More in ‘Sephardic music’

Music

Eastward Expansion

Bringing Sephardic music into the fold
By Alexander Gelfand | 10:50 AM Dec 26, 2008

Wandering about an exhibition of illustrated Sephardic proverbs at the Center for Jewish History, killing time before a Sephardic Music Festival concert, I couldn’t help but view the physical separation between the museum’s Sephardic and Ashkenazi exhibits as a metaphor for the Jewish community at large: a house divided, as it were, between its Sephardic ...

Music

Space Time Continuum

Music that borrows from different eras, people, and places
By Matthue Roth | 11:51 AM Dec 4, 2008

There’s a strange phenomenon among people who become Orthodox—they seem to enter a time warp. Their clothes, their colloquialisms, even their musical choices become frozen in a single moment, like Rip Van Winkle or Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Every time they talk about bands or movies or commercial jingles, they’re back at ...

Audio 

Music

Mediterranean Melodies

La Mar Enfortuna reinterprets the music of the Sephardic diaspora
By Sara Ivry | 12:00 PM Oct 20, 2008

Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles
Nearly twenty years ago, musicians Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles formed Elysian Fields—a rock group whose noir-infused songs are utterly seductive and hypnotic.
Elysian Fields is still going strong, but in 2001 Oren and Jennifer took on a new project—digging up old melodies and lyrics from the Sephardic world of ...

Audio 

Music

La Nona Kanta

Flory Jagoda sings the songs of her great-great-great-great-great grandparents
By Julie Subrin | 10:55 PM Jan 8, 2007

Growing up in the Bosnian village of Vlasenica, Flory Jagoda spent her afternoons and evenings singing with her family—everyone sang, her grandmother, her aunts, uncles and cousins. Though they’d lived in the Balkans for centuries, their songs were in Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, passed down from the time of her ancestors’ expulsion from Spain.
World War II ...

Audio 

Music

Ghetto Music

When Italians fell for klexmer, Francesco Spagnolo tuned them in to the forgotten sounds of their own people
By Boris Fishman | 10:57 PM Dec 12, 2005

In the late 1980s, klezmer music was making a comeback in the United States, but also on the festival circuit in Europe. It even caught on in Italy, which struck Francesco Spagnolo as strange; klezmer had nothing to do with Italian Jewish culture, a venerable and singular blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influences.
Back in Italy, ...