Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin

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Woody Guthrie’s music was part of the soundtrack of young Lorin Sklamberg’s life growing up in California.  The seeds were sown.  Years later, The Klezmatics, the group co-founded by Lorin in 1986, would win a Grammy Award for the album “Wonder Wheel:” music by The Klezmatics, lyrics by Woody Guthrie.  

This is a meaningful time for The Klezmatics, 40 years since the band’s creation, 20 years since the release of “Wonder Wheel” and concerts across Europe and the United States.  Now comes an expanded 20th anniversary edition of “Wonder Wheel” and an album celebrating the group’s 40 year anniversary: “We Were Made For These Times.”  

 Indeed.

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Paula Eiselt caught the movie bug early, taking the rare day off from the Yeshiva she attended on Long Island to watch Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem For A Dream.”  She was hooked and eventually interned for Aronofsky a few years later.  At film school at NYU, many student films were shot on Saturdays.  That was a problem.  Saturday was Shabbat for Paula, the Jewish sabbath, a day of rest.  So began Paula’s balancing of life as a Modern Orthodox Jew and a documentary film director.  It hasn’t been easy, but she’s done it, thanks in part to the support of mentors at NYU.  Perhaps it is not a coincidence that some of her films, including her most recent “We Met At Grossinger’s,” feature strong women.

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Growing up in the small town of Morden, Manitoba, Loreena McKennitt wanted to be a veterinarian.  But she was also surrounded by music.  After a brief stint in university, her love of music took over.  The animal world’s loss was our gain.  Much of her music for more than four decades has largely been informed by her love of travel and Celtic history.  It’s a musical journey that has taken her around the globe, but has always brought her back to her beloved Canadian home.

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Ashley Kahn writes books about music.  Not just any music.  Albums.  Iconic albums.  “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis.  “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane.  And now, “Graceland” by Paul Simon.  He also knows the music business from the inside, having served as a tour manager.  The love affair with music started as it did for so many of us, listening to the joy that came out of an AM radio as a kid.  To borrow a phrase from “Graceland” and the title of Ashley’s new book, it was a feeling of “miracle and wonder.”  And it still is.

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JANNY SCOTT

“9/11: Portraits of Grief”

After a long hiatus, welcome back to “Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin.”  

In the days and weeks and months after September 11th, I became an avid reader of a daily New York Times series called “Portraits of Grief,” 220-word snapshots of the people whose lives had been taken on 9/11. 

Former New York Times reporter Janny Scott was a part of the team that created “Portraits of Grief.”  She wrote many of the first profiles. 

Response to the series was immediate and passionate.  Millions read the profiles, on the subway, on the street, before going to bed.  The profiles elicited smiles and tears.  They provided therapy and more than a touch of humanity at a time when we were struggling.   And the series is remembered, 25 years later. 

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There are a lot of different people on a movie set.  It usually helps when all of them are rowing in the same direction.  Erika Burke Rossa got an early lesson in interacting with all sorts of different people, growing up in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then coming to New York to be a dancer, an actor, a social worker and now a first-time feature film director.

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FRANK FILIPETTI

Creating Behind The Console

If you’re a music buff like me, you could listen to seven time Grammy Award winning engineer and producer Frank Filipetti talk all day long.  There are stories of joy and inspiration and an improbable journey, working with James Taylor and Carly Simon, Broadway musical casts and recording the traditional sounds of the Bush men and women in southern Africa.

 He can perhaps understand the musician better than most engineers and producers.  In the first ten years of his career, he was that musician, gigging and recording and surviving and dreaming in New York.   And then at 31, he found himself professionally adrift and had to make a decision.  We’ve been the beneficiaries of that decision.

Frank is currently part of a show at the Sheen Center in New York called Studio Confidential: Music’s greatest behind the console stories.  Ticket info is at https://www.sheencenter.org/events/detail/studio-confidential-1

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KEN BELSON

“Every Day Is Sunday”

The Super Bowl has long been America’s unofficial national holiday.  Ken Belson covers the business of the NFL and other sports, bringing a business journalism background to his work rather than a sports journalism background.  He learned the lessons of how to deal with influential corporate executives as a business reporter in a land not associated with football: Japan.  But those lessons learned long ago laid the groundwork for a new book that tells a story as compelling as any game: “Every Day Is Sunday:  How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut.”

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We are going deep into the archives for this episode of "Before The Cheering Started with Budd Mishkin."

I’ve been blessed to have a long career in broadcast journalism and meet so many intriguing people along the way.  During my years covering sports, when I spent more than a few days and nights at Yankee Stadium, there was nothing better than spending some time with the longtime public address announcer at the Stadium, Bob Sheppard.  For more than fifty years, his voice was an integral part of the experience at Yankee Stadium.  Meeting him and developing a friendship with him was one of the great joys of my life.  

He was a thoughtful man, well read, kind and, to use one of his words, “mannerly.”  And he was a wonderful storyteller, without an iota of hubris despite the love and adoration he engendered.  And so when I found an old cassette from my former radio station of an interview I did with Bob in 1986 for “WNBC’s Sportsnight with Dave Sims,” I listened and smiled and wanted to share it.  

Bob died in 2010.  He is still beloved and will never be forgotten.

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Arturo O’Farrill says his piano looks at him every day and asks “want to dance?”

Let the playing begin.

Arturo O’Farrill’s love affair with music spans generations.  It started with his father Chico and continues with Arturo’s sons Adam and Zack.  He’s shared the love with thousands of students through the years in classrooms and on performance stages.  After almost two decades of ideas and meetings and work, Arturo’s love of Afro Latin jazz will soon have a home in East Harlem.  Casa Belongo.