Music Mavens

3 min readJan 16, 2023

Another win for the good guys, headline from foxnews.com: “Gun-toting mom thwarts kidnapping attempt during dramatic confrontation.” Even better — no shots fired.

A beautiful but cold and windy day but, because I had the prime winter parking spot, the floating book shop was a snap. I spent most of the session in the car. My thanks to my Constant Benefactress, who donated a handful of non-fiction, and to the woman who did a swap of Russian titles; and to Alice, a convert, who purchased To Be a Jew: A Guide to Jewish Observance in Contemporary Life by Hayim H. Donin; and to the sweet Polish woman who bought three books in Mandarin for a Chinese friend; and to Brian, who took home Killing by yours truly, and who turned me on to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqikCFqcPrI

So who is Oscar Benton? Born Ferdinand van Eis in the Netherlands, he founded the Oscar Benton Blues Band in 1967. In 1968 the group was runner up at a local Jazz Festival. Its first release came in 1981, Bensonhurst Blues, the title track written by Artie Kaplan and Artie Kornfeld. It’s part of the soundtrack of two French films: Pour la peau d’un flic (1979), a crime thriller starring matinee idol Alain Delon, and La Bûche (1999), a comedy. Benton recorded four other albums. He passed away at 71 in 2020… Artie Kaplan was born in NYC in 1935. A singer-songwriter, producer and composer, his sax solos can be heard on over 150 Top Ten singles, including 1–2–3 by Len Barry, The Locomotion by Little Eva, Mandy by Barry Manilow, Breaking Up is Hard to Do by Neil Sedaka and Sunday Will Never Be the Same by Spanky & Our Gang. He recorded three albums of his own music. One, Confessions Of A Male Chauvinist Pig, released in 1973, includes Bensonhurst Blues… Artie Kornfeld is a big name in the music industry, having been the co-promoter of the Woodstock Musical and Arts Festival with Michael Lang. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, he wrote 75 songs that cracked the Billboard Top 100, and participated on more than 150 albums. He and Steve Duboff wrote Pied Piper by Crispian St. Peters, which hit #4 in the USA, and The Rain, the Park & Other Things by The Cowsills, which hit #2… I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of the Bensonhurst Blues until today, or the accomplishments of these men. Thank you, gentlemen. Facts from Wiki, photos from Google Images: