Now Safar has produced a Sephardic Music Festival compilation album, which captures the sounds of the festival even for those who couldn’t be in New York for it. It includes songs by well-known musicians Matisyahu, Yasmin Levy, and Galeet Dardashti, along with less-familiar artists, like DeScribe and Shmoolik, who team up for a reggaeton-meets-Middle East pop track in French and Hebrew.

For Vox Tablet this week, Rob Weisberg, the host of WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise—“New York’s peerless world music show,” according to Time Out—took a look at the album. [Running time: 15:33.]

Growing up in Montreal, a city with a large Ashkenazi population and a smaller Sephardic one (hailing primarily from Francophone North Africa), that division often seemed quite stark, even brutal. You’d think that the shared external threat of anti-Semitism in a predominantly Roman Catholic province with a history of Jew-bashing would bring Jews of all stripes together, but no such luck. Many Ashkenazi Jews regarded Sephardim as an inferior species; some of the Ashkenazi kids at my high school even taunted our lone Sephardic classmate with the flagrantly racist nickname “Nigmo,” a combination of “nigger” and “Moroccan.”

It’s ironic, this ethnic divide at the heart of a community so often persecuted on ethnic grounds; and silly, too. Many Ashkenazi Jews have Sephardic relatives, if not Sephardic blood; and most have unwittingly mouthed prayers composed by Sephardic scholars and poets, often to Sephardic melodies.

Those melodies, by the way, are gorgeous. Sephardic music draws on a vast swath of traditions, from Spanish flamenco to Turkish classical music, and contemporary Sephardic performers can pick and choose from an enviable collection of repertoires and performance styles, many of which have developed over hundreds of years.

Samuel R. Thomas

Samuel R. Thomas, a musician and ethnomusicologist of Sephardic descent who curated the performance I attended, programmed the event with an eye towards highlighting that depth and diversity. Gibraltar-born multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Elie Massias opened the concert with a solo performance that artfully combined liturgical texts with electronic loops and modern jazz harmonies, while the Brooklyn-born Syrian/Egyptian cantor and oud player Victor Esses followed with a genre of devotional song that has been popular with Syrian Jews for well over a century. “The idea was to strike a balance between someone preserving the traditional wholeheartedly, and someone stretching the tradition wholeheartedly,” Thomas told me. Both sets were fascinating.

Massias recast several traditional songs, including a fragment from Psalms and a segment of the grace after meals, as simple vamps decorated with beautifully improvised melodies, limpid chords and flamenco licks; and he thickened the texture by looping his own guitar accompaniment in order to add layers of additional melody and rhythm, and occasionally

Elie Massias

picking up a soprano saxophone or drumming on a cajon. He sang in a mixture of Hebrew and the Gibraltar variant of Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish; but he sometimes simply scatted along with his own instrumental improvisations, in a voice that was alternately breathy and keening.

Massias reminded me of the Benin-born jazz guitarist Lionel Loueke. Like Loueke, Massias has forged something new and distinctive from the music he grew up with. But while Loueke has fused traditional West African palmwine guitar with jazz and electronic effects, Massias draws upon the unique musical culture of his native Gibraltar—a culture that was influenced by both Spain and Morocco. (Like those of many Gibraltan Jews, Massias’ ancestors came from Tetuan, a Moroccan port city to which large numbers of Iberian Jews fled following their expulsion from Spain in 1492.) Other Sephardic performers have engaged in similar projects—Sarah Aroeste and Pharaoh’s Daughter both come to mind—but few have conveyed such a profound sense of spontaneity and freshness.

Victor Esses Tarab Ensemble

Esses’ Tarab Ensemble—a quartet featuring oud, violin, darabuka and nai”looked further East for its inspiration and material, performing a series of pizmonim, devotional songs that set Hebrew poetry against melodies borrowed from classic Arab popular music. (The word tarab refers both to a kind of urban Middle Eastern music that originated in the 19th century, and to the feeling of ecstasy that the music is meant to produce.) Historically performed at Syrian Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, pizmonim are gradually disappearing, replaced, as Esses explained in a Q&A session at the end of the concert, by modern electronic pop music. (On the one hand, tastes change. On the other, it’s easier—and cheaper—to pay one musician to play an electric keyboard at your kid’s bar mitzvah than to hire an entire acoustic ensemble.)

That’s a minor tragedy. The phrase “classic Arab pop” might not sound inspiring, but the phenomenon certainly is: this is highly refined music that features elaborate compositions and extended improvisation, all cast in the classical Arabic modes known as maqamat. (More than just a scale, a maqam implies an associated set of melodies and ornaments.) The pizmonim have the feel of suites, with each section marked by shifts in tempo, rhythm and mode; and Esses sings in the intensely melismatic, microtonal style that defines virtually all traditional Arab song (including Kuranic chant), with each syllable sliding around on a bunch of pitches—some of them so small, they’d fall between the white and black keys of an ordinary piano keyboard.

Thomas notes that while tension still exists between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, the latter have shown greater interest in Sephardic culture in recent years. Indeed, many of the performers at the festival are Ashkenazi. “It’s like white artists participating in hip hop,” he says. “People are jumping on the Sephardic bandwagon.”

Ordinarily, I might be disturbed by the thought of people diving into the shallow end of a rich cultural tradition just because it seems exotic or approximates the Jewish musical equivalent of a fashionable trend, like oversized handbags. But anything that brings Ashkenazim and Sephardim closer together seems like a welcome change.

Eliezer Blumen is one of those people. He’s been living as a Hasidic Jew for the past twenty years, and to the casual eye he’s a standard-issue Hasid: white shirt, bushy beard, well-worn hat. The trademark vest he wears (more Montana mountain man than Boro Park shtetl-fabulous) hints at something less ordinary, but it’s barely noticeable—lots of Hasidim have their dress quirks, a bright-colored scarf or the occasional pair of rainbow-striped socks.

On a recent trip to New York from his current home in Israel, Blumen stopped by to drop off Real People, the new album from his power rock trio, Yood. How can you tell that they’re a power rock trio? For starters, the phrase “Power Rock is on the CD cover, emblazoned on a dirty wall behind the band, even though it’s neither the band name nor the album title. If a band is going to call itself “punk”—much like someone wearing a shirt that says “porn star” in shiny letters—chances are, well, it isn’t. If you’re all about heavy crunching chords and big-beat drums, however, you’d sure as hell better say it loud and proud.

Yood

The album is bombastic, but it’s a clean, organized kind of bombast; the kind of rawk that one would associate with AC/DC, or even early Metallica”guys who could destroy indie rock kids with a single shake of their grease-sharpened hair (or, for that matter, their beards). Yood calls to mind an early episode of The Simpsons: driving through Brooklyn on a school trip, Bart spots some Hasidic Jews, pulls down the bus window, and yells, “ZZ Top! You guys rock! Upon hearing this, one Hasid turns to another and says, “Did you hear that? We rock! For a small minority of the world’s population—Hasidic Jews who love themselves some old-fashioned rock ’n roll (and still write it with an “n”)—there’ll always be Yood.

There are many good old-fashioned rock ‘n roll moments on Real People. From the blast-off quality of “Free”—in which the two-and-a-half minute guitar solo seems determined to break free of the song, climbing higher and higher along scales, while the song is determined to chase it—to the wailing, harmonica-backed country rock of “Straight to You,” you could sneak it onto the jukebox of a Chicago sports bar, circa 1985, and have an instant round of cigarette lighters in the air.

At times, it’s difficult to remember this is a religious album. And yet, there’s something religious—even fundamental—about it. Like the fact that the lyrical “you” probably refers to God rather than to a biker chick. Like the “ai-yai-yais” that sometimes sneak through the choruses. Or, indeed, the unabashed power rock vibe, which feels both intimate and anthemic, like someone locked in his imagination and playing to a hypothetical arena—something like, dare it be suggested, a religious experience. It’s almost enough to have you up on the couch, playing air guitar—or to take you back to the last moment before you were too religious to cast off your black fedora and do such a thing.

Listen to “Wastin’ Away” by Yood

Listen to “Free” by Yood

A few years ago, the diva and rapper M.I.A. fused dance music, Bollywood music, and hip-hop, and presented it to the world as the latest in music sampling. It wasn’t the first such fusion, but it might have been the first time it was so seamlessly executed.

Electro Morocco

Although Electro Morocco, a New York-based band of Israeli expatriates, isn’t pushing nearly as many musical boundaries as M.I.A. did, the comparison is inevitable and well-deserved. They draw from different parts of the world, but share an aesthetic, both technical and emotional, with M.I.A.

Both include Eastern belly-shaking samples—Indian in M.I.A.’s work, and Middle Eastern in Electro Morocco’s. But Electro Morocco works hard to establish a fresh sound, layered with organic guitars and synthetic beats, that is clearly their own. Their programmed drums are deceptively simple, but grow more intricate with repeated listenings. The off-beat rhythm, the interplay of tweaked, Oriental-sounding guitars, and the frenzied climaxes call to mind bellydancing music and hard rock. The half-sung, half-spoken choruses are catchy yet elusive; they’re eminently repeatable, but you quickly realize you’re singing syllables, not coherent words. Is it just an accent, or a mystical-sounding foreign language?

Mostly, though, you’ll just sit back and dig it. “Joe Pill” is a four-minute dance party, with whirring Arabic plucked guitars and a full-on club beat. “Monkey Do” starts with a trade-off between keyboard blasts characteristic of Middle Eastern dance music and a furious, distortion-heavy electric guitar. The melody of “Sachbak” is strikingly original, yet strangely reminiscent of a blues band, the kind in which an 80-year-old man plays guitar on a stool, making his fingers dance in seemingly superhuman patterns; it’s a plucked guitar line so complex that it sounds like a sample. In Electro Morocco’s short time together (less than a year) it’s almost suspect how tightly they play together. This Hanukkah, they’ll be co-headlining the Sephardic Music Festival in New York. And from there, it’s easy to imagine them taking over the rest of the country in a matter of weeks.

Listen to “Take Me Back” by Electro Morocco

Listen to “Joe Pill” by Electro Morocco

Fusion has become sort of a prerequisite for popular music these days. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the Internet—if you can listen to every radio station in the world, you might as well be influenced by the best. But, as an expatriate American Hasidic guitarist playing American hard rock has found—and as a band of Israeli expatriates reaching for their Middle Eastern roots is learning—sometimes you have to leave home in order to appreciate where you’re from.

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 the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and making them their own. The project is called La Mar Enfortuna (“The Unfortunate Sea”). Collaborating with jazz and classical Middle Eastern musicians, they’ve put out two records on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, a self-titled debut album in 2001 and Conviviencia last year.

Oren Bloedow spoke to Nextbook about this musical adventure.

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 nearly obliterated the Sephardic community of Sarajevo and its surroundings. At 82, Flory Jagoda is one of the few people who remembers the musical traditions of that community. As the matriarch of a large clan—and as a teacher, composer, and performer—she is passing that tradition on. For her efforts, in 2002 she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. These are her songs and stories, as told to us from her home in Virginia.

Flory Jagoda’s songs have been collected on four CDs, available here.

Photo courtesy of Altaras Recordings.

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, Spagnolo hosted a Jewish music program in Milan, and later, a nightly program on Italian National Radio. He talks about why Italians were more drawn to klezmer than to native Jewish music, and how he worked to introduce other sounds. With traditional music from Livorno performed by Simone Sacerdoti, and a liturgical remix by Enrico Fink.

Editor’s note: Since he spoke to us last year, Spagnolo has moved to New York City and taken a new job as executive director of the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History.