Ribs & Brisket band serves up heaping helpings of ‘40s style Jewish Jazz, Yiddish Swing, and various kosher-style blues to discerning New Yorkers and fans everywhere. After a two-year residency at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café their new record, "Essen" is out on Tzadik.

From The Forward
Arts & Culture
Feeding Cornelia Street With 'Ribs and Brisket'
By Alexander Gelfand

On a cold, wet recent night, saxophonist Paul Shapiro warmed up a small crowd at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan's West Village with an old Cab Calloway song, "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House" ("You get the bagel, Fagel.... It's on the fendel, Mendel").

Shapiro, who founded Brooklyn Funk Essentials and once played tenor with The Microscopic Septet, is a busy session musician who has worked with a long list of pop luminaries, from Lou Reed to Queen Latifah. For the past year-and-a-half, he has also run a monthly show, the Ribs & Brisket Revue, in the cramped cellar-cum-nightclub on Cornelia Street, where he sings, plays and jives with audience and band members alike. (The revue normally takes place on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to the ordinary vicissitudes of artists' schedules.)

Shapiro's Ribs and Brisket repertoire is laced with Jewish references that range from the obvious, like the klezmer-inflected melody of the old Benny Goodman tune "My Little Cousin" (based on the Yiddish tune, "Di Grine Kuzine"), to the oblique — like the food-obsessed lyrics to "Everybody Eats." ("It's not specifically Yiddish," Shapiro said in an interview with the Forward, "but if it's about food, it passes.") And most of it is cast in the form of swing and jump, the bouncy, jazzy R&B variant popularized by saxophonist Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five in the 1940s. Shot through with both humor and the blues, jump is to African American popular music as jive is to African American speech. In its combination of manic energy and knowing world-weariness, it bears more than a passing resemblance to klezmer, which may help explain why black performers of the 1930s and '40s had such a pronounced taste for material with a Yiddish flavor: Slim Gaillard's "Matzoh Balls" and Henry Nemo's "A Bee Gezindt," which was recorded by both Calloway and Mildred Bailey (and which singer Cilla Owens covers with Shapiro), were just two of the Afro-Jewish numbers that black performers once belted out regularly. "She's listed as African American on the stamp," Shapiro said of Bailey, who was honored with a commemorative postage stamp in 1994 — "but I think she was passing," he joked.

Not surprisingly, humor is an integral part of the revue. Clad in a dark suit, with a red floral-print tie loosely tethered to his neck, Shapiro jokes with the band and shmoozes with the audience, throwing off a friendly, relaxed vibe that makes the lower level of the café — a basement room the length and width of a boxcar, festooned with exposed pipes and multicolored Christmas lights — feel like an old-fashioned lounge. "I love music that can be both serious and joyful," Shapiro said. "I've always loved funk and swing — hard swing, with a backbeat, like jump — and jazz that doesn't take itself too seriously."

Stylistically, Shapiro's saxophone work lies at the intersection of jazz and R&B first explored by the likes of Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet. Greasy blues licks alternate with rapid-fire runs, and the man isn't above letting fly with an occasional honk. But when he shifts to clarinet for freilach swing numbers like "My Little Cousin" and "Yes, My Darling Daughter" — a tune that he began playing simply because he liked the melody, and only later learned was derived from "Yuh Mein Tiere Tochter" — Shapiro adds a touch of the Jewish melodic ornamentation he first encountered in synagogue on Long Island as a child. Later in life, he renewed his acquaintance with Jewish liturgical music in the temples of the Lower East Side. (Shapiro's debut recording as a leader, the instrumental "Midnight Minyan" — released on John Zorn's Tzadik Records label — presented R&B and swing arrangements of traditional liturgical music. He recently recorded a follow-up disc, to be released this February, that features original versions of Friday night prayers, and he hopes to assemble an album of Ribs and Brisket material this winter.)

The rest of the band provide pitch-perfect support: Brian Mitchell is a fine stride, blues and boogie-woogie pianist, while drummer Tony Lewis's shuffle rhythms and bassist Booker King's two-beat bounce lend the music considerable momentum. The tunes themselves are amenable to treatment that is by turns Jewish and bluish, resulting in a surprisingly smooth blend of Jewish jump.

"Smooth" would also be an apt description of singer Babi Floyd, as would "hip," "eccentric" and "hysterically funny." Floyd joined Shapiro onstage for several numbers that gloomy November night, and teamed up with Owens for "Oy Vey Zmir," a Shapiro original replete with vaguely obscene Yinglish lyrics. But it was his rendition of "Ot Azoy," Cab Calloway's manic homage to cantorial music, that really slew the crowd. Looking like an old-school Harlem hipster in his black tuxedo pants, red velour jacket and undersized fedora, Floyd periodically clapped his bejeweled right hand to his face, assumed an expression of neurotic torment, and uttered a stream of Yiddish-Hebrew gibberish in an uncannily accurate pseudo-cantorial sing-song. It was a performance of Sid Caesar-like proportions, and at least one member of the audience laughed uncontrollably whenever Floyd opened his mouth.

A band that trades in good-natured R&B, Yiddish swing and mock cantillation is already unusual. A band that does all that below West 4th Street, the traditional hunting ground of the mercilessly esoteric downtown crowd, is even more rare. But Shapiro's Ribs & Brisket Revue may be just the thing for those who don't object to music that can both entertain and impress: chicken soup for the weary, postmodern soul.

Alexander Gelfand is a writer living in New York.
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