f36 Ladino Stories


Mor Karbasi is Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Israeli and Jewish and sings her history from the heart. Elizabeth Kinder catches up with a woman who has become a major artist over the past decade.


“I


am built of the past,” says Mor Karbasi, sitting in a room with walls of stone in Ein Karem in Israel. The sun streams in behind her


through a deep-set window, so the waves in her long black hair shine. She is in her mother’s house in this biblical village – its origins dating back to way before the Ottoman Empire, to the time of the First Temple. “I mean I am not just me,” she says. The past in the blistering light and heat and dust of the Holy Land is visceral. And on her new album Ojos De Novia (Alama Records) Karbasi gives it voice, gathering up the joy and pain of centuries of cultural experience as her strong, soar- ing vocals express the origins of her identi- ty: the beautiful result of a very personal search for roots that resonates with us all.


Karbasi is Persian, Arabic, Spanish, Israeli


and Jewish. Yet all these elements co-exist perfectly in the subtle instrumentation and cascading melodies that draw us into her songs of ancient yet timeless histories and modern tales sung in Arabic, Ladino and Hebrew. It has in essence been years in the making, inspired by her restless need to find a deeper sense of cultural belonging that broke free of the government line. “In Israel,” she says, “a collection of broken peo- ple arrived from all over –from Poland, India, Iran, Turkey, Greece, North Africa – they did- n’t want one culture to dominate. Hebrew is encouraged as the only language. It is the language of education. There is pressure to not show any sign of where you come from.”


From her first release Karbasi’s music has sprung from her need to rebel against that pressure. We were initially introduced due to the impending launch of her debut album The Beauty And The Sea in 2008. 22 in April that year, she had only recently dis- covered her Spanish roots. On visiting Spain and informing her grandfather of feeling immediately, inexplicably, utterly at home there, his reply “Blood never forgets” kicked off her dive into the deep waters of her Ladino heritage.


Ladino is the Judeo-Spanish language spoken by the Jews in Spain, the Sephardis (from the Hebrew for Spain, Sefarad) whom it’s thought first migrated there from Jerusalem after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BC and certainly after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. Whilst adopting the local Spanish dialects, the Jewish population sprinkled the lan- guage with Hebrew and Aramaic, which


coalesced into Ladino by the time the Jews were kicked out of the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th Century.


While in Spain Sephardic music evolved into three distinct types: liturgical melodies, the music of the synagogue – for singing the Torah and transmitting religious educa- tion to boys; secular music that was sung in the home – folk stories, romances, ballads and lullabies. The songs might be long tales of love or murder or incest with repetitive melodies making them easy to memorise – songs that mothers would sing to their chil- dren to impart the rules of society. The third type is also secular, cansionero, typically love songs which women would sing in the home or at weddings, accompanied perhaps by percussion (which, this being Spain, might include castanets).


The Jews enjoyed a so-called ‘golden age’ between about the 8th and 11th Cen- turies in Spain as they worked with the Moors to attain positions of cultural and political importance. Its end was signalled by a Muslim mob which crucified the Jewish vizier of Granada before proceeding to mas- sacre most of that city’s Jewish population on 30th December 1066 – although it wasn’t until 1492 when the entire Jewish popula- tion in Spain faced exile, conversion to Catholicism or execution as the Inquistion picked up speed. The Sephardis fled both East and West across the Mediterranean and beyond. They tended to integrate with the cultures of settlement. Very often their religious practices and melodies were adopted by local Jewish communities whereas their secular music and language adopted local characteristics.


Yet in exile the music, like the language, preserved its 15th Century Spanish roots. Karbasi says that when she performs Ladino in Spain her audiences, not realising that she’s singing their language more or less as it was in the 15th Century, simply tell her they think her Spanish is terrible.


After the release of her first album, Kar- basi – then living in England with her boyfriend (now husband) British multi-instru- mentalist Joe Taylor – went with him to Andalusia to explore her family’s ancient cul- ture on her mother’s side, her forebears hav- ing fled from there to Morocco in 1492. In Spain she’d found that as well as questioning her Spanish, audiences identified Ladino songs as ‘flamenco but different’ and Karbasi was keen to explore their common roots. As in the deep core of flamenco, the most important instrument in Ladino music is the


voice, and the two cultures share elements of both melodies and texts, but whereas in the flamenco tradition these have accrued mod- ern Spanish characteristics due to the Gypsies having remained in Spain, the Ladino songs passed down the generations in exile, from mother to child, have retained their mediae- val Spanish roots at their heart.


Unlike flamenco, Ladino is not under- pinned by the concept of duende (the soul- ful transcendence of emotional connection, typically associated with pain). It’s not that the connection doesn’t happen, Karbasi says, more that the communication of pain in Ladino music is a less dramatic affair. “In flamenco the singing can be harsh, it’s a direct expression of agony, a cry. In Ladino, we use a softer sound and vibrato, a slowed down vibrato to suggest crying in pain.” She explains that Ladino singing style is sim- ilar to a flamenco style popularised by Pepe Marcheno. The flamenco dancer Andres Marin, with whom she was gigging, recog- nised a similarity in Marcheno and Karbasi’s vocal styles and suggested she explored his work. And she did, playing his recordings along with those of many other flamenco artists over and over, ’til she found her own voice in the “salad of all the listening”.


L


adino singing also acquired an often high-pitched ululating North African vocal style com- mon in those Sephardic commu- nities that travelled west to Morocco. Known as the Maghreb, their music took on more microtonal Arabic ele- ments and six/eight rhythms. The Sephardic Jews who travelled east, settling in the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and across the Ottoman Empire started an eastern musical tradition in which Ladino songs absorbed nine/eight Balkan rhythms and in Turkey, for example, incorporated elements of makam modes.


After returning to Israel from Spain, Karbasi continued to the Atlas Mountains, following the journey of her mother’s fami- ly for whom Moroccan Arabic became their first language. Here, having become haunt- ed by Berber melodies, she learned local Berber songs, though to source the Berber songs featured on her album, Karbasi didn’t need to travel so far. The opening track on Ojos De Novia features the voice of Shimon Ifrah, the manager of the Jerusalem Andalusian Orchestra who pitched up in her kitchen one day and sang a Berber song taught to him by his mother. “I couldn’t believe it, it was like the African sun came into the kitchen.”


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