Revealing Willie Bergman –

by Dr. Rohan Kriwaczek,

senior lecturer in Conceptual Ethno-musicology, University of Bexhill-on-Sea.

I have always known the music of Willie Bergman, for it formed a large part of the soundtrack to my early childhood, although of course I had no idea who or what it was, or even that it was extraordinary. To me it was the very definition of normality, the record Bubbe always played; it smelt of noodle kugal, pickled cucumber and moth balls. I later learnt that it had been my grandfather’s favourite album through the early sixties. He had died in 1969, two years after I was born, and Bubbe liked to play it whenever family came over to make him feel more present. I have no idea what happened to the record when Bubbe died, indeed I didn’t think about it at all for many years but something of its rich, smaltzy funkiness stayed with me. I could always recall it, distantly sounding somewhere in my inner ear, subtly informing my musical choices through life. A few years ago, I decided to try to find it. The problem was I didn’t have a name. Bubbe always called it Willie’s album, and I remember her telling me once that Oskar (grandfather) had been friends with Willie, that they had played in a band together during the war. But that was it, and it was not enough.

Then, in June 2004 I gave a public talk on traditional Sussex ballads and was accosted afterwards by an earnest and enthusiastic elderly gentleman who insisted he had a collection I should see. His name was Walter Bergman, and in one of life’s extraordinary coincidences, he was Willie Bergman’s son. The collection he had referred to told the story of the music I had been searching for, and it proved to be a surprising, contradictory and fascinating story indeed. It was a huge family archive of gramophone records, contracts, letters, legal documents, photographs and many hand written pages, which filled two large trunks and a book case. Over the next few months, as we steadily worked our way through the archive, each piece of paper was coloured in with tales and anecdotes told by Walter, not infrequently over glass of schnapz. I quickly realised the value of these conversations, and the inadequacy of my own note-taking, and so brought along a tape-recorder.

Sadly, shortly after we had finished this work, Walter died. On my recommendation the collection was left to the Mill Hill Museum of Jewish Antiquity, where it can now be studied by appointment. Four years on I am still collating the many recordings I made during those evenings, putting them into context, pulling them into readable shape, and I hope to have an extensive biography of Willie Bergman prepared for publication by 2011.

I know Walter, had he lived, would have been delighted at the sudden resurgence of interest in his father’s music, as a result of our and others recent efforts.  And it has indeed been quite extraordinary. After nearly fifty years in obscurity his arrangements have suddenly become all but de rigueur. It seems he has at last been granted the success he both longed for and shunned; for Willie Bergman was, by all accounts, full of contradictions, right from the beginning.

****

William Efraim Bergman was born on July 16th 1917. His birth itself took place in a rented room above a tailor’s shop on Brick Lane that his mother shared with her parents and his three elder sisters. The room across the hall housed her sister and a number of other cousins. Willie’s father had been killed a few months earlier at the Somme. His parents had originally come to England from Russia in 1904 to escape the escalating pogroms, but had never managed to find their feet in the new country, and barely scraped by with a series of poorly paid jobs within the East End Jewish community. As soon as the children were old enough they too were put to work sewing sequins onto expensive ladies hats, or sorting bags of beads; anything that their tiny hands and sharp eyes could do to bring in a few extra pennies. However when, for his fifth birthday, Willie’s grandfather made him a cigar-box fiddle, his path through life took a sudden unexpected turn, for he almost immediately displayed a remarkable facility with the crudely made instrument, so much so that a few months later the tailor who worked downstairs presented the young boy with the gift of a real half size violin. Willie quickly outgrew his grandfather’s tuition and soon a proper teacher was found, one who was happy to trade lessons for clothing repairs. By his early teens Willie was earning more than the rest of his family put together playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. But his sights were set much higher, and at the age of sixteen he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.

At the Academy he was placed firmly under the tutelage of the elderly and conservative John Dunn. Dunn was allegedly a fervent anti-Semite and, according to Walter, it was Dunn’s regular verbal abuse and favouritism of other students that pushed Willie towards his first great crisis of confidence and identity. Years later he wrote about this time in a letter to Walter:

... It seemed at the time that all my problems, all my difficulties in life, all my struggles, my trials and tribulations sprung from one thing: my Jewish roots. Throughout my childhood I had worked towards escape from that dreary colourless world into which I was born.  And now I had finally achieved that escape, I was at the Academy, studying to earn my place among the gentiles; and yet even there my roots seemed to offend with such active virulence. And so I resolved to shed it all. To cleanse myself of all past, all roots, all culture. I would become an Englishman, a gentleman. I would deny my roots once and for all. And I would grow a splendid moustache as a badge of my newly invented English persona... And so I joined the British Union of Fascists.[1]

Willie’s involvement with the BUF started in 1935 when he was nineteen. He was not particularly active as a member, seeing it more as a symbolic act of cleansing, though he did attend a number of important marches, including the now notorious “battle of Cable Street”. As can be imagined, his family were greatly upset and disowned him at the time, however this, of course, was just the response he was after. Nonetheless he did keep sending money to his mother which was always graciously accepted.

One day in March 1937 he attended a masterclass at the Royal Academy clearly inebriated and in full black shirted uniform, creating something of a scandal which resulted in his summary expulsion. However his involvement with the blackshirts had by then given him entree to the freemasons[2], and through them he moved into the world of big band, first as a jobbing saxophonist (he had taught himself to play many other instruments in his years at the Academy), and later as a composer and arranger. It was in November 1938, when news of Kristallnacht reached the East End Jewish community, that Willie finally renounced his membership of the BUF. He was afterall brought up on tales of the Russian pogroms and was well aware of the full implications of such an anti-Semitic uprising. Though he retained his assertion of Englishness, he also shaved off his moustache, as if to disassociate himself from the famously moustachioed Mosley, whose style he had intentionally borrowed.

According to Walter, it was Willie’s experience at the Academy and his subsequent expulsion that first rammed home to him the truth in what his grandparents had always taught him: that as a Jew he couldn’t afford to get noticed. But he had also tasted the excitement of taking a stand, and had greatly enjoyed the thrill of it. Thus formed the conflict between direct action, putting his head above the parapet, and remaining unobtrusive, unnoticed, unknown, which was to inform his choices and direction for much of the rest of his life.

At the outbreak of World War II Willie immediately enlisted, later explaining to Walter that it had provided the perfect opportunity to reassociate the diverse identities he had so far assembled. He could feel himself to be both the loyal Englishman, the honourable patriot fighting for justice and the Jew standing up against the oppression of his people; the hero, leading the moment and an anonymous part of a larger anonymous machine. There would no longer be any conflict. However, he was unfortunately discharged within six weeks as “unfit for duty” due to his increasingly poor eyesight: he blamed his childhood years sewing sequins by candlelight. Instead he was given a civil service job with the Ministry for Propaganda, writing arrangements and playing saxophone and trumpet as required in various civilian government sponsored dance bands.

It was during these early war years that he first experienced what he was to later refer to as “the unperturbed freedom of anonymity”, apparently a phrase he was very fond of using. In one of the many letters written to his mother during this period he explains:

... You would think that sitting in an office churning out tunes and arrangements day after day would become tedious but I have found a way to make each day become its own little adventure. For you see our work is all submitted upstairs anonymously; and so each day I invent a new persona, give him a whole history and personality and then consider what might be his musical influences. Today it was an American- Italian called Al Fetucini, who came to big band music from a background in light opera. He had previously been a tenor, and was eternally haunted by Verdi’s aria “O Patria Mia”. Then I spend the day writing the music he would write were he in my position. I end up trying out so many different things, odd combinations of ideas, and some of them, I suspect, might even sound pretty good...[3]

[translated from the original Yiddish]

It was also during this period that he first stumbled upon a rhythmic device that was to make him, or rather his later alter ego Solomon Schwartz, a household name, at least in certain quarters of the East End for a brief time during 1963 that is. Years later he recalled in a fragment from an aborted autobiography how he first derived der Schvitz, the rhythm later to become known as the Yiddish Twist:

... It was back in the days when I got into the habit of inventing people each morning to keep myself amused. That day it was a sad old Yid, past his prime, who would hang out with musicians from American dance bands hoping that some of their cool might rub off on him. In the mornings he would write tunes that he thought were “cool” but really were terribly stuck in the old world. One thing I did to achieve this effect was to take the rhythms traditionally played by viola and accordion in the wedding bands of my youth, and gave them a crude American syncopation. Then sped the whole thing up a little. And voila! Der schvitz was born!...[4]

Of course it was only Willie who thought of it as der Schvitz at the time. No dance with a name sounding so potentially Germanic would have taken off in the way der Schvitz did amongst service personnel during the war. The world around called it the hot beat, a good American sounding name, but to Willie, and therefore also to Walter, it was always der Schvitz. The hot beat was indeed a huge hit amongst the various troop bases throughout the winter of 1941, and in March 1942 Willie was temporarily transferred to RAF Wittering for two months as an official advisor to the Entertainment Corps with explicit orders to help the military arrangers perfect the subtleties of hot beat orchestration techniques.

However, Willie’s patriotic zeal was to come to a sudden end when news of the fate of the Sturma reached London’s Jewish community. The Sturma was a converted coal barge that had picked up 769 Jewish refugees in Constanza, Romania, in February 1942. Being considerably overloaded it soon began to sink near the Turkish coast. The Turkish government refused to allow the passengers to embark unless the British government would give assurances that all passengers would be allowed to proceed to Palestine. Britain, however, refused and six days later the ship sank killing everyone on board. This event caused much outrage amongst the Jewish community, and for Willie it led to a major reaffirmation of his Jewish roots; for a period he even wore a yarmulke to his place of work. He also took to reading the works of Marx and Engels, and declaring himself to be a Communist and Internationalist, but then, when the photographs of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp reached England his political aspirations began to turn toward Zionism.

With the end of the war Willie returned to working as a free-lance composer, arranger and jobbing horn-player, but for him, and many amongst the Jewish community, the victory was somewhat soured by the horrific reports coming back with the servicemen of the fate of Europe’s Jews. Each new account added further fuel to the fire of Zionism burning in many a Jewish heart. However Willie was not yet ready to up roots and head for the Promised Land, and so, for the mean time, turned his anger and determination towards another battle.

Post war England was a hotbed of left wing agitation and trade union activity as the returning troops now wanted a greater stake in the country they had risked life and limb for; and in this the music industry was no different. For many years membership of the Musicians Union had been exclusive to those who played in West End shows and professional orchestras, and indeed often tied up with membership of, or association with, the Freemasons. Jewish musicians (many of whom felt betrayed by Britain’s unwillingness to help the desperate plight of Europe’s Jewry during the war, and its increasing hostility towards the founding of the state of Israel) were spoiling for a fight, and turned their attention towards breaking this exclusivity, thus opening the MU to every professional musician. The campaign was led by Ivor Mairants and Billy Amstell and involved a catalogue of boycotts and pickets outside MU offices and West End shows. Willie himself led the picket outside the Borham Wood MU office running it as a mass “jam” with up to a hundred musicians playing continuously during office hours for five days until the police became involved and began confiscating instruments, thus putting many of the musicians off continuing the protest. But by then the point had been made, and in March 1948 the MU finally agreed to open its membership to all. However it proved to be a hollow victory as the following years saw a steady decline in the popularity of Big Bands, and many of the musicians involved in the protest soon found themselves out of work; amongst them Willie.

Having spent the previous fifteen years working primarily as a composer and arranger for Big Bands, Willie now had to compete with the jobbing musicians hanging out on Archer Street[5], hoping to get picked out for a gig, and it was there that he first came upon the many Caribbean musicians that had come across in the previous years on the Empire Windrush[6] and the many other boats that followed it during the late 1940s. Small groups would jam together on street corners all along Archer street throughout the early 1950s, showing off their skills and style and would later gather at the Rehearsal Club, also on Archer Street, and play together through the night. Initially Willie hung out with the other Jewish jazzers he had known for years, but he found himself increasingly drawn to the more musically colourful and exotic tones of the Caribbean immigrants, at one point forming a short-lived quartet with Jamaican musicians Pete Pitterson and Joe Harriott in which Willie played the Bass[7]. But things were not going well, money and regular work were proving to be a problem, and so he decided to reassert his Zionist zeal and head for Israel. Early in December 1952 he boarded the Northern Star and embarked upon the three week voyage to Israel.

Willie arrived in Israel on December 22nd 1952, during an unusually powerful storm, and had to wait two days before embarking. He was housed in one of the ma’abarot camps[8], a tented city ankle deep in mud with no sewage or water facilities. Unemployment was rife and Willie found his skills as a musician were of no value in this environment. In addition saxophone reeds were not available and he had brought only 2 spares which quickly wore out leaving the only instrument he had brought with him entirely redundant.  Life proved very hard in the early years of Israeli independence, and coming from the relative wealth of London he found he was less well equipped both emotionally and physically than the many holocaust survivors and Eastern European immigrants for whom poverty had always been a way of life. It was four months before Willie was finally given a place in one of the collective farms, or kibbutz, and he spent the following eighteen months tending to a field of avocados. But Willie was not happy; his Kibbutz experience undermined his faith in both Zionism and Socialism, and he decided it was time to go home. Finally, in September 1954 he had had enough and sold his fine Selmer saxophone to buy himself a ticket back to England.

A frustrated and disillusioned Willie arrived back in England to find his compositions, arrangements and playing style had become outdated and was no longer wanted or appreciated. He was disillusioned with Zionism, disillusioned with socialism, even disillusioned with music itself, and so, one afternoon in 1958 he unexpectedly found himself standing outside the Central Synagogue on Great Portland Street, contemplating if he should venture inside. He describes the moment in a fragment from an unfinished memoir amongst Walter’s collection:

It suddenly struck me that despite my Zionism, despite wearing a yarmulke during the war; even despite my time in Israel I hadn’t entered a synagogue since my childhood.  And yet something was calling me inside, some irresistible force, and all I could do was follow. As I entered the magnificent main hall it all came flooding back to me; how my grandparents had taken me to synagogue every Friday and Saturday, the blessings over the candles and food at dinnertime, the old Yiddish tunes my grandpa would play on his wheezy accordion; all of it. And suddenly I realised it was not that I was Jewish; it was that I was a Jew. Although at the time I was not certain quite what that meant I could feel it to be true in my heart. Over the next few months I came to many different conclusions and interpretations, and however right or wrong they may have been they were to change for good the way I led my life, and the music that I was to both write and play...

... Ultimately, for me, it came down to an issue of identity, ethnicity. I was neither English, nor Israeli, nor Russian as my parents and grandparents had been, and yet I was connected to them all. And so I realised that that is what it is to be a Jew; to encompass them all and yet ally myself to none; to dress myself in the surrounding culture whilst knowing that underneath it all I was “other”... and so I tried to express this complex interrelation of cultures and ideas in my music: and to that end I created Solomon Schwartz – a man so comfortable with this “otherness” that he could look both forwards and backwards, inwards and outwards without compromising at any point the Jew that lay beneath. It became to me a mandate to break free from the structured perceptions that so sternly dictate what is and isn’t acceptable within music and indeed the whole of society...

... and so I resolved to form a band that took these aspirations and wore them on its sleeve...[9]

[The above lines were written in 1965, only months before his death. Had he lived to see the social revolutions of the later 1960s, the klezmer revival of the early 80s, and the fashion for ethnicity that dominated the 90s world music scene he may well have felt differently, but the early 1960s were still dominated by the old social structures and definitions.]

Little is known about Willie’s life during the last few years of the 1950s. According to Walter he was gigging under the names Danny Cohen and Eric Israel at various Butlins holiday camps around the South East, but it is clear he must have also been making arrangements and gathering together musicians as the Solomon Schwartz Yiddish Twist Orchestra is known to have debuted at the Don Juan Room on February 29th 1961[10], and indeed by all accounts, or rather, judging by Walter’s account, it was an instant moderate success, providing Willie with the regular work and income he hadn’t managed since the end of the war. By the spring of 1962 he was earning up to £15 per gig as bandleader and was able to pay his musicians £10, a fee previously reserved for only the top orchestral players. That summer the Yiddish Twist Orchestra became the resident dance band of the Astor Club, playing one of the most sought after dance nights in London, and on July 22nd 1962 they signed a two album contract with EMI Records. However, the glory days were soon pass as, on October 5th 1962, The Beatles released their first single heralding the decline and ultimate total collapse of the instrumental dance band culture. The first of these two albums was recorded at Abbey Road studios on August 18th, but before its release, due the following March, EMI decided to drop the project, correctly recognising the runaway success of guitar based bands as the future. Willie was however able to negotiate the master tapes as part of the severance deal and the album was finally released in June 1963 on Schnorer Recordings, a small Jewish label based in Golders Green. That was the record Bubbe used to play on every family visit, the record I hadn’t heard since my childhood, that had haunted and informed my own development as a musician ever since; and so when Walter first put the needle down into its grooves my delight and surprise were matched only by the flood of childhood memories it evoked.

It is strange how background information and acquired knowledge can change your perception of something as abstract as music, for as I listened to those tunes for the first time in nearly thirty years I realised I was hearing them in three different ways. The first was driven by memories – I recalled how I used to dance about as a child, attempting to physically express the glee and excitement I heard in it; a naive and simplistic yet delightfully direct response to the rhythms, colours and basic tunefulness of the music. The second perception was driven by the more analytic musicological framework I had developed since I last heard it: I found myself fascinated by the mix and match of cultures and times it represented; I could hear then influence of Jazz, of Klezmer, of the Caribbean rhythms so popular in the late 1950s, of the big band horns that had rallied the troops during the war, and of course the old Yiddish tunes dragged into the present by the twang of electric guitars and the psychedelic whirr of the Hammond organ: a truly international music yet somehow rooted in England, more specifically the Jewish East End of London. Lastly, I found I was listening to it as a kind of musical summary of the life I had been researching: I could hear every step of Willie’s journey up to that point somehow brought together and placed into context by the extraordinary marriage of sounds and musical idioms presented on that recording. Walter assured me that the name, Yiddish Twist, derived from Der Schwitz, the dance rhythm Willie had developed during the war, of which it was a lighter, faster version, although it seems more likely that the name was a reference to the more well known rock’n’roll dance the twist, as successfully promoted by Chubby Checker during the early 1960s, and certainly Willie’s music does share something of the exuberance of Checker’s twist, but with a different and distinct rhythm[11].

The end of 1963 brought with it the end of Willie’s period in the sun. Dance bands of any kind were no longer fashionable, and Willie found himself reduced to playing Weddings and Bar Mitzvahs for the first time since his youth. Then on September 5th 1965 Willie had a massive heart attack whilst on stage during a wedding at the Golders Green Jewish Community Centre, having just finished a novelty trumpet solo on hosepipe and funnel. He died two days later and was buried at Bushey Jewish Cemetery, next to his mother and grandparents.

Or at least that was the story according to Walter.

****

It wasn’t until a couple of months after Walter’s death that certain questions began to arise to which I could find no obvious answers. At that point Walter’s collection was still in my hands and I had already written a number of articles about Willie’s life and works for various Jewish and ethnomusicological journals. A series of concerts honouring the Yiddish Twist Orchestra were being planned for later that year, and had already been granted funding. And so, when I started seeing holes and inconsistencies in Walter’s story I was at first keen to view them as nothing more than the occasional confusion of an enthusiastic old man. Walter was afterall a theatrical and charismatic storyteller, prone to long anecdotes that veered from wildly from subject to subject, and it was not any great surprise to find that at times he may have elaborated a touch, or confused one instance with another. Indeed his gusto and charm when talking about Willie were so infectious that I was, I must admit, somewhat swept along by the tale and it was only months later, after Walter’s death, when listening back to the hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, that I began to notice little details that didn’t quite fit: names that were supposed to be Willie’s stage names performing at different venues on the same night; clubs that Willie was supposed to have played at that had closed a few years earlier or opened a few months later; but it was the issue of Walter Bergman’s birthday that finally brought the whole tall tale crashing down.

I had from time to time asked Walter when he was born, but he had always shrugged it off saying something like “this is about Willie or me?”, or “what has that to do with the price of schmutz; ask me something interesting”, but I hadn’t realised quite how evasive he had been until listening through the recordings months later. He had given away nothing of his childhood, of his mother or his father as parents; indeed he had barely mentioned his mother at all. He did make one comment, however, that suggested he was born in London during the war, and so I visited the public records office to see what I could find out. What I had expected to be a passing visit turned into three long days of research. I was looking for a Walter Bergman, son of William Efraim Bergman and yet the only Walter Bergman I could find within probable dates was born to a Moishe Bergman in 1944. The was almost no mention of a William Efraim Bergman in any appropriate public records whatever, although a William Albert Bergman was, it appears, present at RAF Wittering in March 1942. I was, to say the least, a little confused, and so decided to try to trace any surviving brothers of Walter, son of Moishe, in the hope that maybe they were related in some way and might know a little more about the family. This proved surprisingly easy and within an hour I had arranged to meet Sigmund Bergman, youngest brother of Walter Bergman, son of Moishe. What he told me was to completely destroy everything I had come to believe about Willie Bergman.

Walter, my Walter, was in fact Sigmund’s brother; and their father, Moishe, was a school caretaker. Their mother had died when Walter was three, and Sigmund never knew her. Family rumour had it that the young couple had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and somehow made their way to England, but it was never spoken about and Moishe refused to talk at all about anything to do with the old country, ever. All Sigmund knew was that they had once lived near Krakow. Moishe had most definitely never been a musician, never expressed any interest in music, and Walter had, it seems, always been in the habit of making up stories about his father’s past, as if to fill in the gaps. He had apparently been doing it since he was very young, and had received more than a few thorough beatings for it. Yet even Sigmund was impressed with the extent of this elaborate pretence. Over the course of a long evening and more than one bottle of wine I gave him a kind of guided tour of Walter’s collection, and played him extracts from the many recordings I had made. He seemed genuinely astonished and yet could not stop smiling to himself, and, as he explained later, to Walter’s memory. When I was finished he gave me broad grin and said “He must have loved you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You must have made an old man very happy.”

I evidently looked puzzled as he went on to explain “I think it’s a Jewish thing... Every nation has a need for nostalgia, to feel a part of history, a part of the culture in which they live; but for us, for Jews, it sometimes comes out differently. For generations, you see, we were deprived of all participation. We didn’t touch history; we were merely allowed to continue. And so now, when we finally arrive where we are free, we aim straight for the trunk of the tree, the professions, doctors, dentists, politicians: it isn’t about the money, or the power; it’s about belonging, becoming a part of the backbone of society, the establishment, doing something that may count. But Walter, he was a storyteller; he never set his sights on anything concrete. Yet still he wanted to belong to history. And you gave him that chance. You believed his tale; you made him, or rather his creation, Willie, a character in the life of England. And you made others believe it too. You must have made him very happy.” He said this as if he didn’t realise that I was Jewish, and hence I could not possibly understand. And in truth I am not sure I do. My experience has been entirely different. But then again I am a professional, a member of the establishment, so who knows.

And that would have been the end of it, bar a little tidying up, but Willie Bergman was to surprise me once again.

On making this deiscovery my first and most anxious thoughts were for my career. I realised I had broken the first rule of scholarship and biography: I had been entirely seduced by my subject, worse, I’d been hood-winked, and published articles that demonstrated the crime. I did, for a moment, consider keeping it to myself, continuing with the concert promotions and writing the biography, but I knew I would get found out in the end. Unlike Walter, I was never any good at lying. I had always lacked that particular form of imaginative thought: my skills lay in putting puzzles together. And so I turned once again to studying Walter’s collection, this time with more of a detective’s eye.

Detaching Walter and Willie from the collection of objects and papers before me wasn’t easy; they had become so embedded with meaning, and memories of Walter’s tales. But once I began to see them for what they really were, the true scale of the achievement became apparent. Walter had taken a large and random collection of music memorabilia, each with something slightly Jewish about the names or venues, and, through an extensive addition of forged printed and handwritten papers (no doubt his own hand though in a contrivedly old fashioned style) intricately woven them all together into an elaborate and detailed hoax. It was fantastic. I had never come upon anything like it. And then it occurred to me that by making Walter the hero of the story, by telling the story of the hoax, using my own gullibility to demonstrate Walter’s credibility: that might just redeem me.

When, a few weeks later, my article The Myth of Willie Bergman was published in The Guardian Weekend Supplement, the response was unprecedented, for me at least. Articles by others followed in all the major newspapers, admittedly more interested in the news aspect of the story: Expert Hoaxed by Elderly Fantasist!; followed by radio interviews, even the occasional TV comment, and then the focus began to change from me towards Willie himself, and of course Walter. My concern for the planned concerts which had afterall been publicly funded by the Arts Council proved entirely unfounded as this publicity, far from putting off the concert promoters as I had feared, caused all the nights to sell out and so a national tour was hastily put together.

And so it seems that Willie Bergman is to have his day in the sun after all.

The last few months have seen a host of blog-sites and music forums discussing Willie Bergman, with an increasing number of commentators choosing to take the stance that he was real. I have even started receiving emails from people across the Diaspora claiming that Willie was their father, or uncle, or cousin. There have even been those who suggest that maybe Walter was in fact the hoax, carefully calculated to generate publicity, and that Willie Bergman was indeed a real unknown and underappreciated bandleader. It is as if he has become a kind of Jewish Everyman, although admittedly on something of a small scale. Clearly there are a great number of people out there who want to believe in him. The Willie Bergman Yiddish Twist Orchestras (there are currently two) are both on successful tours, one in Europe and one in Argentina, and the fad shows no sign of waning.

And the record Bubbe used to play? I have not been able to discover anything about the real Solomon Schwartz, despite my many efforts. Whoever recorded it, and under whatever circumstances, it has now, due to all this hoo-hah, been rereleased by a Russian Label and is doing well in the Itunes World Music charts. Where they got it from I do not know, and they seem unwilling or unable to tell me. At yet Bubbe did always call it Willie’s record; perhaps a bizarre coincidence, perhaps something more. I guess it will forever remain one of those many things I wish I had had the interest to ask her about when she was still here.

[1] This document is one of a number a memoir fragments found among Willie’s collection. Like all the other documents quoted it is currently available for study at the Mill Hill Museum of Jewish Antiquity – catalogue number WB-M4-206.

[2] During this time the Musician’s Union was a closed shop and closely associated with the Freemasons. Membership of the Freemasons therefore was often a first step in joining the Musician’s Union, thus opening up a great many professional opportunities.

[3] MHMJA catalogue number: WB-N6-107.

[4] MHMJA catalogue number: WB-N6-111.

[5] In the late 1940s Archer Street became an impromptu labour exchange for unemployed musicians.

[6] The Empire Windrush was the first of the ships that brought Caribbean immigrants to England after the war to fill the British labour shortage.

[7] This quartet made one recording entitled, Cool Jazz with Joe. Willie Bergman appears under the pseudonym of Bill Cole.

[8] Temporary camps set up to house the many European Jews arriving throughout the early 1950s.

[9] MHMJA catalogue number: WB-S3-217.

[10] MHMJA catalogue number: WB-P3-167 is a poster for the night advertising Solomon Schwartz’s Yiddish Twist Orchestra as 2nd on the bill.

[11] It is of course possible that both “twists” were independently derived at the same time, as with Newton and Leibnitz both inventing calculus, or Darwin and Wallace both conceiving evolution.