Summary: As we just celebrated the day of love, it’s quite fitting that Ben Schenck describes his love for the clarinet and music as a “crush.” A crush that makes him want to be as close as he can to it as possible, which is perhaps why he is smitten with New Orleans. He originally came to the Crescent City for the traditional Jazz, something he was pleasantly surprised to discover was still alive and well, and then circa 1991, after realizing his love for Klezmer music, he started the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, followed by the Panorama Jazz Band in 1995, a group who brings a New Orleans approach to various genres of music. Aside from hearing about his musical background and what draws him to New Orleans, you’ll also get the inside scoop on his favorite places to eat and what he likes to do during the day with his family in New Orleans, all on this episode of GoNOLA Radio! Stay tuned to the very end for a special in-studio performance of Schenck playing a new Yiddish tune, meaning simply "happy," which is exactly the feeling it induces. GoNOLA Radio is a free New Orleans podcast hosted by Sunpie Barnes, Lorin Gaudin, George Ingmire and Mikko about the food, music and culture of the Crescent City. Subscribe to GoNOLA Radio on iTunes or download to your mobile device on Stitcher. GoNOLA Radio features music by Cale Pellick. Podcast Transcript: Sanpa: Welcome to Go NOLA radio. My name is Sanpa Barnes and I will be your host of hosts as we explore New Orleans to learn about the city's rich cultural heritage, food, and music. We'll bring you experts, the real deal experts, who will talk with you about the people who make New Orleans such a wonderful place to live and visit. It's Go NOLA Radio. George: Those of you who listen to our Go NOLA podcast know that we're normally talking about something to eat, somewhere to go, something going on, but today we're talking about somebody. A gentleman by the name of Ben Schenck. I want to welcome you to Go NOLA radio. Ben: Thanks for having me. George: Of course, I'm here with Lauren Goden and Miko. Miko: Hey, everyone. Lauren: Hey, there. George: So, so. You go back a bit of a ways with everything from Klezmer music to Caribbean music, to Bulgarian music. We could talk about all kinds of forms. Tell us where this started, and I think we could go over to the East coast and talk about Washington D.C. and a radio station. Ben: Right. Well, I grew up in Maryland and I went to college in Vermont, and when I was in college this was during the whole new wave phase of pop music, so we would have our Friday night parties and listen to Blondie, and The Talking Heads and Devo. I love to dance and I love pop music, but I hit a point where I got really, just kind of od'ed on synthetic music. Synthetic sounds and I started thinking couldn't we have fantastic, hot attractive pop music with no electricity? Because look there are tubas and there's a clarinet. In fact, I think I'm going to try to learn to play the clarinet. We've got banjos, and so that idea just started kind of percolating in my mind, and then the obvious thing was New Orleans-style jazz. Well, I didn't know anything about New Orleans at that point. I'd never been here. I thought New Orleans ended in the twenties and jazz went to Chicago and New York and St. Louis. I thought about the evolution of jazz as a timeline. You know this happened and it stopped happening and then this happened. There was New Orleans Jazz, but then it turned into swing and then it turned into bee-bop. But what I found when I visited here for the first time in 1984 is that it kept happening here. It's not a period of jazz evolution, it's a regional style that is still happening, and that New Orleans is full of all this music going on day and night. That it's part of life in New Orleans in a way that I, as somebody from somewhere else, could not even imagine,
