| HOME | NEXT |
New Years Eve, 1998/99 with some of the restaurant staff, all newly arrived immigrants to Queens and from the same region of Romania.
| How does one
adequately describe a musician's rounds at an ethnic restaurant? Well the driver's seat is
yours, and you are on an international journey of sorts: your task is to cover your
four-walled environment with a preponderance of the prerequisite ethnic styles of music.
Of course, especially around Oktoberfest season, you must lean very heavy on the German
styles. Outside of Oktoberfest time, you are sure to include a rich variety of those less
"ponderous" styles, adding to your stereotypical beer hall "oom pah
pah" repertory a little more polish and sophistication exemplified by the Vienna of
Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár or Emmerich Kálmán. In my case, aside from the various
German repertories, I had another musical agenda as well that catered to other musical
palettes, such as standards from the Hollywood Golden Age for instance, as well as
selections in musette style culled out of classic French films or the repertory of Edith
Piaf. With less personal freedom of choice you will often become an accessory in providing
functional music for special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and
other such rites of passage. Again, with concrete examples from my experience in mind, I
have been in such incongruous situations as trying to provide the appropriate music for a
party thrown by a group of Armenian-Americans for a religious patriarch from their Queens
community.
|
New Years Eve, 1998/99 with some of the restaurant staff, all newly arrived immigrants to Queens and from the same region of Romania. |