Interview with Janet Klein


Q: Please tell me something about yourself. How did you become so fascinated by the early 1900s?

Janet Klein: I was an artistic type kid growing up in San Bernardino, California, a rather dreary town, although if you look at photos of it from old postcards from the 1910s, it was at one time, a beautiful place...lots of orange groves and a Carnegie Library building with an onion dome, an idyllic valley setting. The only places I found beautiful were those spots that were old or left alone and in tune with nature, like the old ranch down the street called the "Bachelors Back Achers" or the old Mission Inn, built in the early 1900s in nearby Riverside. An old stone cottage stood in the wash near our house, that was used as a shooting range...it was a mysterious old structure. Pointing down to the wash was a natural arrowhead shape imbedded in the hill above. Indians looked to this signpost to find a natural hotspring below. The hotspring, for as long as I can remember was a closed off Christian enclave. It had once been the fancy Arrowhead Springs CountryClub in the 1920s. Most of the modern buildings around town looked like trash. It's that basic sense of discontent and a search for places or things that made me happy or intrigued. I was fairly disconnected and discontented with contemporary culture and retreated to my dad's painting studio where he had a great record collection and a nice bohemian atmosphere. I was more comfortable around my parents, grandparents and great aunts than with other kids my own age. They told me great stories about New York in the 1930s-50s and about their experiences in the "Old Country", i.e. Poland. When I visited them I loved to see objects in their homes, clothes in the back of the closets, photographs etc. I became quite a sentimentalist...I love objects and places infused with the presence of a person or a history.
As far as female role models, I had wonderful women around me, strong, lovely, interesting, smart, talented...I didn't care for the tough-talking, "athletic" unfeminine angle of the "women's liberation" movement I saw around me in the 1970s. The grown women I knew didn't seem to be oppressed, in fact, they were ruling their respective roosts. "Bra-burning" wasn't as interesting to me as going through the lingerie drawers of my lady relatives. I think I am attracted to finding evidence to show that women have always accomplished impressive things and have had no shortage of intelligence, attitude and feminine power, without trying to be "like" men. Which has led me to paw through alot of old books, photographs, printed matter,etc. When I see photos of women from the 1910s,20s 30s...I relate, I see people like me. I look at books and magazines today and I feel like an alien.

Q: You've just been on a tour in Japan. What was the experience like to perform in a country with a totally different culture and what do you like about the Japanese audience?

Janet Klein: We love it. This was our third tour in Japan and we have felt very welcomed and comfortable. To our surprise we've met and played with talented Japanese groups playing, American string band, jug band, klezmir, 20s hot Hawaiian music there. The clubs are beautiful and well-equipped and our fans have been gracious and enthusiastic. Sometimes girls wear their grandmothers' kimonos to show me the old fabrics, and bring old photos. I have learned several obscure westernized jazzy Japanese songs from the 30s and recently a well known boogie woogie type tune from 1947, that translates as "The Ginza Can Can Girl".
I admire Japanese culture very much. They are so careful with their land. It is a very aesthetic place. There seems to be a real preservation of regional specialty and the appreciation of nature is apparent in so many ways. I wish their sensibilities of modesty and politeness and their aesthetics of "small scale refinement" would make their way over to the USA. We could use a good strong dose of that kind of influence.

Q: Your CDs feature between 18 and 26 songs each...do you know all these songs by heart? And how many songs do you play in a live performance?

Janet Klein: An average set for us is about 14-16 songs....I always have my fancy music stand on stage so I can feel comfy performing material that I haven't yet memorized, which means I can try out new things spontaneously with an audience. I've got alot of nerve that way. My band members manage to play an impressively vast repertoire on stage without charts...they are all encyclopedic smarties.

Q: What can one expect from a typical performance by Janet Klein & her Parlor Boys? Is there a typical performance at all?

Janet Klein: We often open the show with a screening of rare animated and/or musical film shorts from the 1920s-30s and then we play about an hour and a half set. We usually reconfigure the band throughout the show...Parlor Boys added and subtracted, so that we can pare down and change textures...Many of the fellows play multiple instruments, so there is always a variety of things going on musically.
Very often we play at old theatres, some with their mighty wurlitzers in tact...if so we never pass up an opportunity to bring our dear friend Bob Mitchell to play, (a legendary theatre organist playing since the 1920s). Sometimes we share the bill with a screening of a silent feature film. This year we'll be opening for "Hot Water" and "Never Weaken" with Harold Lloyd, and "Pandora's Box" [also known as Die Büchse der Pandora] with Louise Brooks and "Picadilly" with Anna Mae Wong.

Q: Why do you want to recreate times gone by? And where do you see the relevance of this era for us today?

Janet Klein: It is interesting that people ask this question. I wonder if historians are asked why they write books about the past or if they ask conductors why they put on concerts of classical music. For me, if there is such a thing as "progress" for societies, it seems that it has to include looking back as well as moving forward...and that it has to entail learning from and reflecting upon the past...and if we are smart, we'll hang on to the good stuff and drag it with us into the future. The songs we do were not written so long ago, mostly written in America, yet they seem like music from a lost planet. There's a familiarity and a strangeness that suggests something something missing today.

Q: Personally I think it's a shame that for example so many of the old movies are not available these days neither on video nor on DVD. And the vast majority certainly will soon be lost forever if nobody transfers old movies burried in the archives from celluloid to modern storage mediums. What do you think why are so few people are interested in the vintage stuff?

Janet Klein: Thank goodness for the collectors and historians and niche interest groups that help to save those films. We have the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences and UCLA Film and TV Archive here in Los Angeles which are world class hubs for film preservation. I am a nut for these things. Sometimes it comes down to the efforts of a few people who recognize a real classic treasure and go to arduous lengths to save an artwork on film.
One of the troubles with contemporary audiences appreciating old films is that relatively few people get the experience of seeing them (particularly from the silent era) on a big screen in a theatre. People with curiousity can rent video, but seeing these things on television is a short change experience.
The sounds of delight that you hear watching a good print of a great silent comedy on a big screen in a theatre full of people...it's something very special unto itself. It's that experience where people realize old films are not scratchy and primitive, that these things are really rich and impressive.

Q: Two of my favourite songs on Oh! are Rebecca Came Back from Mecca and Baltimore. Please tell me how you discovered these songs. And what do they mean to you?

Janet Klein: I am lucky enough to have friends with great 78 record collections. "Baltimore" seems to be a tune that was pretty popular in 1927. It was recorded by many different bands. It is what I like to call a "hey hey" song. It has the feel of the time...this one describes a dance called "the Baltimore" "there's a dance that's gottem like Blackbottom called Baltimore, oh baby that dance has got a rythym that's hot...when the band starts playing you'll start swaying like an old seesaw, you'll start steppin' out, getup and shout hey hey" and "Rebecca came back from Mecca" is a rarer tune I have only heard one recording of this...originally sung by Monroe Silver, a Yiddish specialty performer. It was written by Kalmar and Ruby who wrote most of the material for the Marx Brothers. These tunes have some of the cleverest lyrics ever...this one is about a girl who lives across the street who saw an oriental show and then decided she would go to Mecca across the sea. Now that she's back she's not the same..."Since Rebecca, came back from Mecca, all day long she keeps on smoking turkish tobacca, with a veil upon her face she goes dancing round the place and yesterday her father saw her with a turkish towel around her, oy oy everyone worries so...since she came back from the harem, she's got clothes but she don't wear 'em" etc.
As I said, I knew my great grandparents and other relatives who spoke yiddish, so the dialect in these songs is very familiar...my great grandmother Mary used to say, (interchangeable with the meaning of a simple oy vey) : "it's a turrible ting vat it is!"

Q: How did you discover the ukulele as musical instrument. And when did you know that this is your instrument?

Janet Klein: I like to think small. I came up drawing and painting and listening to music. I played classical piano. I wrote poetry because you could hone something small into something just right. I wished that I could be a chanteuse, so I started to write poetry that I could recite. Then I tried the triangle and used that for musical emphasis in a few poems...then the ukulele. It seemed natural to try to learn some of my favorite old songs on the ukulele...after all most sheet music from 1917 to 1935 have ukulele arrangements. It was a very popular instrument at that time. I mostly learned these for myself and then when I would play them for friends,and they really liked them...and I realized that this was a way to share these old songs with other people AND the surprise was that I could make them my own, put them over as I wanted to express them.

Q: Please tell me how you've teamed up with the Parlor Boys and why are they named Parlor Boys at all?

Janet Klein: I feel like I met the Parlor Boys like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, meeting each unique character in a different way. The first musician I met who was a wizard of 1920s music, was John Reynolds. I met him at a party not long after I started playing the ukulele. John is the grandson of silent movie actress Zasu Pitts and John sure inherited some rare talent. Tom Marion, my regular right hand Parlor Boy played with a 1920s style dance band...I tripped into a dance at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA and there he was. Ian Whitcomb had a radio show where he played Tinpan Alley recordings and English Music Hall stuff and then I found myself playing on the bill of a show called "Uketopia" with him at a local venue organized by ukulele revivalist, Jim Beloff. Anyway, the tale goes on...
Fact is that we literally meet in the parlor of my old bungalow and play music every week. I like the concept of the "parlor" in old houses, it would be where girls would entertain their gentlemen callers, and where people would read the newspaper, play piano, recite poetry, that kind of thing.

Q: You're not only collecting old music but almost everything of your favourite era and even live in an old craftsman house built in 1917. One wonders why you have an internet connection at all :-)
So how strict are you about "living" in the past and where do you discover the old things and songs?

Janet Klein: I now live in an even older house , a craftsman from 1908. It's a dream, lots of dark wood, very solid, nice big porches, 100 year old avocado tree in the back. Well, I do go kicking and screaming into the modern world, everyday braving the traffic of LA...in a modern car with a nice CD player. Ah well, I surrender to some modern conveniences, the computer in particular...it is an amazing tool. I loved the process of creating a website. I definitely collaborate with talented friends who can navigate the high tech of web and designing on computer, but ultimately we managed to wallpaper over the clean cold backgrounds, warm things up, put a patina and texture on everything and now I 've got the most old fashioned website on the internet, maybe...
We find songs from old recordings, old movies, sheet music, hand-me-downs, gifts from collectors and fans...any where we can dig things up.

Q: Who are your favourite artists (musicians and actors) from the past? Do you have a top ten of songs and movies maybe?

Janet Klein: OH boy, here goes, I know I can't narrow this down to ten of anything.
Singers & musicians:
Cab Calloway, Blanche Calloway, Fred Astaire, Lotte Lenya, Lil Armstrong, Mae West, Josephine Baker, Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, Fannie Brice, Lee Morse, Benny Moten, Charlie Johnson, Marion Harris, Jane Green, Sugar Underwood.
actors:
Marion Davies, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Nancy Carroll, Nina Mae McKinney,Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Bessie Love, Joan Blondell, Lon Chaney, George Raft, Paul Muni, James Cagney...
movies:
Dance of Life, Bronze Venus, Picadilly, Applause, Prix de Beaute, The Unknown, anything with Fred Astaire, anything with the Nicholas Brothers, the Marx Brothers, everything that Busby Berkeley did, The Kid Brother, Broadway Through A Keyhole, Hollywood Revue of 1929, The Magnificent Ambersons, King of Jazz, Vitaphone short films of the 20s and 30s...
songs: just look at my CD songlists...there are my favorites

Q: You have released five albums in eight years which is an impressive number especially as an independent artist. How did you manage this success and what do you know about your listeners and fans?

Janet Klein: Somehow the natural flow has been one CD once every two years. I started playing ukulele in 1996. I made my first CD in 1998, 2nd in 2000, 3rd 2002, 4th 2004, 5th 2006.
My first CD happened almost accidentally. I was learning alot of songs on the ukulele and I wanted to make a present for friends and family. Robert Loveless, who was an art school pal who had been making records with his bands for years, (Savage Republic, 17 Pygmies, and Scenic) became my producer and (recently) my husband, helped me to record some solo songs and played also on some tracks. I had planned on making homemade cassettes to give away. Well that was 1998 and I found out that everybody was using CD players but me, and so I looked into making CDs. Well, it seemed that you had to press 1000 copies minimum, so I went ahead with that. Because I am an artist, I just had to make fancy packaging. So it turned into this professional thing and at the end of it, I realized that I had made a "product" then what? Band fantasies. After that I was lucky enough to meet musicians who could help to hash out arrangements and who could bring these things to life in ways that were more amazing than I could have imagined.
A very broad audience has gravitated to our band. We've got (gratifyingly), film and music buffs and historians, record collectors, regular folks of all ages, from the young kids who like old movies to grandmas who "remember when", highschool flapper girls, goth and retro swing kids, lovey dovey couples, animators, magicians, people with a vaudevillian bent, etc.
The thing that never ceases to surprise me is that, I started with an interest in these old songs in such a way that I had to correspond with people far away, (pre internet) or go to libraries and now I have people sending me recordings and films and sheetmusic all the time, the collectors and the enthusiasts alike, all coming out of the woodwork.

Q: Your CDs and website come with some great artwork. Who is responsible for the ideas and the realisation?

Janet Klein: Robert, my husband and I are both crossover types in that we paint and draw and take photos and collect old stuff besides making musical things. He has always collaborated with me on the photo and art bits along the way. I always start with a strong sense that I'd like to make the package look like the stuff inside might be by an artist from the 1920s. Musically, we are always trying to be as authentic as we can and then I like the CD art to feel like an old object...like an old playbill, postcard, sheetmusic, candybox etc.
With the CD graphics and our website, I've worked with several really talented artists/designers who've brought their drawing, typographical and computer knowhow and talent into the process and each finished piece became something more delicate and well rendered than I could have thought up all by my lonesome. For instance on the new "OH!" CD, I had just found two old photos that I was crazy about...one a candid homemade photo from the 1910s of some ladies posing inside a row of wooden barrels on a porch, and another candid picture of two fellows in summer straw hats fighting over a bucket. Shortly after that, my husband and I were driving down the main street in our town and there were all these wooden barrels just sitting in a vacant lot. Well, it just happened and there was our cd concept wiggling into reality.



Robert and I took some photos and then our designer friend David Barlia got into the mix and he came up with the surprise of having one of the Parlor Boys peeking over the fence at me on the inside of the package. I remember that I gave David this old playbill I had from the 1910s from a vaudeville team called the "Big Four" in "Barnyard Frolics" well in looking at it closely, he called me on the phone and said, gee, did you see the back of that thing? and the next thing I knew he had borrowed this wonderful textural backgound from that and he came up with type treatments to die for. Big fun really, alot of little adventures all the way, it's an intriguing process every time.

Q: What can we expect from you in the future? And will you also tour Europe to promote your new album?

Janet Klein: We would love to tour in Europe, but haven't yet made much of a dent with finding promoters, distributors etc.
We've toured Japan several times now because we such strong support there.
I would love to play in Europe of course because the layers of history are everywhere. I would love to play some of the wonderful old theaters, tea-rooms, hotels, wherever there's an old atmospheric place....that's my favorite thing. Because when you play this old music in old rooms where the music was a long time ago, it comes close to time warping.
As far as future projects, I would like to record more songs with organist Bob Mitchell on the Mighty Wurlitzer, we want to record some of the westernized Japanese jazz songs from the 30s we've learned recently, some ragtime material, more yiddish flavored borscht belt ditties, more vaudeville duets with patter, more old Italian instrumentals...we plan on doing more of the same, which is digging for buried treasure, what we do seems to change according to what we find.

For more infos visit janetklein.com and cdbaby.com and read my review of Oh!.