How did a group of ragtag amateurs from the 1960s launch today’s Jewish music scene? And whatever happened to these players, who were a newfangled alternative to the old-fashioned wedding bands of the time? We tracked down the young men in the picture, who, after more than half a century, are still surprised at how a little training and a lot of nerve could bring a new sound to an old refrain

T he grainy black-and-white photo of a motley group of musicians taken in 1963 provokes a multitude of questions. Who are these callow young men with their sheepish grins skinny ties and suits of different colors? Why are there two accordions for one band? Why are there no drums? What sort of venue has two menorahs and an aron kodesh behind a curtain?

Fifty-four years later, it’s still up for debate. Shmuel Boruch Bagry remembers that “it was a rehearsal, in a shul in Brooklyn.” Yisroel Lamm says,”It was a Melaveh Malkah in Queens, Kew Gardens.” But both of them are there in the picture, and even if they can’t remember the place, they know exactly what group it was: It was the Pirchei band.

Pirchei Agudas Yisroel was formed back in the 1930s by the legendary Mike Tress z”l as a sort of boys’ club for frum kids, with learning, trips, concerts, and plays. In the 1960s, Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum z”l, a Pirchei leader who would become a master mechanech, camp director, producer of the early Pirchei records, and who would later found Torah Communications Network, decided to form an amateur Pirchei band.

“Eli kept tabs on who was musically talented,” says Yisroel Lamm, who went on to create Neginah Orchestra and is today one of the Jewish music scene’s most popular conductors and arrangers. Rabbi Teitelbaum summoned the more musically talented of his Pirchei boys to see if they could play together.

“I got a call from Eli,” remembers fellow musician Motel (Mark) Landesman. “He said, ‘We’re having a rehearsal, so come over!’ That was at the very beginning of the band.”

The idea was for them to play at Pirchei events, Melaveh Malkahs, and camps. But the initiative turned into much more than simply good clean fun. In 1963, creating a frum Jewish band was a novel project but an idea whose time had come, and those rank amateurs would ultimately transform into the pioneers of today’s Jewish music scene.

To understand why the Pirchei band became so important is to time travel back to New York in the early 1960s. There was no Neginah, no Neshama, no singing stars — basically no frum professional Jewish music scene at all. People who wanted a band for a simchah had very limited options. Rabbi Moshe (Manny) Greebel, a member of the original Pirchei band, remembers that the options included bandleader Rudy Teppel, already an older man, and Dave Wakeley.

“There was Paul Pincus and Dave Taras,” says David Nulman, another player originally from Scranton who’s been teaching music in schools for over four decades, is a music therapist, and has produced many recordings for children. “You had Yom Tov Ehrlich and his accordion, and the Stoliner Band. The Epstein brothers had a band — they were four Litvaks from the Lower East Side.” Their repertoire might have been limited, but then again, so was the breadth of Jewish music the Orthodox world enjoyed.

Back then everyone had a radio and some had televisions, but media saturation was far more restricted. Hence, music was as much a DIY hobby as a spectator sport. There were fewer professionals, but lots more amateurs. “When I was growing up, it was a normal thing for kids in a frum family to take music lessons,” says Mr. Landesman. “Some guys even worked their way through college playing in bands.”

Yeshiva Torah Vodaath had a student orchestra to play at graduations, directed by a public school teacher. “We loved doing that,” Landesman chuckles. ““We were allowed to skip class to go to rehearsals. And some of the guys in that orchestra went on to become major talmidei chachamim.”

Nevertheless, playing music professionally was not seen by most parents as an appropriate career for a nice Jewish boy. “The European parents in particular thought it was a shanda to be a professional musician,” says Michoel Lamm, a player whose brother Yisroel would become a household name in Jewish music. “In Europe, the musicians were the klezmorim, the guys playing in the street with a cap on the ground for coins.” Playing with a band was even more anathema in the chassidic world, although Lamm notes how radically things have changed. “Today,” he says, “the chassidim have taken over the Jewish music industry.”