Jamie Bernstein, the author, narrator, director, broadcaster and filmmaker who happens to be the daughter of the famed composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, has lived all over the city.
From her upbringing on West 57th Street to Park Avenue to the Upper East Side to a brief stay at the Dakota, Jamie Bernstein grew up way above 14th Street but developed a special rapport with Greenwich Village as a teen.
In 1967, she and her best friend were 15 years old, “a little too young to appreciate everything, but we were inhaling it all. … It was the absolute epicenter of coolness in the 60s,” she recalls.
“We would walk up and down 8th Street, where all the head shops were — it was just so cool,” Bernstein says. “We were young, unofficial hippies, and we felt like we were the coolest people in the universe – it was a wonderful time, very magical. … Washington Square Park was just as you imagine it, full of hippies and guitars.”
Bernstein remembers the long-gone women’s prison on 6th Avenue (the Jefferson Market Garden is there now, next to the library), where relatives of the prisoners would be yelling up to their incarcerated relatives. “It was a total scene on that corner!” she says.
As an adult, she made the Village home for a while, living on both Jones and Morton Streets. Bernstein has many friends there, including the noted jazz singer Janis Siegel, who was instrumental in hooking up Bernstein with the Village Trip festival, which runs this year from Friday, Sept. 19 to Sunday, Sept. 28, and has featured Bernstein’s involvement for the past few years.
“I met (festival co-founder) Liz Thomson through Janis and had a conversation with her about ‘Wonderful Town,’ my father’s musical about the Village. The first song in that show is a guided tour of the neighborhood. … Liz and Cliff (Pearson, the other festival co-founder) are incredible!” Bernstein declares. “They manage to pull all this stuff together; there’s so much in the festival. It’s just amazing what they do.”
Bernstein ended up doing her own guided tour of the Village as part of the fest, a task for which she declares herself uniquely qualified.
Although she once thought she would become a performer and spent some quality time “shlepping a guitar around to auditions,” she could never get over the “nerve-wracking” experience of singing onstage and soon realized that her real talent was as a “talker.”
“I fell into the business of talking about music and narrating concerts,” she explains. “And I was born to be a tour guide.”
In preparation, Bernstein “did a lot of research and discovered a lot of cool things,” including the story of the Hess Triangle (you can look it up!). Her tour began at the Village Vanguard, where Leonard Bernstein would sometimes accompany the comedic cabaret team of Comden and Green on piano, back in the days when he lived on West 10th Street. The tour ended in the basement of the Washington Square Park Hotel, where Bernstein and Siegel gave a concert that ended with the entire audience singing along with “Somewhere” from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story.”
“It happened to fall on 9/11, and the song is so aspirational. There’s a place where we all take care of each other and maybe one day we’ll all be okay. And everyone was crying. It was fantastic,” Jamie Bernstein recalls.
This year, Bernstein took on the chore of curating a show titled “Bernstein Remix!” She credits DJ Spooky with the “awesome concept.”
A wide variety of performers will interpret her father’s music, including David Amram, Janis Ian, The Ahn Trio with DJ Spooky, Janis Siegel, Fred Hersch, and many others. Bernstein promises some surprises.
“All of a sudden, I had a lot of cats to herd,” she says of the upcoming show. “I don’t know what I was thinking, but it’s going to be quite magical!”
Proceeds from Bernstein Remix! will benefit Artful Learning, an educational non-profit founded by Jamie’s brother, Alexander, who sadly passed away earlier this year. Although the Sunday evening show is sold out, there is a waiting list.
On Saturday afternoon, “Classical Cool!” features a family-friendly program which includes works by Leonard Bernstein and Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals” as performed by The Village Trip Festival Orchestra, conducted by Victoria Bond. Nina, the youngest of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s three children, will narrate.
An online auction is also in effect until Sunday evening, with some items only available to concert attendees. Probably the most sought-after item will be Leonard Bernstein’s personal flask and the remains of a bottle of Ballantine’s scotch that was used to fill it.
Jamie Bernstein, who muses that she is “so much more comfortable with words than notes,” has written a poignant (and highly recommended) memoir titled “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.” Since she gave up the notion of performing music herself, she is “much calmer than I used to be,” although she hasn’t entirely given up that creative side of her nature.
“I’ve written hundreds of songs,” she admits. “My dream is that some young singer will record them someday.”
Jamie Bernstein is online at jamiebernstein.net and on Facebook at facebook.com/jamie.bernstein.16.
For more information on the Village Trip, visit thevillagetrip.com. You can also learn more about the Leonard Bernstein auction at onecau.se/artfullearning.
