career of the artist and the establishing the longevity of the label, it also paved the way for a second Bikel album of Russian songs shortly afterward, Songs of Russia Old & New. Both of the albums are combined onto one CD in this reissue, featuring some of the most popular material that Theo recorded in any language.
Born in Vienna, Bikel was fluent in several languages when he moved to the United States in 1954. As he remembers today, he met Elektra president and founder Jac Holzman "within weeks of coming to America. I used to sing at parties all the time. In fact, I still do. There's one tonight, in fact! Jac heard me at a party, and then said to me, 'Listen, I'm very impressed by what you do. But I don't know how much of what you do is visual. 'Cause not only did I hear you, I saw you as well. And that's very impressive, but a record album is just to the ears. I don't quite trust my own sense of how impressed I was, knowing how much of it was visual, and how much of it was just the music. So if you'll permit me, I'll record you on tape, and play it to some people who haven't met you and see how they react.' So that's exactly what we did. I traipsed up five flights and, in his apartment, put some songs on tape. He played the tape for some friends of his, or acquaintances of his, whose taste he trusted, who had never seen me or met me, and came back to me and said, 'I want you to make records.' That's how it started.
"Jac is an extraordinary producer. He has an extraordinary grasp of what is needed at any given time in order to produce a work. He had that as a young man. I mean, when I first met him, he lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, and he was driven. All he cared about was folk music. He himself doesn't play or sing, but he zeroes in with a sense of taste and discernment of what is good. He was one of the earliest people who said not only 'this is good,' but 'this should be heard by many more people than just a few people who hang out with folk musicians down in Greenwich Village. And the way to do this is to put them on disc.'"
"Bikel could do just about anything," says Holzman, who would produce both Songs of a Russian Gypsy and Songs of Russia Old and New. "He had a certain vested interest in being a polyglot, and there had not been a lot of Israeli material released. The Israeli album [Folk Songs of Israel, issued in 1955 as a ten-inch LP] was his first one for us. That did very nicely. But we had him billed below the title, and of course we changed that pretty quickly as he did movies, became known, and became the favorite prospective son-in-law of most Jewish mothers. His next big album was Jewish Folk Songs, the Yiddish album."
Adds Bikel, "We thought that the Yiddish songs were a good idea, and we recorded those as well as the Hebrew ones, and then, in a number of other languages and various albums. First of all, 'cause I'm able to do it. And I do it in a manner that respects the material. I don't take liberties with the material, or for that matter with the accent. I pride myself on being as accurate as I can humanly be. Sometimes to a fault, so much so that people insist that I speak the languages I sing, 'cause they don't believe that I don't know how to speak them. It's because my accent sounds so authentic."
Bikel had been familiar with Russian songs for quite a while before he recorded Songs of a Russian Gypsy. "Some I'd heard sung by people even long before I went after the songs themselves," he explains. "I spent part of my childhood in what was then Palestine, which is Israel now, and there were quite a number of expatriates who performed that kind of music and those songs." In a couple instances, the material he selected for the album "reminded me of those. In others, I simply felt drawn to the poetry as well as to the music. I'm very close to Russian gypsy music, especially, and the music that I went after, even as a young student. Thankfully I didn't have to travel too far. At the time, I was studying in London, and most of that music could only be heard in Paris from expatriate gypsies who'd been thrown out of Russia, because nobody could rely on them for anything except music."
That music, he continues, "drew me on both a musical and emotional level. Russian gypsy songs can go from the quietly mournful to the exuberant, and in each of these elements, you retain some of the other, as it were. There's always an echo of the sadness in the exuberance, and suddenly an underlying quality of juiciness even in the midst of very sentimental texts and music."
On Songs of a Russian Gypsy, Bikel's guitar and vocals were accompanied by Sasha Polinoff on balalaika, Lonya Kalbouss on accordion, George Greenberg on violin, Yurka Sutotsky on bass balalaika, and Fred Hellerman (of the massively important folk group the Weavers) on guitar. "For those kinds of albums to succeed, they have to be personality-driven," observes Holzman. "If I took any person off the street who had the capability of doing all of that, it's neither fish nor fowl. But you had an overriding personality like a Bikel, who built up a tremendously loyal following; you could get away with that. He did it very well, and the musical settings, with Sasha Polinoff, were very solid."
The value of Polinoff's contribution, remarks Theo, was that "he played an instrument that is so typically Russian that it couldn't be anything else, the balalaika. The other instruments, you find the violin on other kinds of music, you find a double bass on other kinds of music. You suddenly find an accordion on various other musics, especially French and South American. But a balalaika can be found only in Russian music. It's that uniqueness, with this little instrument that only has three strings which are tuned to the same note, that gives it such a flavor of authenticity. In that sense, he contributed a great deal to the recording."
Bikel had known Fred Hellerman "from the time that I came to America in 1954, which was at the time when the Weavers were not performing terribly much, 'cause they were blacklisted. I befriended them, they befriended me. I was a key supporter of their music, had been even before I met Pete Seeger or any of them, when I was still living and studying in England. When I finally got to meet them, I tried my level best to break the blacklist for them, and managed, in one instance, even to do so when I hosted a television program. Quite apart from that, Fred and I became very close friends and remain so. And he's a great musician. So when it came time to do something with instruments -- not just with myself and guitar, which is what the very early recordings of mine were -- the choice of Fred Hellerman was a logical one. Because he has the ability to adopt and adapt himself to styles."
Songs of a Russian Gypsy became not just Bikel's biggest album up to that point; it became Elektra Records' biggest album up to that point. It sold more than 35,000 copies in its first four months, a quite large number for an independent folk label in the late 1950s. "It ended up selling a lot more than that, but for an indie label, 35-50,000 of anything was giant," points out Holzman. "Especially when you take into account that there was no copyright [payments on folk songs]. Let's assume there would have been normally 24 cents of copyright out of the $2.37 record. That's 10% more gross margin that you got to hang onto. That was very attractive. But it wasn't done for that reason. It was just one of the happy products of recording folk music. The Theodore Bikel Russian gypsy albums put us on the map; they were big hits for us."
Speculates Jac as to the album's appeal, "There had been no Russian material released. There were any number of Jews who had come to the United States from Russia. The people who bought that record were primarily descended Russian Jews, and some of them who had parents or grandparents who were still alive bought it for them. But this is where interpretations sometimes have it over the real thing. This was a carefully constructed record. In fact, we shot the album cover twice. It came out, I didn't like the album cover; we went back and shot it again. I wanted it to punch more. It seemed a little dark and a little settled, a little posed. But I wanted something where you could see the fingers whirring. There is a little known fact that I am one of the [instrumentalists] on that cover. I've shown up on covers a couple of times, not very often. Must be the Hitchcock in me or something." Incidentally, according to Bikel, some of the album was recorded in the photographic studio of George Pickow, husband of fellow Elektra folk artist Jean Ritchie, "so we were already there in a photo studio and playing around with notions of what to do."
`Continues Theo, "I was sometimes shocked that it was doing so well. Elektra were working first out of [Jac's] apartment, then out of a smaller place, and when they moved into [their] first suite of offices, its subtitle was 'the house that Theo built.' Was I surprised by the success? You know, I like it when people listen to my music, I like it when people appreciate my music. I really never thought of success with a kind of an S with two strokes through it. It may sound harsh, but it isn't, really. Especially with the music. I never looked for monetary success at all. Artistic success, yes. Absolutely."
For his second Elektra album of Russian material, Songs of Russia Old & New, Bikel opted for somewhat different material. "The time had come to branch out and to acquaint people with stuff that I knew about Russian music that could not be included in the first album," he offers. "In fact, when [the earlier album] was called Songs of a Russian Gypsy, it was just that, and it was no more than that. But there were songs of new Russia that needed to be recorded, and there were songs of old Russia [which] are not gypsy songs that needed to be heard as well. The two needed to be juxtaposed, one to the other. So we came up with this notion of songs of Russia, old and new." Holzman again produced, and Fred Hellerman again took a major supporting role in the album, arranging and conducting the songs.
Since the release of the LPs, Bikel has continued his career as a popular singer and actor with numerous records, movies, and theatrical productions. He still performs songs from Songs of a Russian Gypsy and Songs of Russia Old & New, and "to this day, I get mail, I get email, speaking of what these records meant to people when they had them first. Some people jealously guarded them all through their lives, still play them, put them on cassette so that they can play them when they no longer have phonographs or turntables. A woman came up to me and said, 'I used to have every single one of your albums. Now I only have half of them, and that was the hardest part of the divorce,'" he laughs. "That stuff is still around, and it spoke to people so strongly. I'm gratified that it will now find an audience that never knew vinyl records, that didn't know what a turntable is, and probably doesn't know anymore what a cassette is." -- Richie Unterberger
contents copyright
Richie
Unterberger , 2000-2010
unless otherwise specified.
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