Versión en galego – 普通话传记
Jako el Muzikante, the roguish hustler from the café aman
Sephardic urban music at the crossing point between East and West. A final toast at the café aman. An empire about to break off.
“Ven al Luna Park”, the first album by Jako el Muzikante, alter ego of the Galician artist Xurxo Fernandes, now available in Spotify
We are in troubled times and sometimes in troubled times a new aesthetic language emerges from the ashes. This is the music from troubled times… one century ago.
After World War II, in Japan, butō translated the reflection after the nuclear disaster into dance. The War of Independence, the return to absolutism and the complicated struggle of Spain to abandon the Old Regime inspired Goya his Black Paintings. In the underworld of the Greek port cities, after the traumatic dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the rebetiko, declared in 2017 Intangible Heritage of Humanity by Unesco, emerged.
The character of Jako el Muzikante is born in the ambience of the café aman, also known as kavanes, usual at the Ottoman empire during XIX century and beginnings of XX century. Cafes where the classless met. Cafes where coffee was prohibited most of the time but where hashish was routine. Cafes where Greek exiles born in Western (Turkey would deport more than a million people later) or Turks born in Greece (half a million would be forced into exile in the 20s) used to gather, with Armenians (that would suffer a tragic genocide in 1915), with Slavs… Some of them were Jews of Sephardic origin, who had Ladino or djudeo-espanyol as their mother tongue. In those cafes, one century ago, an incipient globalization was brewing, while the roots of their respective identities, at the same time permeable, survived.
In words by Alberto Conejero López, as quoted in the book from his Carmina Urbana Orientalium Graecorum. Poéticas de la identidad en la canción urbana greco-oriental, kavanes were multicultural places, “governed by its own rules. One of them time. In this habitat time does not spring from the past or progress towards the future. Time is encapsulated, only referencing itself within the actions that take place in that space.”
Who is Jako the Muzikante?
Jako is the Sephardic dandy, the roguish hustler from the café aman, who barely survives singing at weddings and at bar mitzvah parties, as well as pilfering what he can from his drunken and entertained clients at the café. Over time, these melodies were forgotten because of the complicated situation that those artists went through. But not all was lost: some of those pieces have been recovered from the memory of the descendants of those Sephardim. Enough to record an album of exceptional aesthetic quality, bringing to life, a century later, those songs that connect so well with our present reality and yearnings.
Xurxo Fernandes, the artist who created the project and who embodies Jako, found out about the Sephardic world at the beginning of the millennium. In a casual encounter at an airport he met some Bulgarians who, funnily, spoke a kind of Spanish that even had some hints of the current Galego language (spoken in the Spanish Galicia, north-west of Spain, where Xurxo is from). The impact on Xurxo of the life history of those people, whose ancestors have kept the language in exile since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century, would impel him to research. He travelled to Israel and Turkey, to search for what remained of that culture and, specifically, of its last moments of artistic splendor during the Ottoman Empire: the repertoire of the early twentieth century. Xurxo would apply the same inquisitive spirit that he already put into traditional Galician music (from the age of 14 he was devoted to touring the villages of Galicia to find someone to teach him how to play the tambourine) to this new passion. In such a way that, at present, he is the only young artist capable of speak and write fluent Ladino (a piece from the album, from Rosa Askenazi’s repertoire, Cursed Kokaine, recorded by her in 1932, has been translated by Xurxo from Greek to Ladino), with that mixture of Spanish ancient, Turkish words and French influences, typical of the language on the Eastern Mediterranean branch.
Nowadays Xurxo continues his research and he is usually posting videos and other materials at the Facebook page of Jako el Muzikante. He is also regular participant in the email group Ladinokomunita and he is providing lectures and workshops about Sephardic music in several European countries.
The book-CD “Ven al Luna Park”
Ven al Luna Park (come to the Luna Park) is the first official album of the project. It is a book with a CD, with abundant documentation and references on the themes, produced by Xurxo Fernandes himself, written in Ladino, English and Rashí (Ladino written in the Hebrew alphabet). It is the first project to recover urban music of the Jews of Spanish origin. The music is already available on Spotify and the physical book-CD is available in eBay.
The repertoire of this book-CD comes from diverse archives of oral tradition, dated from 1906 to 1995 (Emili Sene’s, Jakob Michael’s or Victor Besso’s for instance) and it is full of anecdotes, references and pictures, collected over the years by Fernandes.
The title of the work, which is also that of the eponymous piece, refers to the expression “Luna Park”, which means a place of pleasure and fun, in languages as diverse as Polish, Dutch or Turkish (the original Luna Park was founded on Coney Island in 1903). It was recorded in Coruña, at the Nakra Studios, with the oudist Wafir Shaikheldin (Sudan), the violinist Andrea Samek (Hungary), the Catalan percussionist Alexandre Guitart, the missed jazz bassist from Madrid who died last summer José Luis Yagüe, the clarinetist Georgi Yanev “Yoro” (Bulgaria) and the collaborations of Antía Vázquez Pantín, Eduardo Bolaños, Guillermo Reiriz and Paco Ulloa.
This editorial work is also supported by a concert program that has been already performed in Spain and in Algeria and that is ready, with line up from trio to sextet. In fact, the recording is the result of 8 years live experience, reflection and a thorough work of arrangements and documentation. So far, the live show has got critics like “A band that fired up the audience in moments of pure happyness.” by El Watan or “A mind-blowing show… A glorious, terrific very entertaining concert” by Fernando Íñiguez (Radio 3-RNE).