Category Archives: Music Before Shabbat

MBS back to 1497 and a tragic story in the sweetest voice: Bienvenida Aguado

24th July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And we come back to the eternal Bienvenida Aguado and this tragic story, kept alive since 1497 in the Sephardic diaspora 

Hello! How are you? In this occasion we come back to the Sephardic legacy, with a lady that was already our protagonist in this edition of MBS. One of my very favourite female singers, Bienvenida Aguado, born in Çanakkale, Turkey, in 1929, settled in Israel from 1979 and passed away in 2016. I hope you’ll enjoy her unbelievable melismata and the sweet timbric of her voice.

As usual, you have the video at the bottom. And if you like this, as usual, please: share it with your friends! Thank you in advance.

 

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The greatest female singer of the Sephardi-Turkish style

There is not much information about Bienvenida Aguado, as she was not a chazzan, neither a professional singer.  But we are lucky to have a bunch of recordings in audio and in video, made mainly by Susana Weich-Shahak. This picture is from one of the albums released with those recordings.

Bienvenida was born in Turkey and, despite that she moved to Israel in 1979, she returned to her native land every Summer, according to the booklet of the album Judeo-Spanish songs from the Eastern Mediterranean. Bienvenida Aguado and Loretta Gerassi.

Bienvenida sang both in Judeo-Spanish and in Turkish. Here you have an example of her singing in Turkish.

The song about the tragic story of the Duke of Gandía, murdered in his 19 years old

According to the booklet of the aforementioned album, written by the wonderful Edwin Seroussi, “the medieval Spanish romance continued its existence in the Sephardi oral tradition with significant modifications while retaining themes and the major structural characteristics of the Hispanic genre: lines of sixteen syllables (two hemistiches of eight syllables each), assonant rhymes and melodies of four short phrases covering two lines (four hemistiches) in forms like ABCD (like in this piece) or ABCDCD”.

The event mentioned in this song dates back to 1497 and tells the story of the murder of Juan de Borja y Cattanei, II Duke of Gandía (he is the man in the portrait). He was stabbed and his body was thrown to the river in Rome, when he was only 19 years old. The last time he was seen alive was in a place called the square of the Jews.

He was the firstborn favorite son of the pope Alexander VI and his preferred lover, Vannozza Cattanei, and brother of Cesare Borgia.

There are several hypothesis about the reason: the jealousy one, according to which his younger brother Jofré killed him because Juan was his wife’s lover, and the political one, that blames Cesare, who would take Juan’s place in the heart and the political plans of the Pope, their father. But, so far, this is an unsolved case and many other possibilities, like a punishment by enemies of their family, make also sense.

The song explains how the body of the Duke was found in the river by some poor fishermen. With no doubt, he was a rich and important person, because of the clothes he had. They though he was the son of a king. He had a ring in his finger that would make one hundred poor become rich. And the son of Alexander was been search…

If they returned him alive to his father, he would make them noble, and if they returned him dead, he would give them some presents.

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Click the picture to listen to La muerte del Duque de Gandía by Bienvenida Aguado:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
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Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

The secret of Shabbat in Aramaic, by cantor Pierre Pinchik

17th July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And our protagonist today sings to the secret of Shabbat, in Aramaic. He was born in Ukranian land at the time of the Russian Empire and became the favourite chazan in Chicago: he is Pierre Pinchik

Hello, how are you? I have goosebumps. It is almost impossible for me to write while listening to this recording. Some specific performances has such a power that makes you think “what did this man have inside to sing like that?“. Many cantors has sang Rozo D’Shabbos wonderfully. Pinchik develops unexpected melistama, plays with the phrasing accelerating and slowing down, chews some syllables and uses a soul-stirring vibrato, in this text in Aramaic, for which he created the music. 

As usual, you have the video at the bottom. And if you like this, don’t be selfish: share it with your friends!

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A voice from the Golden Age of the Chazanim

Pierre Pinchik was born as Pinchas Segal in 1900 in the Ukranian village of Zhivitov, that was part of Russian Empire at that time. I think it must be now Zhyvotivka, in the oblast of Kiev, Ukraine.

So he grew up in the Czarist Russia, attending the Hassidic Skverer yeshiva, lead by a rabbi that was very fond of music and used to invite cantors. Later, Pinchas changed the yeshiva for the conservatory in Kiev, where he would study piano and voice.

And, after the revolution, he was hired by the new Red Army for touring the country singing folk songs. He served as chazan in Leningrad for 6 years, before moving to the USA in 1927. During that period, he realiced that the classic liturgyc repertoire from the XIX century was not the most suitable for his voice and style, so he rearranged some and also composed some new ones, like this Rozo D’Shabbos.

At the USA his career boosted almost inmediately, he became much appreciated as a cantor and he recorded several albums, signed by the RCA. His main synagogue was K’nesset Israel Nusaḥ S’fard in Chicago. He died in 1971 and is buried in Boston.

I found this portrait and some biographic facts at the website of Geoffrey Shisler and also in Milken Archive. In this last one there are further details of how he got to travel to the USA with documents provided by the poet Itzik Fefer, who would be murdered later in Stalin’s massacre of Jewish poets, also about the first years there, as well as about the Chemelnitzki massacre in XVII century at the birthland of Pinchas.

The song about the secret of Shabbat

The lyrics of the song are in Aramaic, from the Sephardic liturgy of Shabbat. You can find them and the translation into English, here at the blog A Nigun A Day.

You can get the general sense but I think you must be familiar with the Hassidic kabbala to really understand the meaning in all its deepness. If you are, and if you know also Hebrew alphabet, this seems a very interesting explanation at the website of the project It Is Shabbos, by the contemporary cantor Yaakov Lemmer, who has also recorded this song. You can listen him singing it live, here.

Clic the picture to listen to Rozo D’Shabbos by Pierre Pinchik:

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I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

Jews in Uzbekistan, a History of millenia

10th July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

 And we travel to Uzbekistan, one of the places of the world where I have felt more tolerance and peaceful coexistence of religions, with an old recording of a love song, made in 1957

When I made this edition of MBS, I already talked about Deben Battacharya and his recordings in Israel in 1957, and we listened to a piece of music by Yemenite Jews. Visit it if you didn’t read it before, as his work there was outstanding, a real legacy to teach and please us today. His portrait is also linked.

At that moment I was already considering to come back to these recordings to listen some of the Uzbek pieces and here you are!I hope you are well! I want to ask you something.

 

If you like this, please share it with your friends. It really helps me to keep this initiative going on week after week, to see that it reaches more people with these musics that capture the History of civilizations.

 

Jews in Uzbekistan, a History of millennia

I have had the luck of visiting Uzbekistan twice, for the Sharq Taronalari – International music festival in Samarkand (thanks to the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Madrid), as a journalist in 2017 and with the band I manage, Vigüela, in 2019. The people there is really warm and caring. One of the most enjoyed moments for us was to share the table with Muslims of Persian background, Orthodox Christian Russians and Tajiks.

Following my obsession of searching for the synagogues whereever I go, we searched for the one in Samarkand. It was not easy, but finally we found it, as well as the Jewish quarter. Samarkand is not only the outstanding Registan square and the big avenues full of flowers, it is also little and tidy streets, with little shops, little mosques, kind people doing their lifes. That is the kind of street where the synagogue is. This picture is by Oleg Yunakov in Wikipedia.

But the main city for Jews in Uzbekistan is Bukhara, with which I have a pending subject to fullfill! In the country there are around 13.000 Jews and Bukhara has two synagogues. They are recognized as a native group.

The presence of Jews in the land is documented for more than 1000 years and some historians state that Jews are settled in Bukhara since the time of the King David. In 538 aC, the Persian king Cirus the Great (VI century aC) liberated the Jews that had been deported to Babylon and welcomed them in his empire, that spanned from all the current Turkey to the river Indo at the East and to the Aral sea at the North. The religion of the Persian was the Zoroastrianism but Ciro the Great allowed big religious freedom. The current Jews of Central Asia could be descendents of those released from Babylon.

This outstanding picture of Bukharan Jews is from the very recommendable web Enlace Judío:

Until the Middle Ages, Bukhara was the biggest settlement of Jews in Central Asia (Mizrahi Jews, practitioners of Sephardic Judaism). Nowadays, the youngest speak mainly Russian but the older ones keep the bukhori language, that is based on classical Persian, seasoned with words from Hebrew and languages from the surrounding countries.

From the mid of XIX century, the emigration of Jews from Uzbekistan to Israel has been constant. The Bukharian quartet from Jerusalem took shape at the end of XIX century. The Soviet Regime didn’t make things easy, specially in terms of religious practices, so many Jews emigrated to Palestine. The Holocaust made that many Askhenazi searched for shelter at the URSS, and many ended in Bukhara. Waves of mass emigration would happen mainly in 1972 and after the fall of Sovied Union.

About todays, Uzbekistan is a secular state of Sunni Muslim majority and with 16 different faiths. There are around 13000 Jews. I invite you to watch this short and nice video about the current Jewish community in Bukhara. I hope they will be able to develop their lifes and keep their faith and practices without fear.

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What about the music?

The true is that all this is fascinating but what took us here is the music: the recording by Deben Battacharya made in 1957 in Israel, from a group of Bukharan, lead by Menahem Eliezacoff. I have chosen a love song, consisting of a series of verses in Persian called shair. The instruments are chang (harp), kamancha (bowed string instrument), tambur (plucked string instrument) and doiras (frame drum).

This recording is included in the compilation released in 2014 by ARC Music under the name of Music of the Oriental Jews from North Africa, Yemen & Bukhara. You can find more info about this compilation, here.

Clic the picture to listen to the love song Tulkum by Menahem Eliezacoff Group:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

MBS with a legend in music, by John Zorn

3rd July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And on this occasion we will come back to our todays with the super productive creator John Zorn and one of his pieces I love the most: Sippur, played by Masada String Trio

John Zorn does many different things. I have only seen him once, in a concert with Mike Patton, the singer of Faith No More, Fantômas or Mr. Bungle and who is one of his many collaborators. But, before that, I started to really appreciate Zorn’s work thanks to his work with the record label Tzadik. In this occasion we will enjoy his work as composer, in which the Jewish history and symbols have a strong pressence.

Sippur, a legend made music

· At the bottom you’ll find the video with the music piece ·

 

Sippur, in plural sippurim, is a legend, a story, usually with a moral lesson. There are many Hassidic sippurim in which the protagonists are rebbes. My very dear Igal Gulaza Mizrahi noticed me about the many sippurim by and about the founder of Hassidism, Baal Shem Tov. After watching some videos with rebbes explaining tales, I found this one, made with stop motion, very nice to share.

 

And here on the right you have the cover of a book of 1888 by Jakob. B. Brandeis, a historic publisher from Prague. This book is available digitaliced, here. Sadly for me, it is in German and I haven’t found a translation to English. But you can read many little Hassidic sippurim, in English, for instance in Chabad.org.

 

But what about the music!? This is “Music Before Shabbat”

But as you understand, music is a door that opens the curiosity about many other captivating facts about Jewish people, history, traditions… The true is that, while doing this MBS, I felt tempted to talk about the fortress of Masada and about Issachar, son of Jacob and Leah, but I will leave them for another edition.

This picture by John Zorn is the profile picture from his Facebook page, credited to Nick Ruechel. He was born in New York 66 years ago. His main instrument is alto saxofon but that is not the most meaningful thing to explain about him as a musician. His work as a composer and a producer is super prolific and very diverse: from a nice delight like the one we have here below, to some things I could not even call music, like this.

I have chosen the live version of Sippur recorded in 1999 in Warsaw (where I should have been in April…) by the Masada String Trio, composed by Mark Feldman (violin), Erik Friedlander (cello) and Greg Cohen (double bass). The studio recording is in The Circle Maker, disc 1: Issachar. You can listen that version here.

John Zorn, through his label Tzadik and, above all, the Radical Jewish Culture series, has launched the works by artists like Frank London, David Krakauer (our protagonist of this MBS) or Naftule’s Dream (that will show up here at MBS soon). He really deserves a prominent place as the disseminator of Jewish contemporary music and this is a little tribute to him.

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Click the picture to listen Sippur:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

The brave blind girl who turned into more than a little queen: Reinette l’Orainese

26th June 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And on this occasion we will enjoy the outstanding singer, composer and oudist Reinette l’Oranaise, born in 1918 in Tiaret, Algeria.

I discovered this artist while learning more about my much appreciated singer and pianist Maurice El Medioni. He has collaborated with Reinette on many occasions. About Maurice, and also about his uncle, Saoud l’Oranaise, I will come back in future editions of MBS, as they are also benchmarks of the Jewish music from the North of Africa. In this meantime, it is the turn for this superb artist that I think deserves a prominent position in the Olympus of music.

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The brave blind girl who turned into more than a little queen

Reinette’s life could have had the same destination as Saoud’s: she could have ended her days in Sobibor. But no. Her fate was another. Her life continued until she died in Paris in 1998. In this picture, from the blog Ben Zaken Descendance, Maurice El Medioni is with her. He is alive and 91 years old.

· At the bottom you’ll find the video with her voice ·

Reinette, whose real name was Sultana Daoud, was born in 1918 in Tiaret, 220 kms to the East from Oran, in Algeria. She was the daughter of a Morrocan rabbi.

The infection of smallpox made her blind from 3 years old. But it did not prevent her study music with the mentioned Saoud El Medioni. According to Gharamophone, Maurice sais the little Sultana was Saoud’s first pupil.

The young Sultana learnt to play darbouka as well as oud  that, at that time, was an instrument exclusive for male performers. She also learnt also many pieces from the Arab Andalousi legacy, of which she is considered one of the referential keepers, without whom many pieces would just have got lost. This is especially thrilling for me, as the land where I am settled and from where I am writing to you now was that Al Andalus, that land where that music took its first shape, the music she would play and sing five centuries after the Moorish and the Sephardic Jews were expelled from.

This picture is from the same blog as the one above –>

Reinette and Saoud were inseparable. She was his taliba, his pupil, and she used to sing in his cafe in the Derb, Oran’s jewish quarter. In 1938, with the shaykh, the master, she moved to Paris, where he was going to set up a cafe in Montmartre. But he would send her back to Algeria very soon, encouraging her to make her name in her country. He did well. In January 1943 the German army, after the Operation Torch, made a roundup of Jewish in Marseille’s port and deported Saoud and his 13 years old son Joseph to Drancy camp and later to Sobibor, where they would be murdered.

If you want to know more about the Jewish musicians from the North of Africa, check the work Jews, Music-Making, and the Twentieth Century Maghrib, by Christopher Benno Silver.

What happened with Reinette back in Algeria?

Back in Algeria, her popularity started to rise. She would perform regularly in Radio Alger, she joined the female orchestra of Meriem Fekkai and she would collaborate with the most relevant musicians at that time. But in 1962, after the independence of Algeria, as well as more than one hundred thousand Jews, she had to leave the country and moved to France. There, she performed for the Jewish community from the North of Africa.

Only 23 years after her exile in France, she would get some attention from the media. According to the beautiful obituary by Philip Sweeney, some journalist from the newspaper Liberation realized about her. This would rekindle her sweetest moments. She would perform again in great theatres, she would be admired and she would end her days recognized as a cultural ambassador of her country, Algeria. 

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Click the picture to listen to Reinette l’Oranaise:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

MBS with a super star of the Yiddish films from the 30s

19th June 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And in this occasion we will enjoy the voice of one of the best singers of the History: Moishe Oysher, spellbinding both in popular music and in liturgical singing.

I hope you are well! I learnt about this artist when I started to search for cantors and I come back to listen him again and again: he is Moishe Oysher. 

While searching for facts about his bio, I realiced that I consider Moishe Oysher as a star but that his niece Marilyn Michaels may be even more famous. The Oyshers came from a family of at least six generations of cantors. Apart of Moishe and his niece Marilyn, his syster Fraydele, Marilyn’s mother, was also a recognized singer. You can listen the ladies here. 

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Poignant cantor, Yiddish cinema star and ‘Kosher heart throb’

Moustache is often a good idea. With this outfit, that defiant gaze and that outstandingly passionated way of singing, I can understand why Moishe became popular.

 

· At the bottom you’ll find the video with his voice ·
This picture is from the film Der Zingendiker Shmid (The Singing Blacksmith), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, based on the play Yankl der Shmid, by David Pinski. Find here a very interesting documentary about the film.

Moishe was born in Lipcani in 1907, that nowadays is in Moldava. But at the time of his birth, Lipcani was part of Khotin district of Bessarabia guberniya of Russian Empire. With the birth of the state of Moldava, the river Prut that bathes the city would be the natural border with Romania. The border with Ukraine would be also very near, few kilometres to the North.

Today, Google Maps shows in Lipcani the place of the church of the Seventh-day Adventists and also of the Jehova Witnesses. The pressence of Jewish is kept thanks to the thrilling project of repair and documentation of the Jewish cemetery, started in 2013. Before the II World War, many of the inhabitants of the city were Jews. In 1941, they were deported to Brichany and Transnistria. Clic the picture if you are interested in a documentary about Lipcani with testimonies of survivors. In 1952, the Lipcani quarter would be buildt in the city of Ramat Gan, at the East of Tel Aviv.

But the young Moishe wouldn’t have to experience the terror. His destiny was another. From a very young age, he was captivated by the magic of the stage and started acting in theatre as soon as possible. In 1921, a 15 years old Moishe travelled to Canada to join his father, who emigrated to America when he was a kid. He was left in Lipcani, where he would get the spell of the music from both of his grandfathers.

Once in Canada, he joined the Actors’ Union in 1924 and started to work. The following years, he would move to USA, he would marry Florence Weiss, who would be co-starring some films with him (watch them singing together, here), he travelled to Latin America with his own company and, after his return in 1932, all the shows at the theatres had already done the castings. He was finding no job… but the time of the High Holidays was coming: he was luckily hired as chazan for the High Holidays at the First Roumanian-American congregation. His style keeping the prayers of Bessarabia, would enchant the public, as he does nowadays.

And what about the song?

There are many recordings by Moishe Oysher available. I selected this one of a cantorial melody that talks about the reconstruction of the Temple. It was composed by another chazan, Israel Schorr, born in 1886 in the Polish Galitzia, about who I will talk longer in a future MBS issue.

Oysher’s rendition of Sheyibaneh Bet Hamikdash is a 6 minutes joy of dynamic development in which his voice and creativity scale the greatest heights of artistry. Enjoy.

Clic the picture to listen Sheyibone Beit Hamikdash by Moishe Oysher:

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I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

MBS with a piyyut sang by Yemenites in 1957 in Israel, recorded by a Bengali ethnomusicologist: Deben Battacharya

12 June 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And in this occasion we will enjoy a mesmerizing old recording of a Yedid Nafshi, dating from 1957, from the recordings made in Israel by the Bengali ethnomusicologist Deben Battacharya.

I hope you are well! I want to ask you something. If you like this, please share it with your friends. It is all I could want with this, to reach more people with these musics that captures the History of our civilization. Under the video you have a button to sign up.

In the last edition we payed attention to a contemporary artist, David Krakauer, and we talked about current events. But I can’t hide my addiction to the old music. That’s why I feel so thankful to people like Deben Battacharya. In 1957, he spent 2 months in Israel, recording the different people that gathered there from so many origins. In Yish’i, between Jerusalem and Ashdod, he meet the Yemenite community.

The recordings by Deben Battacharya in Israel 1957

This portrait of Deben is from the booklet of a collection of 4 albums with those recordings, that was released by Westminster in 1959 under the name of “In Israel Today“. This recording of Yedid Nafshi is also included in a much newer and easier to find compilation, released in 2014 by ARC Music (whose work of re-editing and disseminating Battacharya’s work is also outstanding), under the name of Music of the Oriental Jews from North Africa, Yemen & Bukhara. You can find more info about this compilation, here. It contains more outstanding beauties so I might come back to this album in the future.

In website The World Jukebox, you can also find information about the different albums released with those recordings as well as a brief information about Deben and his trip to Israel. And if you want to know more about Deben Battacharya, there is a large interview made by his friend Kevin Daly, here.

The recording of Yedid Nafshi is accredited to Nissim Matari (even though you’ll hear two different singers) of whom there are no references apart of this recording. But the booklet of the edition of 1959 explains that Yish’i “was founded in 1950 to house some of the Yemenites who had arrived to Israel during one of the largests airlifts in the world, known in Israel as “magic carpet”“. Deben met the settlers at the end of their day’s work. Then they moved to the village hall, where all the inhabitants, of all ages, men and women, gathered. Deben would edit 6 pieces in the collection of 4 albums, with the recordings of that evening. Let’s enjoy the result.

Clic the picture to listen Yedid Nafshi by Nissim Matari:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

MBS. David Krakauer’s special voice message for you + 3 minutes of musical spell

5 June 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

And in this turbulent times, we are together to reflect and enjoy. Today, Mr. David Krakauer, the wondrous clarinetist from New York, provides us an amazing tune and a heartfelt message, specially for us as recipients of Music Before Shabbat. 

I feel so thankful to David that took a moment in this turbulent moments, specially for USA and for his city, New York, to send us a special message of good wishes and solidarity against racism.

The inspiration that a black musician provided him for creating an amazing composition is even more meaningful in these days. 

Listen David’s message, here

David Krakauer’s Klezmer à la Bechet (feat. Nicky Parott in the bass) 

I love the clarinet in klezmer. How not? A good clarinetist of klezmer makes the instrument talk, laugh and cry in an unpredictable flow that caresses your soul. 

The “à la Bechet” refers to Sidney Bechet, a black composer, clarinetist and saxofonist from New Orleans, born in 1897 with an innate talent for music that would develope from a very young age. He is widely known, but if you want to learn more about his biography, check for instance this. And you can listen him playing clarinet here. David Krakauer calls Bechet his “teacher he never met”, as he explains in this interesting interview.

And David Krakakuer? Well, he is also a master, composer and clarinetist, recognized as one of the best clarinetists on planet Earth, with a strong career both in modern klezmer and in classical music.

David was born in 1956 in New York, where he lives. I mentioned him in this edition, related to Meshuge Klezmer Band and David’s initiative Music from the winery. So, apart of his own career, David provides dissemination of the work of other artists too.

David started in classical music and recovered the music of his ancestors in his early 30s, when he became curious about his ancestors. His grandparents arrived to the USA from Eastern Europe at the end of XIX century and, after the religious prosecution they had suffered, they decided to leave all that behind and to talk only English.

Two generations after, as David explains in this other interesting interview, that tradition was lost at the USA, but the people started to want that music for weddings, that music that the old people of that time had listened when they were kids. That was the beginning of the revitalisation of klezmer. You can check David’s website for more details about his career and projects.

Clic the picture to enjoy the outstanding David Krakauer with this piece from the album A New Hot One:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

Music Before… Shavuot! ? With nouba Raml Maya

28 May 2020 – Shavuot is almost here

Yes! This week this message reaches you one day before because Shavuot begins tonight. Let’s start to create the atmosphere for this time for study and reflection with a piyyut sang on nouba Raml Maya.

In this occasion I have to thank once more the team of Darké Abotenou as the piece that accompanies us today is from their Youtube channel.

Once again the Sephardic legacy has the lead role in this diggest. Not the Eastern one, but the North African, with a piyyut sang on the nouba or makam?Raml Maya.

What is a makam? Very basically, in the Arabic, Persian, Turkish… music a makam is a scale, like a guide for performance, that defines a mood.
And what is a nouba? A nouba is a collection of chained pieces, like a suit with different parts and those parts are called mîzân.

The concept of nouba (also written as nawba) is deeply related to the Andalusi classical music and to Ziryab, musician in the court of Abd al-Rahman II in Cordoba in the IX century. He came from Persia and he put the seeds for this music to develope during the following centuries. The noubas developed in the North of Africa and nowadays there are kept eleven noubas in Morocco and sixteen in Algeria. In the web site Hazanout.com, dedicated to the hazanout in Morocco, they are mentioned 16 and the terms of makam and nouba are both used without further clarification.

? Special announcement: later today, 28th of May at 17h (Central European Time), Yan Delgado and me will make an interview with Jako el Muzikante, who will talk in Ladino and I will translate into English. Check here in advance ?

Where does my turmoil comes from? Let me explain. 

The Raml Maya is a nouba of which you can find many renditions of its parts (note that a complete nouba with all its parts can last six or seven hours) by artists of Andalusian music, like this or this. This recording that we will listen today is named Makam Raml Maya and you can listen at the beginning of the recording how Shavuot is mentioned and the piece is announced as “makam”. So my inference is that in the last years the terms of makam and nouba are been used indistinctly at least in the context of the sang piyyutim. Any further clarification about this would be really appreciated! In the meantime, let’s continue with what is clear like water: Shavout starts tonight and we have this beautiful piyyut (the lyrics are from the Machzor) to listen to warm up. 

Clic the picture to enjoy the piyyut for Shavuot:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shavuot sameach

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory

Music Before Shabbat, with Jako el Muzikante. Yearnings that you will, or will not, share ?

22 May 2020 – Shabbat is almost here

Love, love, love… that tearing feeling that drives us so crazy, is again the topic of today’s piece. A song about the quest to find the lady of his dreams, sang by Jako el Muzikante

In this occasion we will enjoy a very recent recording with Jako el Muzikante, that will take us back to Izak Algazi’s time before he moved to France (check the previous MBS, here).

As announced previously in another MBS, the friends from Sephardic Stories, that lead the Gibraltar World Music Festival, during the lockdown started the initiative Sephardic Collection, to support the work of the artists in this difficult time. In this frame, last Thursday it was premiered the video of this issue of MBS, that you can see below. ?? 

? Special announcement: next Thursday at 17h (Central European Time), Yan Delgado and me will make an interview with Jako el Muzikante, who will talk in Ladino and I will translate into English. Check here in advance ?
The song about the quest of the perfect lady

In the lyrics of this song, Onde que tope una ke es plazyente? (where would I find a pleasant one), a man wonders where would he find the woman of his dreams, one that he liked, slim, graceful… and that thinks before she speaks! He will wait for her many years.

According to the book-CD “Ven al Luna Park”, by Jako el Muzikante, Jak Mayesh “on the 8th of September of 1942 he recorded his voice for this song for a record of the “The Jack Mayesh Phonograph Record Co. label, accompanied on the oud by K. Bozajain.”

The book-CD also explains that Mayesh recorded the song again in 1948 and that it exists also a version of this song in the oral tradition, sang by Roza Berro. “Ven al Luna Park” includes also some brief biographical infos about Jak Mayesh, who was born in Kushadashi in 1899, a city by the Aegean sea, that now belongs to Turkey. He moved to USA in 1929, served as a singer in the most important Sephardi synagoges and also stablished a business of wholesaling flowers. What happened with this business? You can learn it in the book-CD ?

The recording in which Jako el Muzikante is based for his rendition is in an album from the collection of Jakob Michael and it can be found in the mentioned book-CD, Ven al Luna Park, by Jako el Muzikante, available nowadays in most of the online shops and digital platforms.

And I know this song is specially appreciated by my friend Fernando, who will receive this message in Krakow, that I hope to be again soon, when all this awfulness ended!

?One more announcement: if you understand Spanish, you can listen the interview with Jako, done by Marcelo Benveniste for Radio Sefarad and Radio Jai. Listen here ?

Clic the picture to enjoy Onde que tope, by Jako el Muzikante:

I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
It is as symple as sending … this link to sign up

Shabbat Shalom.

Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música

And we share with you one hour of music for joy in this playlist.
To know more about our artists, click here.

May you always find the light in your path.

These is our artistic offer for live show:
Jako el Muzikante – Gulaza – Janusz Prusinowski Kompania Jewish Memory