A Link Between the Ages

I’m asked occasionally why I don’t write columns linked to the news of the day. My answer is because I’m trying to write columns linked to the ages.

I realize that sounds pompous and somewhat ambitious, but I mean it on a scale less than cosmic. I’m just out there trying to chronicle small patches of life for a tapestry intended to define who and what we are.

To do that I choose generally to write about people rather than issues or even about those mega-people we call celebrities. No one is going to ignore O.J. Simpson or Heidi Fleiss, but who’s going to give a damn when a hot dog vendor decides to run for the City Council?

Continuity is a key to defining who we are, linking the past to the present as a way to the future. I see some of that linkage in ties that bind family generations together as each attempts in its way to acknowledge the value of the other. Lee Newman, for instance, uses music as a means of tribute.

He’s a young singer-actor who, with a cousin, has created an album called “Relatively Singing” that pays tribute to two of his great-grandfathers. One is a songwriter named Jimmy McHugh and the other a singing-dancing-handclapping little comic from the past named Eddie Cantor.

They were big-time long before rock ‘n’ roll, heavy metal or gangsta rap came along, existing in the days when tunes you could sing were popular. Try singing along with Snoop Doggy Dogg and you’ll see what I mean.

“I feel close to them,” Newman said to me the other day, talking about his great-grandfathers. “I want them to be a part of my life.”

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I’m aware that performers are endlessly seeking gimmicks to promote what they do and that newspaper columnists are in constant danger of being reeled in like fat little fish at the end of a gimmick’s hook.

But I’ve known Newman’s father, Eddie Kafafian, for a lot of years and I know how close the family is. So when the kid tells me his CD is meant to honor a couple of great-grandfathers I believe him.

Jimmy McHugh I’m not too familiar with, except that he wrote tunes like “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Cantor I remember.

He was born Israel Iskowitz on New York’s Lower East Side, dropped out of school when he was about 12 and went on to become a kind of icon of American show biz in a career that linked vaudeville to television.

I used to watch him on TV singing “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider.” Ida was his wife. He talked about her all the time and about their five daughters, the way Kathie Lee Gifford is always talking about Cody.

Four of the daughters are still alive and one of them, Edna McHugh, lives in L.A. She told me that they weren’t all that crazy about their dad making jokes about them, but, that aside, they were a close and loving family.

Cantor used to do a funny little dance when he sang, rolling his eyes and clapping his hands as though he were enjoying it all a lot more than anyone else on Earth, and maybe he was.

I especially remember him singing about Ida because he was reaching out to her beyond the screen with emotion that transcended shtick. Ida, sweet as apple cidahhh, sweeter than all I know. . . .

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Cantor was raised by his grandmother and Lee Newman spends a lot of time with his grandmother, Edna, so you can see how the generations have always connected. He was just a few months old when Cantor died in 1964 but was influenced by the fame of the man to try his hand at show biz.

The family used to gather around an upright piano that was given to Jimmy McHugh by George Gershwin during the Great Depression and sing both the tunes McHugh wrote and Cantor sang in the old days. Now they’re in an album.

Newman’s feeling for his famous relatives comes across in the tunes he offers in “Relatively Singing.” Listening to them I felt a sense of the affinity that united them, the acknowledgment of what he gained from the generations that preceded him.

Not everyone has a relative with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but sometimes simple lives of grace and courage serve as lessons to the children among us who ultimately will carry those lessons into the future.

I doubt that “Relatively Singing” will be among the year’s Top 10 albums, but it has a place in the tapestry that defines us. Someone, I forget who, once said that while days and weeks seem to drag, “generations pass like a snowstorm.” Lee Newman’s music is a nice way of acknowledging those crystals of the storm that added beauty to our world a long time ago.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com