The Breath of the City

New York Nostalgia in a New Album

Fresh from a flight into LaGuardia , I stepped out of my cab on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Immediately, I felt my lungs expand with the wind that runs through the city’s urban phalanx of towering buildings. Like the Lord breathing new breath into the first human, I felt filled with the air of a different existence, an earlier version of myself.

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While training to become a cantor, I spent four years living as a New Yorker. Admittedly, I wasn’t very adventurous. I spent most of my waking hours within forty blocks of my apartment on the Upper West Side, with exceptions for the occasional opera, broadway show, or pilgrimage downtown for dim sum.

I voyaged deeper into New York’s five boroughs while working in chaplaincy — one summer at New York-Presbyterian’s Weill Cornell Medical Center and one summer at a pair of outpatient mental health clinics run by JBFCS. One summer, I worked in Brooklyn out near Sea Gate, situated at the absolute end of Coney Island. Those days, I would get on the Q train at 42nd street and fall asleep each morning for a full hour until we reached the end of the line.

Awakening each at the end of in Brooklyn, I could feel the echoes of my parents’ childhood memories. My mother grew up in Brooklyn; my father in Queens and various towns on Long Island. New York was the old neighborhood, overcast by clouds of nostalgia and family stories.

Returning to the city this past April, I was taken aback at the wind-swept, animating spirit of New York. Perhaps it was simply the breath of my liberty, being out of my routine for several days of professional travel. But it also reminded me of the winds of liberty and promise that blow on the streets of the city that never sleeps.

New York is a microcosm of the world — a sprawling, sleepless creature made of stone, cement, and dreams. A world of endless human community and activity that can nevertheless feels as small as a street corner. It is these contrasts of possibility and unsuspecting intimacy that have long made New York a natural destination for so many immigrants, especially Jews.

To speak of Jews and New York is almost redundant. The city is filled with billions of Jewish stories, none of which we get bored of telling. Yet I recently discovered a musical portal into New York Jewish nostalgia which blew me over, almost as much as the breeze of those Manhattan avenues.

In A Dark Blue Night is the newest album by YIVO Director of Public Programs and resident composer, Alex Weiser. The record comprises two song cycles which reflect lovingly on the feeling and meaning of the New York through Jewish eyes. The first cycle, “In a Dark Blue Night,” features five settings of Yiddish poems which paint a glowing musical portrait of the city at nighttime. The second, “Coney Island Days,” is a dreamy soundscape of New York as conveyed through the memories of the composer’s late grandmother.

Weiser’s new work is the freshest musical nostalgia that I’ve consumed in a while. With complex sonorities almost entirely anchored in a major tonality, Weiser’s settings gently pull the listener into New York’s wondrous world of possibilities, arising in wistful musical meditations on the sleepless city at night.

No. 4 - “Golden Honey” (Translated From “New York Evening by the Hudson Shore” by Celia Dropkin)

In the rooms of your skyscrapers

Golden honey runs—the light

Through millions of windows,

As if through the rooms of a gigantic honey-comb

You can see the golden honey,

The honey of mankind, the light.

The Yiddish poetry in the first song cycle soars, and with almost none of the Ashkenazic musical signifiers that one expects of Yiddish art song. Weiser’s compositions are thus sonically closer to Sondheim than Secunda. Yet even if Weiser shares some of Sondheim’s harmonic palette, melodic jauntiness, and New York-centricity, he parts ways with the Broadway icon’s dark brooding and pessimism, instead painting the City as a nurturing womb which gives life, memory, and identity.

“Coney Island Days,” Weiser’s second cycle, bubbles with rosy-cheeked idealism. Playful settings of “Coney Island,” “Pennies,” and “ Knish Store” set his grandmother’s memories of a playful childhood, putting the listener in a reverie as they are transported back to simpler times. The latter songs especially evoke a loving relationship with her mother, as conveyed through the caring observation of the little, endearing details. Mezzo-soprano' Annie Rosen’s effortless and warm tones perfectly carry the music’s message of devotion, comfort, and love.

Mother

My mother new knew her age. She never celebrated her birthday. She always went to school to speak better English. When she died, she had leukemia, she was still going to school. She was heavy. She used to buy a corset. When she went to get measured, I went with her. My mother used to take me all over. I was like her pet. My mother, she was a saint. She was wonderful.

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Alex Weiser’s new album evokes an idealized New York, the city which nurtured generations of my family. And like all idealization, it comes with the suppression of difficulty and hardship.

Jews know this from the Hebrew Bible. Just compare the stories of King David in the books of Samuel and Chronicles. The prophetic Samuel gives the unvarnished truth about that sweet singer of Israel, who built the Israel monarchy while devolving into impulsivity and sin during the second half of his career. The Book of Chronicles idealizes David instead, remembering his goodness and accomplishments and especially his music and prayers.

Even though the underlying reality is tough, those prayers evoke what we love best about where we came from and where we are going.

In this way, Alex Weiser’s In A Dark Blue Night is not just a Jewish love letter to New York, but a prayer as well.