By Taylor Massa
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| Sid Yiddish, 51, playing outdoors for a public performance. |
Strange happenings hide in the
most normal of places. A lonely violin whines in the background, as a man
smokes a cigarette on the rusty fire escape stairs. A cracked floor and a maze
of hallways is decorated with everything from mannequins begging to be
graffitied, to an anarchist library gifted from the disheveled Occupy Chicago
movement. The back room is a vast corner filled with windows displaying the
city skyline. Here, at
1000 N. Milwaukee Ave., sits what appears to be an abandoned office
building. The weather is greyscale and
the smell of fresh sawdust and drywall fill the first floor, as contractors
have begun the long process of construction. Most who frequent the space
MuliKulti are more colorful than the next. This is
where Sid Yiddish, 51, practices music with his band The Candystore Henchmen.
“I think to
a lot of my teachers, I was so weird. I was already out there,” Yiddish said.
“I remember singing these songs backwards, we discovered later that I was
dyslexic, but I was singing these songs backwards and the teachers would get
really upset because I was singing these beautiful songs backwards.”
Yiddish,
born in Chicago as Charles Sidney Bernstein, is a self identified 'accomplished
weirdo.' A love for music that started
early on never seemed to flicker, and today he is the lead conductor of his own
mismatched band. Currently he is in Columbia College's graduate school program
studying performing arts. However, he
cannot read music...and has no interest in learning.
“I'm sure
theory is good if you have the brain for it. I'm not necessarily a trained
animal per say, I prefer my sort of 'wantonedness' to do what I want to do.”
Every
member of The Candystore Henchmen seems to be more colorful than the next. Art
Pitkin, 67, a violinist in the band, met
Yiddish at their former place of work Manufactuer's News. They were both fired (amongst others), or 'graduated
from' as Pitkin likes to describe it, due to a general distaste of oppressive
authority and throwing impromptu concerts on the company lawn.
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| Sid Yiddish and Jason Page deliberate their next moves during band practice. |
“To our
credit, the neighbors did have the police come over to tell us to be more
quiet. So I guess our amplification was adequate on that particular date,”
Pitkin said. It was here
that Yiddish and Pitkin formed a bond, both having an affinity for the
obscure. “I describe my place in music
in one sentence: 'I play several instruments...badly,” says Pitkin.
A huge
aspect of The Henchmen's live shows is performance, specially centered around
improvisation. Yiddish has created his
own mode of conducting based around a list of 75 different hand gestures, all
signifying musical cues of an orchestra. “I try to
take the basics. The language we speak.
I study it a lot, I'm always watching people. And I think they think I'm
staring at them,” says Yiddish.
A Henchmen
show is an experience . The band is a
revolving door of musicians; young and old, strange and clean cut, keyboards
and hand drums. Yiddish's costume
consists of traditional Jewish dress complemented by a wide smile . While
conducting, his mannerisms vary, including middle fingers to the band members
signifying, “High E.”
“You could
even say that we don't play music, but rather that we make a performance. It's wacko and intentionally clashing,” says
Pitkin.
Jed Oelbaum
is a 30-year-old freelance musician in New York. Having worked with all sorts of people in the
business, he commends Yiddish for his conducting abilities: “I personally
prefer working by myself. It's ambitious
of Sid to create a structure for improv. As a concept, it's certainly as
legitimate as what maestros do to an orchestra.”
“My study
has been the world. You know, I have
depression and anxiety and I work that stuff out through my art. So if I seem spastic or extreme, I'm just
trying to work through it in my art. It's kind of how I do things,” says
Yiddish.
Wes Heine,
30 (aka 'Cousin Bones') has known Yiddish for almost 10 years working with him
on different projects. He is a Chicago
cab dispatcher and blues poet who believes music should be raw and emotional,
and that Yiddish had created just that: “Everyone knows Sid is crazy. Also,
this the most common feedback I receive as a performer,” Heine says. “The difference is that Sid is not just
artist that makes manically intense art...he is a manic-depressed person who
makes art.”
The fury
and happiness can be heard in the banging of the Henchmen's songs. While it might not sound beautiful to the
traditional ear, there is something to be said about the feelings it
invokes. Those attending Henchmen shows
are unable to hide their opinions: “Watch the audience. You will see laughter, rolled eyes, disgust,
joy, nods and defensive silence. Yet
this is a characteristic of any real art: polarizing the audience,” says Heine.
Jason Page,
34, plays keyboard in the Henchmen and relates Yiddish's music to the
scientific principle, Benford's Law; referring to the frequency in distribution
of digits. “Conducted
chaos. There is something to be said
about chaos: chaos is not random, chaos is musical in it's complete form,” says
Page.
“Art is
dangerous. Art can be interpreted as such. But there's people who just take art
so fucking seriously and they shouldn't,” says Yiddish.
Creativity
oozes from the practice space at MultiKulti.
In the middle of conducting, Yiddish leaves the room as the band
continues to play and returns with a piece of broken window shutters. Promptly handing it to the percussionist, he
says “I want you to play this too.”
Questions
aren't asked and the banging begins.
Every instrument is not what it seems.
When only the right side of the band is instructed to play, the
percussionist takes this as an ideal opportunity to chug a can of off brand
beer. Yiddish holds his hands strongly
in total focus, facing the keyboard in a boxer stance, the sign for 'rest' in
his band.
“The
Henchmen is democratic in the sense that you don't need to have qualifications
in music. You don't have to have a degree, a certain amount of experience, a
resume that says you played with all the greats,” says Pitkin.
Yiddish
treads uneven ground in the music industry.
Everything from his aesthetic to his theory would seem bizarre to most,
he admits. And he likes it that way. “Something
I say in in all of my bios is 'I may not always understand what I'm doing, but
I know you will,'” says Yiddish.
As the out
of tune keyboard tings on, it mixes pleasantly with the strings of the
violin. A synthesizer plugged into a
plastic recorder screams. Louder the
music builds.
Then
suddenly, the pandemonium stops suddenly on the same note, at the same time.
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| A panoramic shot of The Candystore Hencemen practicing. |