CHEAP FOONK CHEAP Kwanzukah

Since this CHEAP FOONK falls right between the Jewish holiday Hanukah and the African American holiday Kwanzaa we felt it only fitting to celebrate them together with CHEAP Kwanzukah. If you don’t know what Kwanzaa is, look it up. Same goes for the more famous Hanukah. But don’t worry, we provide some clues in this show, a one hour misch pookah of CHEAPs favorite Black and Jewish singers, Black Jewish singers, Jewish Black singers. One singularity doesn’t shut out the other. Let’s honor our singularities together. Compare and contrast them. Come join the party, we’ll all light the Kinara. Spin our dreidel made of Kente cloth. Kwanzukah. Sing along. You will hear: A Sesame street Kwanzaa; Teddy Pendergrass singing Happy Kwanzaa, Lena Horne with Now, the rendition of Hava Nagila used as soundtrack for Cuban revolutionary filmmaker Santiago Alvarez’s great 1965 film of resistance, Now!; Bessarabia sung by young gay Black Jewish Yiddish singer, with a sexy deep Bass voice, Anthony Mordechai Tvzi Russel; The Temptations with Fiddler on the roof (with a fun intro by Lady Diana Ross); The inimitable Mickey Katz with St. Louis Blues, about which Josh Kun wrote, “there is no attempt by Katz to hold “St.Louis Blues” up as a vessel of racial authenticity or treat it as the musical key that opens the cross-racial door to black culture and, by proxy, American culture itself. Instead, the fetishizing of musical blackness that has so often accompanied white participation in black culture and that has so guaranteed the terms of whiteness itself is nearly displaced by Katz’s own fetishization of his Jewishness. The result, then, is a racially hybridized composition, one that switches between languages, bridges tradition and styles and plays on histories of musical racialization.”Then we will play a short broadcast about a Black Jewish Passover seder in 1969, followed by Sammy Davis Jr’s sort of spoken word version of In the Ghetto and Sesame Street’s Veronica Monica with some Hanukah vibes; Gil Scott Heron, of course, gave us Whitey on the moon; And Minnie Riperton with Lovin you, followed by the monumental Paul Robeson with the Yiddish song of the warsaw ghetto Zot Nit Keynmol; We couldn’t stop ourselves from playing an excerpt from the soundtrack to the 1970 Ossie Davis film Cotton Comes to Harlem. Detroit’s own Jewish black singer Jackie Wilson gave us My Yiddish Momme. And then the great – or greatest? - Nina Simone with Eretz Zavat– Chalav Udvash. And we will close the show with our own Vaginal Davis with her band Pedro Muriel and Esther and their brilliant Riche Jewish Husband.