Chaim Tannenbaum has shared stages with singer/songwriters Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and played on or produced more than 20 of their albums. But because he’s a sideman he’s virtually unknown to the public, and even an Internet search reveals little about him.
A vocalist and a multi-instrumentalist who plays banjo, harmonica, guitar, mandolin, recorder and saxophone, he met the late Kate McGarrigle at Montreal’s McGill University in the mid-1960s. Tannenbaum, Kate and her sister, Anna, got together twice a week for years just to sit around and play, he said. “They were my dearest friends. It started out as our social life.”
When the McGarrigles went professional in the early ’70s, they asked him to join them. “I had the wonderful position of being able to tag along,” Tannenbaum said on the phone from New York, where he now lives.
His collaboration with Wainwright began around the time Kate married the sardonic crooner in 1970, a marriage Tannenbaum described as stormy but artistically productive. Over the following decades, Tannenbaum became one of Wainwright’s closest musical cohorts in the recording studio and on the road.
At Wainwright’s shows, Tannenbaum, whose voice has been described as a lived-in yet angelic tenor, steps to the microphone to sing gospel songs.
“Loudon makes a point – if there’s going to be a gospel song sung, it’s going to be by the Jew, because he doesn’t want to be seen endorsing the message of these gospel songs,” Tannenbaum said.
He added that at a show in Nashville, an elderly woman told him she was surprised to hear the gospel music of her church “sung so good by a Jew-boy.” She wasn’t anti-Semitic, Tannenbaum said. “She was just amazed that her music had reached a Russian Jewish kid in Montreal.”
At 68, Tannenbaum has just released his debut album. Retiring from Montreal’s Dawson College, where he taught philosophy for 35 years, gave him the time to work on the self-titled recording, he said. The songs are mostly sad and pessimistic, but sublimely beautiful. Tannenbaum explores the theme of exile – the diasporic sentiment – through a mix of folk, gospel and blues covers and his literate originals. He’s included one of Kate McGarrigle’s best songs, (Talk to Me of) Mendocino. It’s about the “loss of home, twice in fact, and the prospect for a next one,” he said. “Whether that prospect can be realized, however, is in doubt.”
About the gospel-flavoured tracks on the album, Farther Along and Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit, Tannenbaum said, “I’m attracted to gospel music, not because I believe in or hope for a heavenly afterlife, but precisely because I don’t.”
Gospel music “registers a dissatisfaction with the human state and a longing for a better one. Of course, it’s a longing that can’t be satisfied. I find it often very poignant,” he explained.
He described his parents, who came to Canada from Russia in the 1920s, as irreligious. “They cared nothing for religion. They weren’t menaced by it, they didn’t disapprove of it, and they certainly didn’t embrace it. This is not to say they weren’t deeply Jewish. We spoke Yiddish at home and we observed some of the rituals of the Jewish calendar,” he said.
Tannenbaum remembers that while he was growing up the rabbinate was discredited “for having failed to alert the Jews to the imminent danger, and when the danger appeared, for having failed to direct them in any way except to keep kosher. And who could believe the Holocaust was a product of divine ordinance, without repulsion.”
Beliefs in a higher power strike Tannebaum as entirely preposterous and unworthy of consideration. “I remain my parents’ son in that regard,” he said.