And we’ll listen to a cantor that is also the author of some of the most celebrated pieces of cantorial repertoire: Israel Schorr, born in 1886 at the Polish Galicia.
Hello, how are you? I hope well. Today it is the black Friday, isn’t it? Well!!! I have a super offer for you: your subscription to Music Before Shabbat, now, half price! ? Guaranteed.
I am having a super demanding week and I must say I am exhausted but when I start to delve in the thrilling Jewish music and history my strengths are renovated.
This week many people have seen the “secret” Hassidic wedding with 7 thousand guests in New York. If you haven’t seen it yet, check this. I hope the time to celebrate with massive amounts of people together will come back soon… In the meantime, I was thinking what are the usual insights of the population about the Hassidic Jews. Our protagonist of today, Israel Shorr, was from a Hassidic family so I will dedicate a part of this MBS to the Hassidism.
The life of Israel Schorr, as of many great cantors, is reasonably well documented. But Schorr is not as famous as others, because he died quite young at the very early age of 49 on April 9th 1935. This way, he was not a witness of the horror that would trap his mother land.
He was born in 1886 in Khyriv, or Chyrov, that was at that time in the Polish Galicia that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that now is Ukraine. But other sources say that he was born in Rymanów, two hours to the West from Khyriv, that is currently Poland.
He started singing as a boy soprano and became the official cantor in L’vov in 1904. He succeed his distant relative, the Hazzan Boruch Schorr, who was very appreciated because of his improvisations and his innovative compositions. There is some nice information about Boruch in this book, Discovering Jewish Music, by Marsha Bryan Edelman.
He served also in Brno, Kraków, Piestany and Zurich before emigrating to the USA in 1924, thanks to a visa for artist that he got with the help of Solomon Bloom. This man deserves attention too, his life is absolutely fascinating. You can start with this.
There at the USA, Schorr served in synagogues in Chicago and New York. Shorr was a composer as well as a cantor himself and one of the most famous pieces for hazzanut art, Sheyibone Beit Hamikdash, has done by him. You can find many renditions of this piece in Youtube. But my favourite is the one by the aforementioned Moishe Oysher, of whom I talked in this previous edition. Israel Shorr died at his 49 years old, because of a heart condition.
Sources for Schorr’s bio (check them to learn more):
Poland at the Google Maps Street View is always sunny. This is Rymanów nowadays (Khyriv is not streetviewed yet):
Hassidism in (very) brief
Do you remember the edition about John Zorn and the piece Sippur? Find it here. In that edition I already talked about the founder of Hassidism, Baal Shem Tov, who made many sippurim, many tales, to teach in an easy and appealing way the ethics and practices of this new line of Judaism. It you are not familiar with it, this video is very nice. Maybe I am a little childish? ? The fact is that it is very nice!
The happy way of approaching the religious celebration that you can see in this wedding in New York is explained in the way Hassidism understands life and the relationship with the divinity.
Listen to Av Horachamim byIsrael Schorr
Listen to the rendition by Israel Schorr of this Shabbos prayer, Av Horachamim, written in memory of the communities that were wiped out during the Crusades. This brief explaination is from this work by Rabbi Y. Friedman on the web Chareidi and there you can find also a part of the poem: “In his tremendous mercy may [our] merciful Father […] recall in mercy the holy kehillos that gave up their lives in sanctification of [His] Name […]”. The kehillos are the congregations. For the full lyrics in English, check this web page.
There is more information about the use of the poem in Shabbat, on this site of the Ortodox Union.
I found a brief historical explanation about the destruction of the Jewish communities in Germany by the Crusaders in XI century and the use of this poem on this page of the St John’s Wood and The Saatchi Synagogues:
“Its origins lie in the wake of the First Crusade. Many Jewish communities in Germany were decimated as mobs found an outlet for their religious zeal in killing Jews before making their way to the Holy Land to wrest it from the Muslims. Thousands of men, women and children lost their lives in the communities of the Rhineland. Mainz, Worms, Speyer were ravaged over the course of a few weeks as the Crusaders made their way down Europe. […] As the black plague swept across Europe during the mid-fourteenth century, annihilating nearly half the population, Jews were taken as the scapegoat and were accused of having brought about the plague and were persecuted and killed.”
And we’ll learn about an artist in whose biography myth blends with facts. Born in Algeria in 1920, settled in Paris during the occupation of the nazis, he would later be called the “King of Shaabi”: he is Salim (Simon) Halali.
Hello! How are you? I hope well. In this occasion I want to say thanks to Patricia Álvarez. She is a friend of mine from Madrid, a wonderful dancer and a culture enthusiast, especially from the Mediterranean basin, the Balkans and the Middle East. She introduced me to the work of Salim Halali. So, thank you, Patricia!
In this bio of Salim (super large, and I still would have been able to follow many more threads) there are facts and tales, that you can believe or not. I will explain the sources and you can judge by yourself but… do you know? The stories are worth of it. I hope you’ll like them.
The Algerian Jewish boy who wanted to be a flamenco singer
Shlomo or Simon Halali was born in Bône, currently Annaba, in 1920, from a family from Souk-Ahras. His father was a Turkish and his mother was a Berber-Jew. He left the country very soon, at his just 14 years old, searching for a career in music (even when he didn’t have any education in music). He wanted to be a flamenco singer.
So in 1934 he got to travel to Marseille, as a stowaway on a ship. Some time after, he went to Paris, where the International Expo would take place in 1937, with the hope to get a job at the Algerian pavilion. There, he found some compatriots, like Mahieddine Bachtarzi, who was the director of the first Andalusian music association of the Maghreb: El Moutribia.
Simon would later be renamed as Salim and he would reach high recognition.
Continue below, under this picture of the Hôtel de Ville of Bône:
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About Souk-Akhras, in ancient time it was Thagaste, a very important Roman city, the birthland of Saint Augustine.
According to the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World edited by Norman A. Stillman, the modern town began in the 1850s as a French military post, and by 1856 it had a permanent Jewish settlement. Some of the Jewish inhabitants were Baḥuṣim, semi-nomadic Jews from the surrounding region who adopted a sedentary lifestyle in the new town. Others were Jews of Livornese descent (from the city of Livorno, in the North coast of Italy to the Tyrrhenian sea).
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And this is the Hôtel de Ville of Souk-Akhras (picture kindly released for public domain by the author, Abdallahdjabi):
But let’s stop and hear a story. Believe it or not. You decide.
I found this story in the comments of the video in Youtube that you have at the bottom. And the same is in the facebook page La Page Thagastoise. Believe it or not. Salim has openly gay. But during his life he loved a woman. I believe it, as many years ago I was loved by a man who was gay some time after and now he is married with another man.
The story is translated and a little summarized by me, from the original from that mentioned page. The story is about the forbidden love between a Jewish boy and a Muslim girl from a large family of Souk-Ahras: Salim Halali (Simon at the beginning) and Ryma (that is how he nicknamed her, and sometimes he called her Fettouma too).
Simon and Ryma were neighbors and also distant cousins through the Ryma’s paternal grandmother. Indeed, the father of Ryma, a notable of Souk-Ahras was the son of a Jewish lady, converted to Islam, from the very old family of Ouled Kakou, from Souk-Ahras. These two children grew up together. They were inseparable like a brother and sister.
A few years later, having become a very beautiful and young woman, Ryma was forbidden by her father to see Simon again, who had also become a tall and charming boy. But they found a way to meet again discreetly at Ryma’s paternal great-aunt, Rimoun Kakou, who unlike her sister (the grandmother of Ryma) remained of the Jewish faith.
Made aware of this secret relationship, the father of Ryma, furious and with a great anger, hits Simon and outright forbids his daughter to go to her aunt Rimoun.
< The Great Synagogue of Marseille. The newspapers said in 2016 that it had been was sold to an Islamic cultural organization and it would become a mosque. But nowadays it is still a Synagogue and was renamed in 2018 as Breteuil-Beth Yossef, honoring the ex Great Rabbi of Marseille, Joseph Haïm Sitruk. It can be visited and it is a very recognized treasure for its historic relevance.
Far from Ryma, sad and unemployed, Simon leaved Souk-Ahras at the age of 15 (the biographies use to say at 14) and went to Marseille to look for work. Back in Souk-Ahras, two years later, and with a little money, he asks her father for Ryma’s hand, who categorically refuses to marry his daughter to a Jew. Indeed, Ryma’s father had already promised his daughter to a rich and very famous man from Souk-Ahras who ended up marrying her.
Unhappy, Simon leaved Souk-Ahras permanently at the age of 17 for Paris. And he would come back just once, in 1958.
Ryma’s husband died two years after her marriage in a traffic accident. Widowed, Ryma was forced by her father to marry a cousin of his, 25 years older than her. She moved with him to Annaba and later to Tunis. They had two daughters. Upon the death of her second husband, Ryma left Tunis and moved with these two girls to Bordeaux where they successfully completed their brilliant medical studies. In Tunis she got closer to her great-uncle Joseph Kakou, who was a soldier.
In the meantime, Simon moved to Paris, where he sang in cabarets. France was under the colaborationist Vichy government. Fleeing the pro-Nazi French police, Simon took refuge in the great Mosque of Paris for several months. At this time, his name would be changed for Salim. Learn more on the next story, below.
And still in love with Ryma, Simon only sang her name. He dedicated his first and famous song, “Mahani Ezinne” to her, but also “Rimoun Rmetni”, “Fettouma taaz alaya” and many other hits.
In 1958, Salim returned to Souk-Ahras where he gave a concert in Thagaste Square. There he was finally given news of his beloved. He followed her footsteps to Tunis where he learns from Joseph Kakou that she has gone to Bordeaux. He immediately left for Bordeaux to find her but she had left with her eldest daughter for the United States after her marriage to a wealthy American.
Casablanca. Spanish post office and the German consulate in the medina. Date unknown.
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In 1982 Salim installed in Casablanca in Morocco. There he finally had news of his beloved Ryma by a Souk-Ahrassien (Ex Minister and ex Ambassador) married with his young daughter. Note that Salim was already 62 years old and they hadn’t meet each other since he was 17. The daughter organized a meeting between Salim and Ryma in Paris in a famous restaurant. The reunion between the two old lovebirds of Souk-Ahras was sad and very moving.
Salim had improvised while weeping a song for Ryma who was also very moved, the famous Alach Ya Ghzali. He learnt from Ryma that she knew everything about him and his singing career: she listened to him every day and she knew all his songs by heart.
Ryma died in Bordeaux in 1986 at the age of 66, where she is buried. Salim travelled from Morocco especially to attend her funeral where it seems he had read aloud the Fatiha (the first chapter, or sura, of the Quran) in her memory.
The sources mentioned by this person, who doesn’t identify his/herself are:
Kamel M
Brahim Merakta from Casablanca, close friend of Salim
Ryma’s little daughter (now in Bordeaux)
Old testimony from one of the sisters of Ryma’s first husband
Joseph Kakou’s daughter (Cannes)
The Jews and the Great Mosque of Paris at the Vichy period
About this story there is some controversy. Some state that the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris saved thousands of Jews, providing them documents with Muslim identities. Others say they might be around 100.
This wonderful picture of the Great Mosque at a time when Salim could be there is from the website of FranceCulture.fr:
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On the occasion of the release in 2012 of the film Les Hommes Libres by Ismaël Ferroukh, the newspaper Haaretz made a interesting review of the available positions and evidences. Find it complete, here. And I summarice here below. But, before, I quote a paragraph that is specially meaningful:
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“Posing as Muslims would presumably have been technically possible for some of the North African Jews living in France. The Jewish men, like the Muslim ones, were circumcised. Jews and Arabs had shared surnames. Their outward appearance and knowledge of Arabic also helped an unknown number of Jews assimilate into the Muslim community. But the Germans did not easily give up on their demand that someone suspected of being a Jew prove his origins. That was the context for their turning to the Great Mosque of Paris with requests that it rule whether a particular person was Jewish or Muslim.”
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Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy: “uncovered the most important written evidence to date relating to the subject: a note from a bureaucrat in the French foreign affairs ministry to the foreign minister, dated September 24, 1940, which describes the Germans’ activity against the mosque, that says “The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of the Muslim confession. The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices. It seems, in effect, that a number of Jews resorted to all sorts of maneuvers of this kind to conceal their identity.”
Albert Assouline, North African Jew who fled from Germany to France and found shelter in the Great Mosque: “no fewer than 1,732 Resistance fighters found refuge in the cellars of the mosque”.
Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Mosque in 2012, estimated that the Mosque supported around 100 Jews, supplied them with Muslim identity certificates that enabled them to survive.
Dr. Simcha Epstein, a Paris-born historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: “The doubt is not about whether the mosque aided or did not aid Jews, but rather regarding the number of Jews the mosque helped.”
Prof. Renee Poznanski,of Ben-Gurion University, specialist on French Jewry during the German occupation: “I have not come across any such thing in the documentation and testimonies. If it indeed happened, we are talking about a historically minor phenomenon, of very small dimensions, but important of course.”
Yad Vashem: “Yad Vashem made a supreme effort to locate survivors who Benghabrit saved at the time of the Holocaust, and went to great lengths to gather archive material pertaining to the rescue operation at the Mosque of Paris, including applying to the mosque’s archive. Every effort was in vain. No testimonies from survivors or relevant documents were found.”
I strongly recommend you to check the complete report in Hareetz, that has much more interesting facts about the mentioned film and other relevant issues.
What is the relationship between Salim and the Great Mosque of Paris?
The second tale
Salim Halali is one of the characters in the film Les Hommes Libres. Remember he set in Paris in 1937. There, he performed at the Maure café of the Great Mosque of Paris. Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and first rector of the Mosque, who was a musician himself, became friend of Salim and, during the German occupation, would help to hide his Jewish origins by providing him with a false Muslim certificate and engraving the name of his late father on an anonymous grave of the Muslem cemetery of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis).
At this moment I would like to introduce the other tale. It is also from the Facebook page The Page Thagastoise.
In 1942, an Algerian young man from Oran, Younès, came to Paris to earn money to send back to Algeria. He decided to make the black market. One day, he was arrested by the French police. The intelligence officers then proposed to him to cooperate: they will allow his illegal trade but in exchange, he must go to the Paris Great Mosque to spy on the rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, and report to them.
The French police collaborator of the Nazis though the rector was providing counterfeit papers to the Jews and to the resistance. Younès accepts the deal. But very quickly, he got deeply in love with a singer from Souk Ahras, a certain Salim Halali, who had found refuge at the Grand Mosque in Paris and had to pass for a Muslim. To remove any doubts, Salim prayed five times. Younès believed that Salim was not a Jew.
The rector had give Salim counterfeit identity documents, changing his name from Simon to Salim, saving him from a certain death. He would keep that new name until his last day.
What happened with Salim after the World War II?
According to the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, his music became quite popular. In 1947 and in 1948 he set two entertainment venues (cabaret).
In 1949, Salim moved to Morocco and bought an old café in the mellah*of Casablanca, which he transformed into a prestigious cabaret: “Le Coq d’Or”. This venue was visited by the rich families of the country and celebrities. But the cabaret was destroyed in a fire and Salim then returned to France at the beginning of the 1960s. He was known for his extravagant parties, in which he even took elephants (and he had two tigers as pets) to the garden in his villa, as well as for his artistic work.
He stopped singing in 1993 (but made one occasional concert in 1994) and left for a retirement home in Vallauris. He died on June 25, 2005 in Antibes (Alpes-Maritimes) and his ashes are scattered in Nice in a garden.
Salim confided in this doctor, Dr. Abdallah Khémis, that he had given all his copyrights to the disabled of Algeria and offered to the Algerian embassy in Paris a “great value” carpet, according to his own terms. This physician, who practiced at Larcher Hospital in Nice, confirmed that Salim Halali had never forgotten Souk Ahras and that he had dedicated to the city his celebratory songs El Forga Morra and Ya Ghorbati.
* The mellah is the Jewish quarter of the cities in Morocco, usually surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway.
Mellah of Casablanca at the beginning of XX century. Picture of public domain available in Wikipedia. Find more here.
Listen to the rendition by Salim Halali of this poem, Ya qalbi khali hal, in an Arabo-Andalusi style. Lyrics in English, below.
Click the picture to listen to the recording:
LYRICS:
Oh, my heart, let the situation continue on its way.
Leave all the words and listen carefully to what they say.
Slow down, don’t hurry, the one who waits wins.
Deliverance comes in its own time, from the lord to his creature.
Sadness as well as comfort, all come from God.
Be patient during the tests, until God delivers you.
Judgements are established in advance, God’s verdict is inevitable.
Be patience with me, sorrow is never eternal.
Such is this earthly life, it raises some people and sets others down.
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.
A relevant date for our community (and a reason to be more than proud for me): before-Babel Music XP.
A thrilling experience facing the pandemic with live music, by Kajsa Bacos from Kulturverket Onsjö.
Mini interviews with festival manager: Anđela Galić from Kamičak Etno Festival and Samir Baijal from Hillside Festival (continuing the series of interviews about challenges for festivals and about MOST Music participants)
News from the charts and sister projects
What’s next? Mundial Montreal and before-Babel Med XP!
How are you? I hope well. I am not quite happy. My toilet has been flooded due to a breakdown, in a way that I thought that happened only in the films. I am soaked and I am waiting for the plumber… In the meantime, I got to close the water valve and I don’t have water in the house and, did you know? We are in the middle of a pandemic ?
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However, life goes on and during the rest of this month there are some exciting events to pay attention to and interesting colleagues to learn from.
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Do you want to share any useful experience you have had during this difficult time or another content relevant for our community of the global music?
Contact me. And if you find this interesting, share it with your friends. You can read the previous issueshere.
Thanks for your attention and remember that during the reading you can listen to some great music by our artists collaborators –>
In the latest editions the rebirth of Babel Med, now Babel Music XP, have had some place. I am happy to remind you once more that the before-Babel will take place online on 26 and 27 of November and I will happy particitipate in a round table: New collaborations and solidarity for professionals relaunching their careers. It will be moderated by Ludovic Tomas and I will share the table with Birgit Ellinghaus, Umair Jaffar, Emad Mabrouk and Amobé Mévégué. What a pleasure.
By the way, if you want to learn more about me, check the interview that Erick van Monckhoven made me for his World Music Lab Italia. Remember I made an interview with him in this previous edition. I am pleased that he found my insights interesting and I opened totally.
And the interview announced in the previous edition, with Noam Vazana in her project Why Do it Yourself Music, is available here. We talked more than one hour and it was really fantastic! I felt such an easy communication with this wise lady!
THE EXPERIENCE OF KAJSA BACOS FROM KULTURVERKET ONSJÖ (HALMSTAD, SWEDEN)
In the latest edition I asked if any of the readers would like to share their experiences of the last months in dealing with the pandemic and the activity of live music and Kajsa Bacos (her portrait is from her profile at Womex website), from Kulturverket Onsjö, in Halmstad, in the province of Halland replied with this experience:
“From April to August we closed down completely. We planned Summer concerts in July but when the rain poured down for 2 weeks we gave that up. We can seldom trust the weather, so it is difficult to plan outside concerts.
In September we started with concerts. We have a small place and 50-60 persona are the maximum. 45 feels full. So we decided to use our funding thus: Instead of one concert with 2 sets (1,5 hour), we had two concerts with one set (60 minutes). The musicians had an hour to rest and eat in between.
“It was a success. People who have been isolated for long, who can’t even go shopping, came.”
We told the audience that for the first concert only risk group persona were welcome. And only 15 people for each concert. That is 70 + or persons with an underlying condition. The response was big, so we ended up with two concerts for the risk group.It was a success. People who have been isolated for long, who can’t even go shopping, came. We can do this for our venue is not commercially driven, our funding pays for the music.
This way, we keep people happy, we use the funding that either could be paid without the musicians playing or we could pay it back to the government, the musicians are really happy to meet an audience, we show that we still do good work, and we keep our cooperations running, and our network intact. We can’t just give up while we wait for better times.
“We have to work, musicians have to play. People who come here are really good at keeping a social distance. We just have to learn to adjust. And continue.”
We have many times organized events for marginalized groups like children, immigrants etc. In Western Europe today we have more and more old people and because of the pandemic they are marginalized. We need to keep their spirits up also. They can’t see their families, go places, go to dinners. I planned carefully so they arrived in separate groups 10 minutes apart so there was no queue. They came in through one entrance and the musicians came in another. I desinfected all handles, put chairs 1,5 metres apart. And if I didn’t know somebody, I interviewed them on their lifestyle. If they had been at a social event recently they couldn’t come.
We have to work, musicians have to play. People who come here are really good at keeping a social distance. We just have to learn to adjust. And continue.
No musician has been indefinitely cancelled, we have just postponed ther concert. There is a life after corona.”
Thank you very much, Kajsa!!!
This is the Kulturverket place, from Google Maps Street View:
CURRENT AND FUTURE CHALLENGES FOR FESTIVALS
In this occasion, we have two interviews: about Kamičak Etno Festival, from Croatia (that continues the series of festivals included in project MOST)and about Hillside Festival, from Canada. I really hope they can retake their usual shape soon. To attend a concert or festival, gathering together with people you don’t know, but that are willing to share a emotional experience, is inimitable. It is a ritual, from the moment you chose the clothes you will wear. Or even from before. I am thanksful to Kajsa, Anđela and Samir and so many people that are keeping the flame alive in this time of added dificulties.
The third edition was planned to be held on days day 21 and 22 of August at the 18th century fortress of Sinj, in Croatia. This edition included concerts by Croatian, Argentine, Serbian, Macedonian, Bosnian and Irish artists, traditional crafts made by local producers and gastronomic local specialties.
The edition of this year had to be cancelled and although some things will have to be rethought, the festival is included in MOST Project and planned to come back in 2021. Anđela Galić, organizer of the festival, shares their insights and vision.
Mapamundi Música – What do you search for in an artist when you program?
Anđela Galić – We are looking for creative, talented, individuals or groups whose music grows out of a certain musical tradition but at the same moment brings contemporary approach to its interpretation. Kind of music that brings interesting fusion of styles and stays in your ears for a long time.
MM – Which are the global objectives of your festival? AG – We want to profile our Festival as one of the best world music festivals in Croatia, but also in the wider Balkan region. Our goal is to make Sinj (Croatia) and Kamičak Ethno Festival a recognizable festival gem where you can hear great performers from all around the world.
MM – What are the most complicated or difficult issues to deal with in your festival? AG – The most complicated and difficult part is to provide enough funds, which implies constant engagement on the application of the festival to various funding tenders. Also the hard part is the fact that if you want to orginaze good festival you need a lot of planning and organization, which means involvement of many people, in our case volunteers, without whom the realization of the Festival would not be possible.
MM – Which are currently the main challenges for this kind of cultural proposals like yours? AG – Due to the epidemiological situation it is difficult and uncertain to plan ahead. Anything that involves complex organization and engagement of international artists is considerably aggravated at the moment. The whole situation is extremely unpredictable for all involved in music industry and requires quick adaptation to new circumstances.
MM – In one sentence, summarize the reason/s to go to your festival. AG – Excellent music in beautiful ambience of historic fortress at the top of the city with a view of the entire Cetina region, are just some of the reasons to visit Kamičak Ethno Festival. Plus, great fun is guaranteed.
MM – What has happened with the edition of 2020 in the current situation of the pandemic? AG – Sure, except from canceling the last edition, we have to think about alternatives for next edition, so we are considering limiting the number of visitors or organizing festival only with local performers.
Credits:
The portrait of Anđela is provided by herself.
The logo is from their facebook site
The aereal picture is from the website of the festival
The picture of the concert is from the facebook site (concert by Patrick Walker Trio at the edition of 2019)
MINI INTERVIEW WITH SAMIR BAIJAL FROM THE HILLSIDE FESTIVAL (GUELPH, CANADA)
I am sure you will agree with me in the idea that it sounds like magic: to spend three days of Summer in an island in a lake in Canada, full of music, with a program in which diversity of culture, of musical heritage and style, of age, geography and influence is a guiding line. This is what the Hillside Festival state about itself on the website. It helds two editions, the Summer one and also another, in February.
This year the Winter edition was normal but the Summer one had to take an alternative shape: Homeside 2020. Samir Baijal, the artistic director, explains more about the festival in general and about this special edition too.
Mapamundi Música – What do you search for in an artist when you program? Samir Baijal – Once I appreciate that they are a skilled and strong live artist, it is always about trying to picture them on one of our stages. We program all kinds of music and our audience is very open to new artists and form all around the world so I think of how they will respond. I look for performers who can have a strong connection to the audience and in most case willing to collaborate with other artists at the festival.
MM – What are the most complicated or difficult issues to deal with in your festival? SB – Typically, it would be the weather gets harsh as we on an island outdoors.
MM – Which are currently the main challenges for this kind of cultural proposals like yours? SB – Maintaining a festival that is non-commercial that has strong values and environmental/sustainable practices – hence also maintaining a unique identity in a very competitive market. But right now it is enduring the period of the pandemic when we are not able our regular event(s) and revenue is not possible.
MM – In one sentence, summarize the reason/s to go to your festival. SB – A family friendly festival in a beautiful setting, that challenges the audience to check their tastes at the gate and with more than just music.
MM – What has happened with Hillside Festival 2020? I think you were able to make the February edition normally, but for the Summer edition, you reshaped it for an online format. How was it? SB – We called it Hillside Homeside 2020. It went better than we expected, the event was completely free to view and what we noticed the most is how much the audience appreciated us offering this presentation. It felt very personal and I think that it was a sense of connection between our patrons and our festival during a very challenging and unprecedented time.
MM – How did you shape the experience of the attendants? SB – This was to be our 37th year, so we had a series called 37 songs where 37 artists offered a personalized recording of a song and monologue/message to the Hillside viewer. There were virtual workshops on everything from yoga to cooking and also links to our craft and food vendors – we had some archival footage with current day interviews (called Now and Then). We used the same different stage template as if it were on site.
MM – How did you get their engagement? SB – We had our mailing list, newsletter and media gave a lot of coverage that it was happening.
MM – Any positive insight of this reshaped edition, that you could even keep for future editions when the pandemic ended? SB – I think we would put more attention on more specific archiving and look at showing these during the year.
Credits:
The portrait of Samir is from his profile at Womex
The logo is from their facebook site
The aereal picture and the picture of the workshop are from the website of the festival
In the previous edition I announced that Transglobal World Music Chart turned 5 years old. I am happy to announce now that the compilation album The Best of Transglobal World Music Chart 2020, will be released by ARC Music in January. Follow our Facebook and visit our website of News to be updated and learn more. And during the last weeks we have incorporated new panelists, from Brazil, UK, Cuba and India.
About Mundofonías, our monthly favourites are the last albums by Niqolah Seeva, Kaito Winse and The Rheingans Sisters. For some weeks now the radio show is been broadcasted in Ràdio Túria, in L’Eliana, Valencia, Spain.
WHAT’S NEXT?
In spite of everything, we are still in the season of professional dates.
Mundial Montreal. The professional’s platform will be working from tomorrow to day 28th. Yesterday I decided to sign up and the true is that I am quite excited!
Before Babel Music XP. As announced above, it will take place on November 26-27. I a proudly included in the program. Remember that there is an interview with Olivier Rey from Babel Music XP, here.
WHO WE ARE AND SISTER PROJECTS
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And we’ll listen again the poem Im Nin’Alu, this time by Shalom Keisar and the Kiryat Ono voice ensemble, recorded in 1977. How does this evolved from just a poem, sang with a big part of improvisation, to a recognizable hit in the world of pop music?
Hello, how are you? I hope well.
Today this email reaches you a bit later. Until this morning I hadn’t decide which would be the focus of this email. I woke up later than I should, because I was dreaming about this song, Im Nin’Alu. I was dreaming and I didn’t want to wake up…
I dreamt a dream that is impossible to make real in the current circumstances: I was part of the cast for a theatre play based on this song. I would have to sing it in the play. All the actors were together around a table, with food and with the scripts, to organice the rehearsals.
Anyway, these guys from the video at the bottom sing better than me. I had this piece in mind since the edition about Suliman the Great, who sang some of this in his medley of Yemenite songs. If you didn’t read that one, click in the link. That recording is enchanting and their story is very interesting.
– And, as usual, find the music piece at the bottom –
Please, if you like this, share it with your friends. Thank you in advance.
What does diwan mean? In Arabic and in Persian cultures, a diwan (dīwān) is a collection of poems.
According to a text by Gregor Schoeler, the Dīwāns redactors made the colletions “arranged by them according to theme exhibit categories which correspond to a large extent to the Western concept of genres. Suchlike Dīwāns do not arise until the emergence of Abbasid poetry with its relative wealth of genres.” The Abbasid Caliphate was an Islamic empire that existed from 750 to 1258 C.E. as it was centered in Baghdad and included much of the Middle East. You can learn more about this topic, here.
The piece at the bottom is part of an album with a compilation of recordings made by Naomi Bahat-Ratzon and her husband Avner Bahat, in the 1970s. This one is dated in January 1977.
The whole album is a wonder and you can listen to it complete here. And to learn more, you have many comments about the album and the songs, here. It was released in 2006 by the Jewish Music Research Centre, in 2 CDs and a long booklet. It is not available in Amazon but it seems to be in the website of the Centre.
The enchanting performance by Shalom Keisar and ensemble from Kiryat Ono
The piece I have chosen is sang by Shalom Keisar (voice and drum) with the male vocal ensemble Kiryat Ono.
Kiryat Ono is a city in the district of Tel Aviv, that arised with that name in 1954 (and would be considered a city in 1992). Before that, there was a ma’abara there, a temporary settlement. You may know that the Operation Magic Carpet had been done in 1949 and 1950 and it transported 49 thousand Yemenite Jews to Israel. The amount of people that arrived to Israel in short time was huge. I have tried to see if Kiryat Ono was one of the first locations for Yemenite emigrants but I haven’t found any data to prove it, apart from the existance nowadays of The return to Zion Association of Yemenite immigrants.
And the crystallisation of a song
About this recording, the website of the Jewish Music Research Centre explains some facts. I will add comments here. In italics, their original texts:
“Im nin’alu daltei nedivim is a shira by Shalem Shabazi, signed Alshabazi. This poem is one of the most popular and widely known among the Yemenite Jews. It is sung on many different occasions, at weddings and other celebrations, to many melodies.”
Im nin’alu daltei n’divim daltei marom lo nin’alu means Even if the gates of the rich are closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed. If you understand Hebrew, check this page of the National Library of Israel. If you don’t understand Hebrew, anyway you can listen to many other recordings of this poem.
Shalem Shabazi (you can find it written as Shalom too) was a Yemenite Jewish poet from 17th century, of whom there are around 550 poems. He was a weaver as his main profession and he is though to be quite poor. He wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. He has a reputation of a heroe and his tomb in Ta’izz, in the Southwest of Yemen, attracted pilgrims all year long and specially aroubd Shavout. After the Operation Magic Carpet there were no Jews left in the city. The exact place of the tomb has been lost. You can read more about him in this site of Diarna.
This is Ta’izz, in a picture by Rod Waddington for Wikipedia. As it may be still quite complicated to travel to Yemen in a near future, you can also check the wonderful pictures of the city that are available in google maps.
“Alternate stanzas are written in Hebrew and Arabic. The poem speaks of angels on high, exile and redemption, exhortation to the soul. The meter is a variant of the so’er (rajaz): -˘˘- -˘˘- – / -˘˘- -˘˘-.”
To understand this part I had to find more about rajaz. In the book A Cultural History of the Arabic Language, by Sharron Gu, 2013, she explains that: “Most historians agree that there were distinct forms of music in the pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula that played an important part in the formation of Arabic poetry. Arabic poetry, unlike the literary poetry of many European languages that is written by literary writers, the Arabic poetry was invented originally by Arab soothsayers (kahins). They used incantations of a rhythmic form of rhymed prose known as saj’ and a poetic meter called rajaz. Arab soothsayers were also enchanters and prophets. It was believed that the jinn (supernatural creatures) prompted the verses of the poet and the melodies of the musician and connected music, poetry, and magic.
[…]
Pre-Islamic music derived from the rhythm of the spoken language and it was little more than unpretentious psalming, varied and embroidered by the singer, male or female, according to the taste, emotion, or effect desired. The oldest form of poetical speech was rhyme without meter, saj’, which was defined later as rhymed prose. Out of saj’ evolved the most ancient of the Arabian meters, known as rajaz meter, a measure which is believed to come from the rhythm of everyday desert life in particular, the beat of the steps of a walking camel. The rajaz meter was an irregular iambic cadence usually consisting of four or six beats.”
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“This song, as performed by Bracha Zefira, who sang a setting of one of the melodies by Paul Ben Haim, has been widely known to the Israeli public since the thirties.”
If i didn’t tell you they are the same song, would you have noticed? I wouldn’t. This violinist is Oedoen, or Ödön, Pártos..
The album includes several versions of the poem, by different artists, and they comment:
“Each performer chooses which stanzas of the complete song suit him or his tradition, and the occasion on which it is performed. He also chooses which melodies to sing, for the sake of variety.”
I want to highlight this part, because it is something similar to what happens in many traditions, including mine, the popular music from Spain, in many of its shapes: there is the concept of styles, that means that the performer has a frame of work, composed by a corpus of melodies (that are just the base and he or she can change, can include other melismata, adapts to the tonality, adapt to the lyrics to say the words in a meaningful way…) and a corpus of stanzas (in the tradition of Spain there are many anonymous stanzas or couplets, that can be chosen according to the will of the performer (who can also create new ones).
With this piece, Im’nin alu, we see how, from the versions from the people, very different between them (you will note this specifically if you listen to the several versions in the album, don’t miss it) performed just for fun or to celebrate, in which the personal will and the circumstances of the moment made each performance different (also the different performances by the same artist), in which the song didn’t have a closed number of stanzas, in which the role of improvisation was high, goes on crystallising in the form of a song. This example is specially interesting because it has produced so many versions and with the time all are much more recognizable as the same song as in the recordings of the album we are talking about. Check more versions:
Listen to Im Nin’Alu byShalom Keisar and ensemble from Kiryat Ono
The notes of the song in the website explain some interesting facts. I explain the words in bold, under the notes:
“Shalom Keisar (NSA studio, 27.1.77; YC 1181), accompanying himself on a drum, with the Kiryat Ono male voice ensemble, sing the first and last stanzas accompanied by hand clapping. The singer opens with the song’s most widely known melody, which was popularized by Bracha Zefira among the Jewish community of Palestine. It is sung in a responsorial manner: the soloist sings the opening hemistich and the choir the closing hemistich. The tawshihִ is sung to another, faster melody. It is usually sung in a responsorial manner, as follows: the soloist sings the first verse, and the choir the second, the soloist sings the second verse and the choir the third. At the end of the song the singers sing a third, slower melody, and a coda-like passage, and then repeat the last two verses at a faster tempo, followed by the blessing Vekulkhem berukhim (You all are blessed).”
The hemistich is a half-line of verse. This term applies to poetic meter with long verses. Between the hemistichs there is a caesura. Remember the schema we have also above: -˘˘- -˘˘- – / -˘˘- -˘˘- There you see the caesura between the hemistichs.
And the tawshih is a type of vocal suite, religious, in Yemeni tradition, related to the qawma (according to the The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The Middle East). And what is qawma? This looks like a gymkhana… According to Mahmud Guettat, the qawma from Yemen would be the fasil in Turkey, the wasla in Egypt, the maqam in Irak, el sawt from the countries of the Gulf. So, these are a system of melodic modes. I found Guettat’s explanation mentioned in a work by Sergi Sancho Fibla (Arrels mediterrànies de la música canareva: Reconstrucció de possibles vestigis ancestrals en les cançons populars d’Alcanar).
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Click the picture to listen to the recording:
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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And our star today is Victoria Hazan, an extraordinary Anatolian singer who moved to the USA in 1920 and recorded an album, Todas mis esperansas (all my hopes), that is a wonderful legacy.
Hello! How are you? I hope well. A few days ago there was an earthquake that has been specially destructive in Smyrna. Just by chance I had been listening to Victoria Hazan around that time. She was born very near Smyrna, in Salihli, and settled in Smyrna before moving to the USA. Somehow I found her mentioned while wandering at the Internet.
So, let’s learn more and enjoy the outstanding performance by Victoria Hazan. She has several songs about that kind of passion that drives you crazy and in this one she uses the metaphor of the passion as a fire: I have chosen Me kemi y me enflami and you’ll find the lyrics at the bottom, under the video.
– And, as usual, find the music piece at the bottom –
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Please, if you like this, share it with your friends. Thank you in advance.
The main facts of the life of Victoria Hazan are quite well know. She was alive until 1995, until she was 99 years old, and there are many pictures of her in different moments of her life, thanks to Maurice Ninio, who I think that was her brother, but I am not sure. In the website SephardicMusic.org there are many pictures, like this one on the left and there is even one of her grave. I have chosen this one, a portrait with a direct and defiant look, by this elegant lady of the sweet and melismatic voice.
She was a singer and a composer and she also played oud. She was born as Victoria Ninio in April 15, 1896, in Salihli, in the province of Manisa, in Anatolia. It is one hour to the East of Smyrna.
In Salihli there is the Sardes Synagogue. According to eSefarad it is “the third oldest Jewish temple known after the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the mudbrick in Babylon.” Learn more in this article about five synagogues in Turkey.
This is the recent status of the synagogue of Sardes. I hope it hasn’t suffered much after the latest earthquake. The picture is by Carole Raddato in Wikipedia:
Victoria’s family’s tradition was to be cantors. She married to a hazan, Israel Hazan, from a family of cantors too, and she adopted her husband’s surname and kept is even during her second marriage. In 1915 she moved from Salihli to Smyrna and in 1920, to New York. The marriage with Israel was already there, in 1925. After he died, Victoria married again, with Joe Rosa in 1936.
She became president of the United Sisterhood Benevolent Society in Bronx. She gave concerts in the synagogue, singing and playing lute, singing her songs, with compositions of her own, in Turkish, Ladino, French, Hebrew, Greek and Armenian. We have her recordings thanks to the insistence of the community: for many years after her arrival to the New World, she rejected to record, arguing that she had no money. But she finally accepted and recorded several pieces, that would be released by Kaliphon Records and Metropolitan Records (below you’ll find more information about the record labels).
The selected song, Me Kemi y me Enflami, is dated on 1942. The specific dates of the different recordings are available here. In 2001, Global Village released Todas mis esperansas, with 24 pieces.
I have chosen Me kemi i me enflami, but all the pieces are amazing. You can listen to many others in the blog by Panos Savvopoulos, where these pictures above are from.
Manisa, formerly known as Magnasia or Magnésie, is situated in the North East of Izmir (38°36N 27°26E). A Jewish ‘romaniote’ community existed there from the Byzantine period, praying in the Etz Ha-Hayim Synagogue. After 1492, Jews expelled from Spain settled there, joining a hundred or so romaniote families. These newcomers founded two synagogues: Lorca and Toledo.
Lorca and Toledo are two cities of my country, Spain. Lorca is in the SouthEast, in Murcia region, and Toledo is the city where my company, Mapamundi Cultural SL, is settled. So these stories are very moving for me. It seems there are not Jews nowadays in the province.
About the record labels Metropolitan and Kaliphon
Me-Re record company was created in the early 1940s by Aydin (or Ajdin) Asllan (a poly-lingual Albanian) and the violinist, Nick Doneff. Soon they splittled the company. Aydin made Balkan and Doneff made Kaliphon.
Canary Records are nowadays releasing much material from that time and they explain here that Doneff was a Bulgarian violinist. They explain that Ajdin Asllan was born in Leskovik near the present-day southern border of Albania on 1895. He arrived in New York in 1926 and made made a record label called Mi-Re in 1937. After 5 releases he stopped, until 1942, when he joined the Bulgarian violinist born in 1981 Nicola, or Nick, Doneff (he is the violinist in the recording of Victoria Hazan’s song and the picture on the left is he) and relaunched it as Me Re. They stayed together very shortly and, as mentioned, Asllan would make Balkan and Doneff would make Kaliphon, that would be provider of recordings for Balkan. Canary mention that a third label appeared, Metropolitan, but it is not clear who was in charge. If you want to learn more about this, don’t miss this article. The picture is from Discog.
Doneff played with other artists, like, for instance, the singer and oudist Armenian born in Smyrna Marko Melkon Alemserian, who you will enjoy too if you like rebetiko. Here you have an example of their work together. They both played in Victoria Hazan’s album.
Listen to Victoria Hazan in Me Kemi y Me Enflami
This piece was recorded in 1942. The singer is Victoria Hazan and the musicians are the already mentioned Nick Doneff on violin, Melko Melkon on oud and Garbis Bakirgian on the kanun. Find the lyrics in Ladino and in English below.
Click the picture to listen to the recording:
Me kemi y me enflami
cuando te vide yo a ti.
En sentirte a ti cantar
me pareses un bilbil.
Ven a mi lado, ven ke te rogo,
ven mas presto tu, biju,
ke vo salir loco.
Ven a mi lado, ven ke te rogo,
ven mas presto tu, ????,
ke vo salir loco.
Tus ojos ke me miran,
el corason me keman.
Con estas miradas tuyas
cuantas almas kemaran?
Ven a mi lado, ven ke te rogo,
ven mas presto tu ????,
ke vo salir loco.
Ven a mi lado, ven ke te rogo,
ven mas presto tu, biju,
ke vo salir loco.
I burned and became inflamed
when I saw you.
In feeling you sing
you look like a nightingale to me.
Come to my side, come I beg you,
come more quickly, you, jewel,
that I will go crazy.
Come to my side, come on, I’m begging you
come more quickly, you, ????,
that I will go crazy.
Your eyes look at me,
they burn my heart.
With these looks of yours
how many souls will they burn?
Come to my side, come I beg you,
come more quickly, you, ????,
that I will go crazy.
Come to my side, come I beg you,
come more quickly you, jewel,
that I will go crazy.
The translation into English is mine.
There is a word that I don’t catch and in the original booklet it is not written. It is just written “biju”, from the French “bijou”, but I listen a variation in her singing, that’s why I put the question marks.
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ow are you? I hope well. Today it is the black Friday, isn’t it? Well!!! I have a super offer for you: your subscription to Music Before Shabbat, now, half price! ? Guaranteed.
The life of Israel Schorr, as of many great cantors, is reasonably well documented. But Schorr is not as famous as others, because he died quite young at the very early age of 49 on April 9th 1935. This way, he was not a witness of the horror that would trap his mother land.
“From April to August we closed down completely. We planned Summer concerts in July but when the rain poured down for 2 weeks we gave that up. We can seldom trust the weather, so it is difficult to plan outside concerts.
I am sure you will agree with me in the idea that it sounds like magic: to spend three days of Summer in an island in a lake in Canada, full of music, with a program in which diversity of culture, of musical heritage and style, of age, geography and influence is a guiding line. This is what the Hillside Festival state about itself on the website. It helds two editions, the Summer one and also another, in February.
