Music Preview: Janet Klein digs into the early 20th-century to uncover forgotten, occasionally bawdy treasures
Singer Janet Klein deftly navigates the primordial ooze of American pop — early 20th-century Tin Pan Alley songs — rich musical territory where hot-cha-cha, shimmy-shaking snakehips, and droll double entendre abound. When she convenes her band, the Parlor Boys, at Altadena’s Coffee Gallery Backstage on July 30, it’ll be a marvelous evening of American arcana, put across with a lilting touch of string rhythms, nimble horn runs and Klein’s fluid, winsome, clear-toned pipes, acutely rendered elements which resurrect this almost lost art form.
Klein has been plying this oddball style for decades and her career and sound succeed due to an undeniable authenticity, the fruit of a lifelong misfit perspective.
“I was born in Los Angeles but grew up in San Bernardino,” Klein said. “It was a good place to be an escapist. I loved what remained of the early 1900s California Dream, the palm-tree-lined streets leading to the last standing orange groves, ranch properties, the old Craftsman and Spanish-style homes in nearby Redlands, the Mission Inn in Riverside, the Bear Gulch Inn in Cucamonga, all evidence which lured me toward languishing beauty of the past.”
As she grew up, Klein couldn’t shake her outsider’s viewpoint.
“I call it ‘bumping off the curb of my discontent,’” Klein said. “There is a certain clarity in knowing what you don’t like. The restlessness created by being surrounded with so many things that I couldn’t connect to, drove me to seek out things that do resonate for me.”
“I come from a fine art background and there is a connection of creating something tangible while at the same time stringing together parts of yourself and what you want to say or add to the world around you. At a certain point, moving from painting and drawing, performance art and poetry, it was through music that I’ve felt like my molecules had all finally found the right configuration.”
Klein works on the chronological cusp between Emma Goldman and Betty Boop, a crucial point of cultural transition, and one that’s allowed her to build up a startling repertoire.
“When I went to UCLA, I majored in fine art and design, but I spent a lot of time in the music library there,” Klein said. “I could paw through vinyl records there and camp out with headphones. Fred Astaire, Josephine Baker, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, they led the way. They were the first figures I encountered as I realized that what I was attracted to was entertainment of the 1930s. And pre-Internet, it took a physical journey to find these things. Writing letters, making, sending and receiving cassette tapes, opening books, meeting people. Big Band music was accessible, but pre-1940s music was trickier to find.”
“We perform music that is considered Depression Era, Jazz Age music,” she said. “I love unearthing obscure tunes, it puts me over the moon to dig up incredible material that seems to have fallen off the map.”
Klein’s safari through the Tin Pan Alley jungle has earned her some very gaudy baubles; song subjects are wild — ethno-centric exotica like “Yiddish Hula Boy,” or the libidinous pet-inspired “My Canary Has Circles Under His Eyes” are typical.
“I like to pepper my sets with naughty numbers,” Klein said. “Songs like ‘If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sitting on It,’ ‘Nasty Man,’ ‘Real Estate Papa, You Ain’t Gonna Subdivide Me,’ and sometimes reversing the gender by delivering the lyrics from the male perspective, like ‘Let Me Put my Banana in Your Fruit Basket.’ I also perform comic Yiddish dialect songs, because they are rare, hilarious, and I am very at home with them.”
Klein’s is a world far removed from the lunacy of today’s furious brutish japes, yet also one that seems so down to our bones familiar that it carries an innate and thoroughly irresistible appeal.
“If there is such a thing as progress, it has to include a knowledge of the past,” Klein said. “Then you can move forward, with all the beautiful layers of humanity enriching what you do. We are playing early 20th-century American ‘classical’ music, it’s our cultural treasure and it’s crazy to keep it stored away gathering dust.”
More to the point, Klein has very a specific modus operandi: “Shock ‘em with sweetness and play the music like it’s illegal.”
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What: Janet Klein & the Parlor Boys
Where: Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 Lake Ave., Altadena
When: Saturday, July 30, 7 p.m.
Cost: $20
More info: (626) 798-6236 or www.coffeegallery.com/
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”