The Discovery Project salutes Marty Levitt

The klezmer revival has taken center stage in the revitalization of Yiddish culture for over 30 years now, with workshops such as Klezkamp, KlezKanada, Klezfest London, Klezfest St. Petersburg (what’s next, Klezfest Mars?), attracting worldwide attention and putting young people in touch with the older, previously forgotten generation of Jewish musicians. Amid all of the hoopla, it’s hardly surprising that a fair number of important musicians have been left out of the limelight, despite their extraordinary legacies.

Listen to Kretchmer's Bulgar. (1:49 minutes, MP3, 1.66 MB)

View a larger image of Marty's notation.

Marty Levitt is one such musician. Born in 1930 in Brooklyn and taken by his mother to live in Poland for several years at a young age. Upon his return to Brooklyn, Marty was raised in his teen years by his father, Jack Levinsky, trombonist, accordionist, and violinist, and the perennial sideman of such legendary klezmer icons as Dave Tarras, Abe Schwartz, and Naftule Brandwein. It was Schwartz who gave Marty his first professional summer engagement, hiring him to play clarinet with his band at a small hotel in the Catskills in the late 1940s.

While other musicians longed to play on Broadway when they grew up, all Marty wanted to do was play in the clubs and theaters on Pitkin Avenue, the street that ran through the heart of Brooklyn’s Brownsville Jewish ghetto. Before he turned 20 he had reached his goal, holding court at such venerable dives as “Dave’s Inn,” where Murder Incorporated called the shots (sometimes literally!). Soon enough, he established himself as one of Brooklyn’s most sought-after Jewish bandleaders, holding on to his father’s klezmer repertoire when pretty much everyone else had switched to Israeli and Hasidic tunes, or had stopped playing traditional Jewish parties altogether. Consequently, when the klezmer revival came along, Marty never really embraced it - after all, we were simply the competition!

I became close to Marty in the last six years of his life (he passed away in March of 2008). I relish the evenings we spent sitting in the kitchen of his home in Canarsie, watching videos of his band, often featuring his late wife Harriet Kane, a terrific Yiddish vocalist who died when still in the prime of her career. We'd listen to his various recordings, or discuss his life in the music business. Occasionally Marty would suggest a midnight visit to one of his favorite diners, rant and rave about the stock market, ask me to take out an instrument so he could give me a lesson, or take the conversation in a personal direction. He was the kind of guy who really opened up to you only when you opened up to him.

If I was really lucky, Marty would take me downstairs and show me his music collection. There were and still are many wonderful and knowledgeable Jewish musicians on the New York scene, but Marty had the archive, the books, the tunes that no one else knew and no one else had even thought about for the past 50 or 60 years. When Jewish musicians passed away, who was interested in folders of freylekhs and bulgars? Surely not a Jewish archive or museum - they would be too busy with classier artifacts. But everyone knew that Marty would care, and he was the one their wives and families would call to come pick up the stuff. He shared this material with me: on one visit, on one Sunday morning, I copied over 600 pages of music!

So, I wasn’t surprised when I got the call this past summer from his son, musician Dave Levitt. “I’m putting the house up for sale, you might want to come down here and take a look,” Dave said. I had told him about the Discovery Project, the Book Center’s new venture in cultural recovery and activism, and he knew that Marty’s archive and Marty’s legacy were right at the top of my list of treasures that needed to be saved and brought to life again. Even though, I was in the midst of running our intensive, seven-week intern program, I got into my car (aided by one of my more adventurous students) and drove right down to Brooklyn, meeting Dave at the house and working from ten until one AM to make sure that all of the important material would come back to the National Yiddish Book Center to be scanned and preserved for posterity.

This month, the Discovery Project salutes Marty Levitt, a musician who really understood the value of his family's musical legacy. His son Dave will be making his father's recordings available to a mass market soon. And stay tuned - for a program and exhibit at the Book Center this summer that will bring his music alive again, so that it lives on for generations to come!

- by Hankus Netsky