Klezmer Guy To Bring Taste of neo-Borscht Belt to Nighttown

Bert Stratton, who founded the Yiddishe Cup klezmer band in 1988, is often called “Klezmer Guy” by people who know him from playing clarinet at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Klezmer Guy also is Stratton’s identity as a blogger, who shares his comedic rants from a “klezmer” perspective at klezmerguy.com, and the name of a show and the trio who perform it.

“Klezmer Guy, the blog, started in 2009, and Klezmer Guy, the show, started last year,” Stratton, a Cleveland Heights resident, said in a recent email. “The show is the blog live. It’s a mix of spoken word (blog posts) and music. A beatnik/nudnik experience.”

Translation per Stratton: “Nudnik” is Yiddish for “pest,” and klezmer is instrumental Eastern European Jewish wedding music influenced by swing jazz.

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“We specialize in neo-Borscht Belt klezmer comedy,” Stratton said. “We really like Mickey Katz, who played klezmer and did Yinglish (Yiddish/English) parodies in the 1950s. Katz was from Cleveland. Joel Grey is his son.”

The Klezmer Guy show features Stratton making music and doing stand-up comedy with Alan Douglass of Lakewood on piano and Stratton’s son, Jack, on drums and percussion.

Douglass, an original member of Yiddishe Cup, “improvises piano licks as I read the blog,” Stratton said. “For instance, if I  say, ‘My dentist thinks he’s Larry David, just like all middle-aged Jewish guys,’ Alan might play the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme.”

Stratton’s son, who just graduated from the University of Michigan music school, grew up playing klezmer. 

“He played his first Yiddishe Cup gig with us when he was 4,” Stratton said. “Big mistake. He stole the show. The audience was mostly elderly women at .”

The elder Stratton grew up in South Euclid in “a highly acculturated, not particularly musical, Jewish family. I became interested in klezmer music because klezmer ‘spoke’ to me.  The scales reminded me of some distant past, I guess. Typical baby-boomer search for ‘roots.’”

In addition to klezmer music, the trio will play some jazz at Nighttown “because it’s a jazz club.” About half the show will be spoken word.

“I’m going to read some amusing stuff about jazz — maybe a blog post about the Jazz Temple, which was at Euclid and Mayfield in the early 1960s,” Stratton said. “I used to go by there every week in a Sunday-school carpool to The Temple-Tifereth Israel (University Circle), where my family belonged.  I was in grade school and didn’t understand the word ‘temple’ in a non-Jewish context.”

Other possible topics are Cleveland Indians great Rocky Colavito, Shaker Lakes and Stratton’s experiences as owner/manager of apartment buildings on the West Side, which he writes about on his blog.

“We’re going to alternate the spoken word with straight-ahead music, which will be klezmer, rock, Tin Pan Alley,” Stratton said. “I like to keep things short. There will be no long jazz solos  and no boring stories. Only short, funny and poignant stuff — musically and otherwise.”

Klezmer Guy will take the stage at Nighttown, 12387 Cedar Road, at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 14. Cost: $10.