Babies and bubbes boogie in Berkeley

It's chaos in Berkeley. A whole JCC turned over to Jewish music, and everything is happening at once. In the "instrument petting zoo" — rooms filled with musicians showing off their ouds, basses and others — there's a little girl who's encountering a violin for the very first time. She's enthralled. She's got a serious look on her face and as she runs the bow across the strings she's making something pretty close to music. Everyone is impressed; we may be witnessing the birth of prodigious career.

Even the virtuosic melancholia of Heather Klein's Hebrew opera singing is lightly interrupted by a toddler tooting on his plastic toy harmonica. As if in response, Klein segues into vocal acrobatics on some swinging Yiddish riffs.

It's Community Music Day during the Jewish Music Festival at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center. Revelry overflows. Hip-hop impresario Tim Barsky, leading a workshop on Jewish beatboxing (making beats with one's mouth and a microphone), tells the group, "When the Chassidim get going it's like a house party without the glowsticks."

Babies, bubbes, moms and mandolins are crossing in the halls and making a racket. Meanwhile, in multiple closed-door workshops, reverence flows across the generations. When Barsky starts vocalizing a funky beat in his workshop — demonstrating the mechanics of his technique — he stops abruptly and asks an older woman why she is scrunching up her nose. Did she not like the music? No, she says. He accidentally sent some spittle her way.

On the main stage now are some of the members of the band that played at my wedding — the San Francisco Klezmer Experience — plus one very special instrument, the tsimbolim. It's like seeing a rare bird in the flesh. Imagine a sort of Old Country hammered dulcimer that sounds like someone is playing the inside of a piano with chopsticks. That, plus two accordions, mandolin and violin send me to Vilna circa 1750.

It starts to rain and I'm back in the 21st century. Here I am in short sleeves. It was sunny when I left the house. Oy.

The worrying dissolves as I immediately recognize something I've never seen before. I recognize it from my mom's descriptions. It's a mandobass. If you took a typical mandolin, enlarged it by 10 and played it upright, you'd be right on. My mom played in a mandolin orchestra at Arbeiter Ring summer camp in Ohio, but I never thought I'd see one in real life. A good 10 or 15 people are cluttered on stage with mandocellos, hammered mandolins, octave mandolins, a crazy variety. And they play a racket of string band Lower East Side tunes. It's the Instant Klezmer Mandolin Orchestra — they only got together today and they sound like they're channeling a band of immigrant masters.

Things are rocking with stomping folk dancing around the perimeter of the auditorium. On the downbeat the dancers go thwack as if amplifiers had never been invented.

Half an hour later when the dapper rapper Hyim processes loops of Jewish folk tunes and Middle Eastern drums through his synthesizer, it's clear he's working the crowd the same way, just with slightly different tools. The same people who were folk dancing are now swaying on their own, boogeying their butts.

And this includes at least one woman old enough to be my grandmother.

Like a good Jew, I wander. Not through the desert, but I find some dessert, a huge chocolate muffin for only a dollar. Scrumptious. In the distance I hear a lone accordion and I go on a quest. Around the corner I find a small room where a group of maybe six people are learning a slow and rhythmically complex dance while a young man accompanies them on a huge accordion. It feels like I'm violating an intimate occasion and being a voyeur and I quickly duck out.

What's amazing is that the group, learning together with so much quiet intensity, may have been strangers.

Tucked away from the throngs or in the midst of the cackling infants, I most want to go home and practice my own instrument, the marimba, so I can learn some Sephardic melodies.

Maybe next year I'll be good enough to play at the festival myself.




Jay Schwartz plays the trap drums in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife and canine. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).