Bagels & Bongos

In 1961, a cocktail jazz pianist named Irving Fields went into a Boston recording studio with a mission. After decades of performing his romantic brand of Latin jazz – he had written a hit for Xavier Cugat, “The Miami Beach Rhumba,” and “Managua, Nicaragua” for Guy Lombardo -- Fields wanted to put his stamp on the music of his youth: Jewish music. He grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, and was a child actor in the Yiddish theater. It felt perfectly natural for him to take classics such as “My Yiddishe Momme” and “Belz” and give them a little Latin zest; and he was sure that his audience would go for it, too. This was the heyday of the mambo and cha-cha-chá, after all. Taking a break for lunch at a local deli, the composer was contentedly jawing a corned beef sandwich when inspiration struck and all the ideas crowding his head fell into place. The title, of course, would have to be Bagels and Bongos. (Check out the Reboot Stereophonic reissue!)

Fields, born Irving Schwartz, had been performing such material for years on cruise ships, in hotels in Florida and New York, and in the Jewish resorts known as the Borscht Belt. In fact, beloved Jewish artists from the Barry Sisters to Mickey Katz had gone Latin from time to time. There was even an ode to kosher wine called “Mambo-shevitz.” (Man oh man!) But none shared Fields’ flair for Cuban boogie and Yiddish schmaltz. When he brought the Bagels and Bongos tapes to Decca Records in New York, they were ecstatic. The album was a smash, inspiring a string of recordings, and is today a highly sought-after collector’s item.

Fields had tapped into a Jewish affection for tropical music that was at its apex by the start of the ‘60s. Thousands of Jewish resort-goers spent summers learning to dance rumba and cha-cha-chá. Weddings and bar-mitzvahs from New York to Miami to Cleveland to Los Angeles were punctuated by mambos and conga-lines, and had been since the late ‘40s. While few remember it today, in the postwar years the cha-cha-cha was known as the Jewish National Dance. Young Jewish fans of Tito Puente and Xavier Cugat called themselves “mamboniks” – which was Yiddish for mambo-lovers – and they were active in every aspect of Latin music: as musicians, dancers, record producers, club owners, concert promoters, radio broadcasters, even the first mass-produced bongos were designed by a Jewish drum-maker.

In making mambo their lives’ soundtrack – so soon after the war in Europe ended and its horrors began to sink in -- the Mamboniks chose to tell their story over again, to a different beat. Bagels and Bongos, for instance, took a lugubrious history, full of despairing Yiddish chronicles and plaints, and made it swing. Fields’ music is by turns romantic and sentimental, traditional and hip, surprising and familiar. At first blush it sounds like the cocktail music tinkling at a yacht club function, but the meter and melodies would never have been heard at a WASPy society ball. It was Jewish music, and distinctly American Jewish music, Latin beat and all.

• A recent and abbreviated interview with Irving
• Irving Fields & Roberto Juan Rodriguez on Tzadik Records