The other Jewish music

Sephardic song is not your daddy's klezmer

by Damon Krukowski

During the 1999 Boston Early Music Festival, in an abandoned synagogue on Beacon Hill (now called the Vilna Center for Jewish Heritage), an international group of musicians called Ensemble Sarband crowded together in the center of the room, on the platform once used for reading the torah. Oud, qanun, and hand drums accompanied an emotive singer through a series of mournful ballads, lullabies, and narrative "romances" -- traditional music from Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Israel. The band leader of Ensemble Sarband, Vladimir Ivanoff, is Bulgarian (he produced the world-music sensation Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares). The other instrumentalists are Turkish. And the singer, Fadia El-Hage, is Lebanese, a disciple of that emblematic singer of Arabic songs, Fairuz. The program was all Jewish music, but it certainly didn't sound like klezmer.

The klezmer revival began with the Jewish folk music of Eastern Europe but has grown to embrace something larger, including the "Radical Jewish Culture" of John Zorn and his cohort and a variety of music both Jewish and semi-Jewish, encompassing Marc Bolan (of T-Rex -- who knew?), "White Christmas," Lou Reed, and the schmaltzy bands of the Catskills resorts (but will it yet revive my Uncle Lenny, who romanced Aunt May with his clarinet from his perch on the bandstand?). Still, the klezmer revival has largely ignored music from this "other" Jewish tradition, the Sephardic. Klezmer is, despite its own hybrid origins, Ashkenazi Jewish music; it originated in the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe and continued to develop in the corresponding immigrant communities of the US. Its language is Yiddish. Its instruments are familiar from other popular American musical traditions: the clarinet, the trap-drum kit, the violin.

Sephardic music, on the other hand, is exotic to ears accustomed to American popular music, generally more Asian, Arabic, or even early-music-modal in its associations than European-diatonic. No tunes made familiar by Irving Berlin; no clarinet; no Uncle Lenny. The Sephardim are the Jews who were scattered across the world by the expulsion from Spain in 1492. They settled in North Africa, in the Ottoman Empire (what is now Turkey, Greece, and the shifting states of the Balkans), and in Northern and Western Europe. Their shared language is Ladino, which is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German. Like the Ashkenazi, the Sephardim absorbed the languages and cultures of the nations in which they lived. Also like the Ashkenazi, they were devastated by the political events of the 20th century: the Holocaust in Europe, and the Arab-Israeli wars, which altered forever the cultural landscape of North Africa.

Despite these historical distinctions, I strain to see the sharp line between Ashkenazi and Sephardic that so clearly divides CD bins (as well as, from what I understand, aspects of Israeli politics and society). The investigation of traditional Jewish culture seems to lead equally to the Sephardic mystics and to the Chassidic sages, to kibbeh and to matzoh balls, to music from the Balkans as well as from the Catskills.

So why, in the first edition of the Rough Guide to World Music (1994), was there no entry under "Sephardic," not even a mention of the word in the index, despite an extensive article on all things klezmer? Perhaps because no one knew where to put it. Under "From the Baltic to the Balkans"? Or "Mediterranean and Maghreb"? Or "The Nile and the Gulf"? The answer would have to be "all of the above." Sephardic culture, in its diaspora, encompasses traditions that we think of as disparate. The Rough Guide editors placed their article on klezmer in the North America section, sandwiching it between gospel and Hawaiian slack key. Klezmer, by virtue of its place in American immigrant culture, has become an artifact of the Lower East Side as much as of Eastern Europe -- it's Jewish-American music. But the melting pot hasn't forged the elements of Sephardic music into one coherent myth. It remains music of the diaspora, literally all over the map.

One can seek out, as an ethnographer would, the individual strains of Sephardic music. The recent Mystic Sephardic Chants (L'Empreinte Digitale) by the Naguila Ensemble documents music in use today in the synagogue of Montpellier, with its hazan (cantor) backed by an excellent trio playing oud, violin, and hand drums. Yet even this anthropological approach runs into treacherous cross-cultural problems. The Sephardic Jews worshipping in Montpellier are the result of not only 15th-century emigration from Spain and Portugal but also 1960s emigration from North Africa. And as the notes to this CD point out, the hymns their cantor sings are related in form to medieval Andalusian poetry, in meter to both Arabic and Hebrew prosody, and in melody to songs used in both secular and religious contexts, from Morocco to Syria. In short, the notes conclude, "In this music, it is not easy to determine exactly what is of Jewish or of Arabic origin on the one hand and what is innovative borrowed material on the other."

At the other end of the spectrum, there's the way the Sephardic song catalogue has been used for individualistic musical interpretation. Israeli singer Etty Ben-Zaken learned traditional Ladino songs from her grandmother, who was born in Turkey. On The Bride Unfastens Her Braids, the Groom Faints: Ladino Love Songs (New Albion), these songs are set by Eitan Steinberg and the Ensemble Yatan Atan in a kind of pan-cultural folk style: recorders, acoustic guitar, and frame drums combine with Etty Ben-Zaken's straightforward vocals to make for music that is only a few shades more "traditional" than some 1960s folk rock. The addition of viola da gamba to the ensemble gives an early-music feel that, I imagine, will one day sound characteristic of the turn of the 21st century. This music may be more accessible, but to my ears it's far less powerful than the ethnographic recording from the Montpellier synagogue.

The DC-based La Rondinella are another ensemble who perform Sephardic music in a folk/early-music hybrid style, but their repertoire is more scholarly. On Songs of the Sephardim: Traditional Music of the Spanish Jews (Dorian), the songs come from a collection compiled by musicologist Manuel Manrique de Lara, and the instruments are, at least hypothetically, from 15th- and 16th-century Europe: recorders, lutes, viols, krummhorns, percussion. Vocalist Alice Kosloski approaches this material in an unaffected manner, but with none of the interesting quarter tones and bent notes that one hears in singers versed in Arabic music. The result can be bland -- the extremely plain harmonics of these settings make the melodies sound more like simple folk tunes than one might like. The rhythms, too, are predictable. These songs seem ready for a Sephardic Irving Berlin to come along and jazz them up.

Far more interesting are Ensemble Sarband. On Ballads of the Sephardic Jews (Dorian) and Sepharad: Songs of the Spanish Jews in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi/BMG Classics), their interpretations of Sephardic repertoire incorporate rhythms, song structures, and scales more characteristic of Arabic than European music. The ballads are long, lively narrative songs punctuated by choral refrains. They can be as compelling as Fairport Convention's reinterpretations of the English ballads collected by Cecil Sharp: the rhythms are related to folk dance; the arrangements take advantage of the improvisatory skills of the ensemble; and singer Fadia El-Hage has a voice of rare beauty, similar in register and color to that of Fairuz.

But my favorite Sephardic music recordings are by Hespèrion XXI, the incomparable early-music group based in Barcelona. It is ironic that it's Iberian musicians, descendants of those who were not expelled in 1492, who seem to perform this music to greatest effect. (Singer Montserrat Figueras does believe her ancestors were Jews -- "Figueras" being equivalent to "Feigenbaum"; and leader Jordi Savall believes his family were once Muslim.) Hespèrion have made excellent use of the Sephardic repertoire, and their new double CD, Diáspora Sefardí (Alia Vox), may be their best performance yet in the genre. Adding ouds, qanun, and even a sarod to their usual instrumentation of viola da gamba, harp, recorder, percussion, and voice, they stretch their reach all the way east across the Mediterranean. They may be the only ensemble with the encyclopedic knowledge -- not to mention the skills -- to play music of the entire Sephardic diaspora.

The first disc of this set offers vocal romances, with Figueras and her characteristically dramatic delivery. The second disc is even more remarkable: here the instrumentalists work in various small ensembles to improvise on Sephardic themes. Savall, a virtuoso of medieval and renaissance viols, is endlessly inventive, a Western Ali Akhbar Khan, and he finds perhaps his most responsive accompanist in percussionist Pedro Estevan, who follows and responds to him in the manner of a master tabla player. These are dialogues that might have taken place in other musical cultures (given equally brilliant musicians). But it is a remarkable gesture for this group to have reached east for techniques to bring this music full circle, back around the Mediterranean to Hesperus, the land of the West, from where it was exiled half a millennium ago.