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The Guide to Jewish Chicago
(reprinted, with permission, from the Guide to Jewish Chicago)
Lori Lippitz: A present from the past
The title of one of the latest recordings of the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band is "Old Roots, New World." That pretty much says it all.
When Lori Lippitz founded the band- today a fixture at Chicago-area simchas-she was tapping deeply into her own family's roots, as well as those of generations of Eastern European Jews.
The fact that Lippitz's passion dovetailed with a klezmer revival on both coasts was serendipitous.
Today, klezmer music-that colorful, danceable mix of Yiddish folk, jazz and theater music with the mystical Chasidic tunes of an even earlier time- is as much a part of the Chicago Jewish scene as bagels and cream cheese.
The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band not only plays for an array of local weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and concerts, but has performed at Carnegie Hall and has toured Europe seven times.
In addition, through the non-profit Klezmer Music Foundation, which Lippitz also started, band members bring the music to inner-city schools, along with a message about the importance of roots, while several generations of high school students have learned to play this age-old Jewish music through a junior klezmer orchestra.
With Chasidic rabbis on both sides of her family, Lippitz says that, although she was not much drawn to organized worship, she always felt "a strong imperative toward outreach to the Jewish community, to keeping the spirit alive." Her uncle, the beloved Chicago teacher and writer Ben Aronin, profoundly influenced her in seeking ways to stay connected to the Jewish community. So did her sister, who was one of the first female Conservative cantors in the country.
Lippitz herself was particularly drawn to Russian culture, and after graduating from the University of Michigan, went on to graduate school in Slavic studies at the University of Chicago. But eventually, "I realized I was too pragmatic, too hands-on for an academic career," she says.
Meanwhile, she had had her first taste of klezmer music in the late 1970s when she heard it for the first time on WFMT's "Midnight Special."
"I nearly jumped out of my skin," she recalls. "I thought, is this Jewish music? I was very excited."
Around the same time, the so-called klezmer revival was gaining momentum on both coasts, but not in-between. After working in outreach for the Reform movement and as a cantorial soloist for several years, Lippitz--whose only performance experience was a teenage stint singing folk songs and playing guitar--started "trying to figure out if I could get a klezmer band going."
"The music was very joyous and full of ruach (spirit)," she says. "I thought, I could bring this music to Chicago and people will start playing it again at their weddings and bar mitzvah parties and reinfuse the whole community with this joyous spirit. It was a pretty simplistic idea. It took about 20 years, but I actually think it happened."
The band's name was chosen to honor Chicago's earliest Jewish immigrants and to recall the colorful spirit and mood of the Maxwell Street marketplace.
Now, more than 20 years later, Lippitz reflects that for many Jews, klezmer music is "a way of drawing their family and community together around a very spiritual kind of music that's also fun. That turned out to be my calling--to import the spirit and inspiration of a previous time and place into our own, to bring something from the past that we feel is missing today."
Lippitz, the band's first vocalist, is now one of three, along with 11 musicians and one dancer. Meanwhile, her own family circle has expanded to include husband Marc Chinitz, a computer programmer, and daughter Kayla, 5.
Her strong sense of community also found an outlet in her work with Chicago Peace Now and with Genesis at the Crossroads, a group that brings Jews and Arabs together through music and art. And she was a founder and longtime president of the Chicago Vegetarian Society.
But she believes that her most lasting contribution will be through music. She says, "If klezmer has become a part of the Chicago Jewish community, if kids are growing up with it and have not assimilated out completely, I will take credit for having started that revolution."
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