Irving Fields, bandleader who fed postwar mania for Yiddish mambo, dies at 101

By Emily Langer
http://twitter.com/emilylangerWP

August 23 at 7:22 PM 

The music was played on jukeboxes, on bandstands and in the hotels of the Catskills during those years after World War II when many first- and second-generation American Jews no longer spoke Yiddish but had not yet forgotten its sound.

That era of transition came with a musical form all its own: the Yiddish or Jewish mambo, a mash-up of Jewish folk songs, Yiddish tunes and klezmer melodies with the Latin rhythms that took American ballrooms by storm in the 1940s and ’50s.

Among Yiddish mambo’s most exuberant exponents was Irving Fields, a pianist, bandleader, arranger and songwriter who made a winning contribution to the genre with his 1959 album “Bagels and Bongos.” Mr. Fields, 101, died Aug. 20 at his home in New York City. The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Ruth Fields.

“Your Miami-bound snowbird grandparents weren’t the first Jews to embrace the mambo pace,” reads an online promotion for a remastered version of Mr. Fields’s album, curated by the nonprofit Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation and released in 2005.