Super quick. Babel Music XP, the professional meeting with concerts that will take place in Marseille in March 2021, official info here, closes tomorrow at 23:59 the application period for artistic proposals.
Don’t miss the opportunity! We have already sent several proposals, what will happen? 🙂
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.
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 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.
Little by little music returns to the stages. And it may be the moment now for small gatherings in which to celebrate music and friendship, that we are all healthy, our voices are strong and our intruments are tuned.
Enjoy with us and with Hudaki Village Band this recent moment at Zhovid the Residence, Ukraine.
Watch the video at the bottom
And if you have the handicap of not speaking Ukranian, don’t worry, here you are the lyrics of these two pieces:
Let’s drink, guys
Hey boys, let’s drink, let’s drink,
while we are still together,
because afterwards we will part,
like sheep in the pasture.
Oh, it is good to be a shepherd
and to be unwed,
looking upon the village
from the highest mountain meadow.
Mariko humiliated me
Hey, I gaze into the valley,
into the valley,
as my friend embraces my beloved.
Oh my God, blonde girl,
Marichko, you humiliated me.
Yea, I gaze into the valley,
into the valley,
as my friend embraces my beloved.
Gulaza hosts Mor Karbassi this next weekend at the concert for the Felicja Blumental Festival that will be broadcasted online at this Youtube channel and at the band’s Facebook page.
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!
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:
What made a man in his 18 years, from a good family from Vienna, abandon his bourgeois life and finally settle in the 3000 inhabitants Zakarpattian village of Nyzhnye Selyshche?
This question came to my mind when I knew that Jürgen, from Hudaki Village Band, was an Austrian. Through that question I got to understand that the story of Hudaki Village Band is the story of the synergy, complicity and the love between Jürgen and the music and the people from this Ukranian agricultural land.
Jürgen is now Yuri and Hudaki is a powerful band of local musicians with an international approach and a careful staging, masters of the alchemy of musical-vibrating happiness.
I had the chance to see Hudaki Village Band at the festival 5 Continentes in Martigny, Switzerland, in June 2019. Fortunately, the festival programmed three concerts with them. And if they had been four, I would have seen them four times. Such is the charm of this band, that comes from a little village from Zakarpattia, the oblast on the southwest of Ukraine.
But, back to Jürgen. Let he be himself who explains the steps that took him to unite his path with a bunch of local musicians from Zakarpattia and develop what today is Hudaki Village Band:
I am Jürgen Kräftner, born 1961 in Vienna, from a “good family”. I finished high school in my home country, studied clarinet briefly at the Vienna Conservatory, not very long, but with a very good teacher, solo clarinetist at the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
Longo Maï, at the end of the 70s. BY Comet Photo AG (Zürich), in Wikipedia
At the age of 18, it came the foreseeable break with bourgeois life. From 1979 – 1997 I lived mainly in a rural community in Provence. It is called Longo Maï and originated from the 1968 movement: No hierarchies, no pay scale, no individual property, living collectively. Daily life included not only agriculture and handicrafts, mostly for self-sufficiency, but also involvement in socially relevant issues, such as supporting refugees and other socially marginalized groups, running a local radio station, and always – music. Even then I was particularly interested in traditional music from all kinds of countries, especially from Eastern Europe.
The opening of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union broadened our horizons considerably. Meeting people from the Ukraine was exciting. I immediately fell in love with a beautiful Ukrainian woman and went there several times. At the same time, I was interested in exposing our socio-political ambitions to a post-socialist environment. The love broke up, but I stayed. That was not always easy, music helped me a lot.
Zakarpattia. By Andre Pop in Wikipedia
Those were years of radical change, in which many people lost everything, not only materially, but also the moral value, systems collapsed. The village musicians I met at weddings seemed to survive this stress and merciless opportunism without any harm. Their music has withstood the kitsch of the Soviet period and also withstood the commercial influence of TV shows.
I only gradually realized the emotional density, the absolute independence and colossal power of this music.
In the beginning, we simply played music together for fun, then the first invitations came from abroad. After the first years we realized together that we have potential as a band.
We started to record CDs, set up a website and rehearse more regularly. With time we realized that we are the only ones in Ukraine who are radically committed to authenticity on the one hand, but don’t reproduce rigidly handed down folklore on the other hand. Our musicians are “real”, we don’t have to pretend. That’s also the reason, why we don’t wear traditional costumes, which nobody in this area has been wearing since World War II at the latest.
My task here, even after almost 20 years, remains to strengthen the self-confidence of the band members, to insist again and again on the strength of the traditional music, without compromising on kitsch and commerce. The most important, we still have fun making music together, just like in the beginning. The fact that we have been playing with practically the same line-up since 2001 is probably the clearest indication of this.”
In 19 years of performing in hundreds of festivals and concert halls across Europe, the band has learned to make their archaic, night-time moments of happiness accessible to the uninitiated. Hudaki Village Band has performed in the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Fusion, Rudolstadt and Bardentreffen in Germany, KlezMore in Vienna, Notes d’Equinoxes Delemont and Festival des 5 Continents in Switzerland, Respect-Prague, Balkan Trafik Brussels, Rudolstadt, Les Suds Arles in France and many more.
Ah, and you might wonder what does hudaki mean: in the Maramures region, a mountainous area of South-west Ukraine on the border with Romania and Hungary, village musicians are called hudaki. Enjoy this delighting bunch of hudakis!
It is not easy to catch Janusz Prusinowski in the same place for several days. Apart from his activities as a cultural promoter, leading the All the Mazurkas of the World Festival, with its several editions every year, he and his Kompania are one of the most demanded artists in Europe in the field of heritage music and dance.
It had to come a global pandemic to make him stay in his native land of Mława enough time, in this exceptional situation, to record a series of 13 video workshops, dedicated to several village masters. In the videos, Janusz explains the basics about their playing, also supported by historic recordings made by Andrzej Bieńkowski, for the archive of the foundation Muzyka Odnaleziona.
“In the Net of Mazurek” starts on Friday 17th of July, in this strange Summer of 2020. The videos will be published at 19h at this Youtube Channel. Each of the recorded videos will have a in real time online meeting some days after, with the registered pupils.
Janusz has devoted his life to learn and disseminate the work of those masters. He incarnates with his music all that knowledge, nuances, expresivity, unique to the rawest Polish peasant music. The result is a mind-blowing music, very distinctive and of a unbridled beauty, made with fiddle and with some local versions of other instruments, like the harmonia polska (accordion), cymbałe (psaltery), the drum baraban, the frame drum bębenek, a kind of “cello” used for rhythm and drone called basy. And, of course, the human voice.
Let’s let Janusz explain what is all this about:
The first video will be released on Friday 17th and the protagonist will be the fiddler Jan Lewandowski and his mazurek. On Mondays and Fridays there will be an online meeting in real time, at 19h, with the registered pupils. The details for the registrations are in the FB page and for any question, the person in charge is Ms. Joanna and her email is wsiecimazurka@gmail.com.
The materials produced for this project will stay available in Youtube after. The project is funded by the National Centre for Culture under the programme Kultura w sieci.
How are you? I have just realiced that this initiative of the monthly magazine is becoming 2 years old. This is the edition 25!
The first issue was launched on 17th of July of 2018. At that moment, my Sherezade was here with me, still working before her August holidays (my expectation is to recover her in October). I had just been in Poland for EthnoKrakow with Vigüela and I was leaving to FMM Sines (Portugal) two days later, where Monsieur Doumani would perform.
My commitment with our community has not weakened, I hope this monthly date with interviews and news is useful and inspiring for you. And in the meantime I think my English has improved ?
<– Click the picture to read that first issue.
This Summer, you know… Despite the critical situation that is still present in many places of the world and also the outbreaks that we are having here in Spain, music goes on.
I have just had a confirmation minutes ago of a concert in November with Apa, the beast of the Valencian cant d’estil, and his partners of Citra Trio. Vigüela has a date with the stage in Madrid on 9th of August and some exciting acts are planned for Autumn. Janusz Prusinowski is launching a series of online workshops, recorded and also in real time, about the masters of the Polish music (more info below), Hudaki Village Band are preparing a new video and will retake the rehearsals in Ukraine in August.
On the other side, news about cancelations of festivals are still arriving, but also a thrilling rebirth, of Babel Med, now Babel Music XP, with renewed team, has been announced recently.
Read more about these and other matters below. Remember that you can send any suggestion of content for the next editions. And if you like this, tell me and share it with your friends.
· The return of the Marseillaise date: Babel Music XP
· In the quest for the sustainability of the recorded music business, with Edith Lei, from Naxos Music Library + 3 months free trial for the first 3 requests
· Mini interviews with festival manager: Béla Pap, from Örökség Világzenei Fesztivál / Heritage World Music Festival
· In deep with Angie Lemon PR
BABEL MED REBIRTHS AS BABEL MUSIC XP
I think this is a quite long-waited news! Probably you are already aware. Babel Med becomes Babel Music XP, with a totally renewed team and co-produced by Zone Franche, and will start in two parts: a professional meeting in November 26th-27th and trade fair with concerts in March 25-27th, in Marseille. Application period for concerts is open here until 29th of July.
IN THE QUEST FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE RECORD MUSIC BUSINESS, WITH EDITH LEI, FROM NAXOS MUSIC LIBRARY
Our “industry”, let me use this term despite the situation, is facing many challenges. There is one that impacts on all the genres of music: the progressive drop of incomes for artists and producers from the recorded music. In this interview, Ms. Edith Lei, Managing Director at Naxos Digital Services Ltd answers about one of their most ambitious initiative: Naxos Music Library. Note that I announced this interview would be with Ina Schröder instead, who considered these were questions for Ms. Lei. I am really thankful to Ina for the intermediation.
Hey! Do you want a free 3 months trial for Naxos Music Library? Email me and tell me. The first 3 requests will have it.
Mapamundi Música – For what I know so far, the Naxos Music Library is an archive with more than 2 million tracks of music that the subscribers can listen to in streaming. Who is the client/user for Naxos Music Library?
Edith Lei – At least 97% of Naxos Music Library (NML) subscribers are institutions or music-related organisations – universities, public libraries, conservatories, schools, orchestras. The other 3% or so are musicians, performing artists, classical music lovers, journalists, critics, radio presenters, music teachers etc.
MM – Much of your catalogue is Western classical music but there are also many tracks of other kinds of music, like jazz and world music. I think you are interested in including more references. How can a record label include their catalogue in the Library? EL – We have subsidiary platforms, one is NML Jazz and the other is NML World. So obviously we take jazz and world music labels too.
There are contracts in place with aggregators, so the first step is to check which distribution partners labels are working with and request content from them. If that is not an option we can look into individual contracts.
Labels with classical, jazz and world music content who want to be part of the NML suite can write to my colleague Helen at Helen.Kwan@Naxos.com
MM – And the independent artists, can they also include their works in the catalogue? EL – This depends on how large their catalogue is. For those who only have a couple of albums with standard repertoire, the amount of administrative work (contracting, reporting, royalties payment etc.) required cannot be justified. If the artist’s intention is to merely make their recordings available on NML so that they can be heard, we can consider taking them under different conditions.
MM – What is the return for the producer that has tracks in the Library? For sure you are aware of the critics from the industry of music about the model of return of the most popular music streaming platforms. EL – Our per-stream rate for labels is many times more than that from other platforms. Referring to this article on Digital Music in January 2018, Naxos paid $0.05 per stream, while Spotify $0.00397, Apple $0.00783, Amazon $0.0074, Qobuz $0.03816. Though this article is from two years ago, it gives you a general idea on how much each platform pays labels.
MM – What are your next goals with the Library? EL – To expand into countries where we do not have a distributor yet.
MM – What are the synergies between the Library and Naxos World? EL – Naxos Music Library is our flagship platform focusing on classical music, while NML World complements NML and offers world music which is becoming very popular and being studied widely in universities.
MM – Do you think this model of streaming for subscribers can face the crisis of sales of physical albums? I am sure you have much more knowledge than me in the situation and expectations for the future of the business of recorded music, that’s why I ask you. EL – Streaming is now the most widely means to music listening, especially for the young generation. For them, physical CD is not an option. Most of them do not have a CD player.
MM – What is Naxos World doing now? Give me a scoop! EL – Under Naxos World we continue to release both very traditional folk music recordings, as well as contemporary and crossover/fusion productions. We are also looking into projects that will bring world music and classical music closer together.
Pictures’ credits:
Ms. Edith Lei and Mr. Klaus Heymann (Founding Chairman of Naxos Music Group) at Naxos XX anniversary gala evening in Hong Kong. From the website.
**** Do you have a world music festival and you want to be included in our mini interviews? Contact us.****
CURRENT AND FUTURE CHALLENGES FOR FESTIVALS
This festival that is our focus today is also included in the project MOST, about which I talked in a previous issue.
MINI INTERVIEW WITH BÉLA PAP FROM THE ÖRÖKSÉG VILÁGZENEI FESZTIVÁL (HERITAGE WORLD MUSIC FESTIVAL) (SZOLNOK, HUNGARY)
I know Béla Pap for many years, in the second edition of Without Borders meeting in Varna (Bulgaria), organized by Yasen Kazandjiev. Béla sent me two pictures, the one I used in the previous edition and also these one. If you know him, you know he is the joyful man, cool and lighthearted who teaches about palinka and he also organices a festival in Hungary, in Szolnok, at the heart of the Great Hungarian Plain.
The festival is planned for August 19th-23rd… now with question marks.
MM – What do you search in an artist when you create the programme?
BP: Above all, in the invited artists, we are looking for how instinctively they experience the music they perform, and how they can build on the diverse folk music heritage in order to reach out in an exciting way to the contemporary audiences.It is really important for our festival to engage new talents and see how they can convey their emotions through their music.
MM – Which are the global objectives of your festival?
BP: We aim to present contemporary art forms and genres to young audiences, mostly those that are based on folk traditions in their content and also express the general feelings, experiences of today’s youth and links to the cultural heritage of previous generations.The primary aim is to contribute effectively to the wide-range popularization of the values based upon the folk cultural heritage of Hungary and other nations (among others basically that of the Visegrad 4 and Balkan countries).
“Since the very start of the festival, we have firmly believed that one of the bases of understanding and tolerating the social changes and geo-political events taking place in the world is a dialogue between generations.“
One of the festival’s primary objectives is involving young children in the events by means of art forms relying on folk traditions, thus motivating family participation and strengthening the links between generations.Since the very start of the festival, we have firmly believed that one of the bases of understanding and tolerating the social changes and geo-political events taking place in the world is a dialogue between generations. By means of the international language of music, the artistic productions of the young musicians building upon the heritage of their ancestors mediate ideas and notions which shared with the audience facilitate to understand the elements of contemporary world vision.
MM – What are the most complicated or difficult issues to deal with in your festival?
BP: As our festival is organised with 25 years of experience, we rarely face challenges we have never encountered before.
The difficulties of finding financial resources, which are reoccurring year after year, are familiar to all professionals – it is boring to talk about, I would say -, but I believe these difficulties are compensated by the realised festival program.
MM – Which are currently the main challenges for this kind of cultural proposals like yours? BP: The biggest challenge, I think, is that people’s ears are “flooded” by the mainstream information and music offerings that attract large crowds.That is why it is a difficult, but at the same time important challenge to try to reach the current young audience with all the old and new tools and channels, to constantly spread the musical delicacies, and to give as many opportunities as possible to experience the magic of live music (especially world music).Fortunately, we have truly potential allies in this: those contemporary young musicians whose music draws on traditions and combine those with experimental elements to enter the world of quality music creation.MM – In one sentence, summarise the reason/s to go to your festival. BP: It is worth coming to the “Heritage” World Music Festival because better and better, fresh music is played almost continuously on two stages for three days, whether Hungarian or foreign artists are playing. Important to note, that apart from the colourful music offer, there is a great variety of Central European food and drink, like a good Hungarian apricot “palinka”, followed by an aromatic freshly sparkling Czech beer, awww… 🙂
MM – Is this experience we are living now, the crisis of the coronavirus, changing your festival in any way (apart from postponing this year’s edition, if so)? BP: When I write these lines, there is still a lot of uncertainty all over the world, including Hungary. However, there are indications that we can organise the festival on its original dates, during the celebration of the founding of the state at the end of August. Of course, at this point, I envisage long queues of people patiently waiting one and a half meters apart for refreshments, while only 4-6 people are sitting at each table.Moreover, it is also possible to draw circles in front of the stage, indicating how many people may be standing or dancing there at one time.
Even if keeping the distance in a festival might be a bit strange, the lack of dancing together in a large crowd is almost impossible to imagine, it does not change what is really important: the melodies floating in the air, the rhythms beating in the heart connect everyone and it cannot be stopped by neither a virus nor any border.
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One of the purposes of this newsletter is to give visibility to the great work done by many professional that are not seen at the stage but without who, all this community would not exist. Initiators of festivals, disseminators… and also PR and publicists. Like Angie Lemon. She can be also useful for you, in case you are needing some support in communication.
I have been in touch with Angie Lemon, first because of her work of publicist for ARC Music, as she has been working with their releases and I am, thanks of Mundofonías radio show, one of their targets. When ARC released some albums by artists that have been collaborators of Mapamundi Música, like El Naán, La Jose and Vigüela, Angie got deeply involved. She and the team of ARC Music were the responsible for the performance by El Naán to BBC Radio 3 and many other good things that happened to us.
A few years ago she established her own brand, Angie Lemon PR, with which she continued the collaborations with ARC Music (the press release for Thraki/Thrace – The Paths of Dionysus, by Rodopi Ensemble was a joy to read) and other clients.
In this times of reflections and memories of better times, Angie came to my mind often, so I decided to ask her to explain me more in depth what is she currently offering.
Mapamundi Música: What kind of services do you provide?
Angie Lemon: I promote world and folk albums and musicians to media in the UK, EU, USA, Canada and Australia/New Zealand. I work with many wonderful magazine editors, radio producers, radio presenters, bloggers, press music journalists, freelance journalists and chart panellists mainly the Transglobal World Music Charts and World Music Charts Europe.
I regularly send newsletters to media I work with and keep them updated with campaigns, projects and news. I work directly with musicians who are self-publishing but also work with indie labels, managers and promoters.
I also consult with artists for project preparation or ideas blasting sessions about specific projects to help timeline events and work out the best possible release schedule or consult about aspects of the project.
I assist artists with bios and press releases and am happy to work with both signed artists and self-published musicians whether solo artists or in groups.
MM. What is your professional background? AL: I have been a professional publicist working in the arts sector for over 20 years and started my career in book publishing. I have worked with authors, painters, composers, cake designers, photographers, inventors and since 2014, world and folk musicians.
I managed and co-fronted the indie folk band, Rivers & Roads in Sydney, Australia for 10 years booking concerts, radio shows, securing national TV with many other well-recognised accomplishments.
I worked as the in-house PR for the UK label ARC Music for 4 years where I had the privilege of campaigning top quality world and folk musicians at a national and international level. In 2018 I took the plunge into the world of freelance publicity focusing on building and developing media relations both in the UK and internationally.
MM. Which is your distinctiveness? AL: What I bring to the mix is firstly a personal love of music and secondly, experience as a publicist. I work with my clients, not for them, I establish what they need and do my best to make it happen and when it does, it’s pure magic! For more information, please write to me: angielemonpr@gmail.com
WHO WE ARE AND SISTER PROJECTS
Mapamundi Música is an agency of management and booking. Learn more here. Check our proposals at our website.
Feel free to request info if you wish. For further information about us, get in touch by email, telephone (+34 676 30 28 82), our website or at our Facebook.
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.
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.
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
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.
· 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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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.
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.
This question came to my mind when I knew that Jürgen, from Hudaki Village Band, was an Austrian. Through that question I got to understand that the story of Hudaki Village Band is the story of the synergy, complicity and the love between Jürgen and the music and the people from this Ukranian agricultural land.
Jürgen is now Yuri and Hudaki is a powerful band of local musicians with an international approach and a careful staging, masters of the alchemy of musical-vibrating happiness.My task here, even after almost 20 years, remains to strengthen the self-confidence of the band members, to insist again and again on the strength of the traditional music, without compromising on kitsch and commerce. The most important, we still have fun making music together, just like in the beginning. The fact that we have been playing with practically the same line-up since 2001 is probably the clearest indication of this.”
<– Click the picture to read that first issue.
MM – And the independent artists, can they also include their works in the catalogue? 
I know Béla Pap for many years, in the second edition of Without Borders meeting in Varna (Bulgaria), organized by Yasen Kazandjiev. Béla sent me two pictures, the one I used in the previous edition and also these one. If you know him, you know he is the joyful man, cool and lighthearted who teaches about palinka and he also organices a festival in Hungary, in Szolnok, at the heart of the Great Hungarian Plain.
MM – What do you search in an artist when you create the programme? 
Since the very start of the festival, we have firmly believed that one of the bases of understanding and tolerating the social changes and geo-political events taking place in the world is a dialogue between generations. By means of the international language of music, the artistic productions of the young musicians building upon the heritage of their ancestors mediate ideas and notions which shared with the audience facilitate to understand the elements of contemporary world vision.
MM – In one sentence, summarise the reason/s to go to your festival. 
I have been in touch with Angie Lemon, first because of her work of publicist for ARC Music, as she has been working with their releases and I am, thanks of Mundofonías radio show, one of their targets. When ARC released some albums by artists that have been collaborators of Mapamundi Música, like El Naán, La Jose and Vigüela, Angie got deeply involved. She and the team of ARC Music were the responsible for the performance by El Naán to BBC Radio 3 and many other good things that happened to us.
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.
