Urban Ladino Music from Istanbul, Izmir, Thessalonica and Jerusalem [2oo3]

World Ethnic,Yahudije, Hebrew, Jewish Music

(((MERKEZ BURASI MUSIC CENTER)))

PASS : ankarasgd

...Ladino music also changed its role in the Jewish community from the beginning of the 20th century: Little by little it lost its function inside the community in the traditional rituals of the life cycle and the year cycle and moved into other contexts such as commercial recordings and performances. The new medium of music distribution: commercial recordings, exposed people in the Ottoman Empire to Turkish, Greek, Arabic and European music and Jewish artists were inseparable part of this industry. A relatively large number of Ladino recordings were released and also non-Jewish artists recorded this repertoire in Thessalonika (see Bresler, Old recordings). Rabbi Isaac Algazi and Haim Effendi were the main Sephardic music representatives on the Gramophone/ Zonophone, Orfeon, Colombia and Odeon labels at the beginning of the century and after. In the 50’s Victoria Hazan and Jack Mayesh were the up and coming stars and were recorded in Metropolitan and Me-Re record companies. All of them were of Turkish origin. The more that local and European music became available and accessible the more we could find Ladino songs borrowed from Smyrnaica, Rebetika, Turkish Şarkılar, Kantolar and folklore music, Tangos, Foxtrots, French songs and Italian operettas repertoire. The famous popular tunes of the time were performed, not in the original language, but with new texts in Ladino. This phenomenon is called contrafacta (About contrafacta see Dragoumis, Greek; Havassy, Sadik y Gazoz; Kats, Contrafacta; Seroussi, Turkish Music; Seroussi and Weich-Shahak, Contrafacta; Weich-Shahak, Adaptations) and is well demonstrated in the case of Sadik i Gazoz (see information in songs nos. 2,14, 11).

This album contains various song types from the four main Jewish centers in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman era. All of them maintained prosperous Sephardic community life that enabled rich cultural and musical means of expressions. In Thessalonika we have a vast documentation from numerous Jewish newspapers and other sources about the distribution of Sephardic music in cafés, Theaters, LP recordings and the press. Izmir is known for its rich female oral tradition well demonstrated by the list of archival-recorded sources for the songs in this album. The unique geographical and demographic situation of this city, multicultural in all aspects including musical is reflected in the many Ladino songs of Turkish and Greek origin. Istanbul had developed a rich and broad Sephardic religious repertoire based on Ottoman instrumental and vocal music. This tradition is still alive now and one of the strong evidences is the existence of the old tradition of the maftirim. Jerusalem also has it own unique style of Sephardic music because of the cultural influence of Ottoman music and the local influence of Arabic music. In addition, the music in Jerusalem reflects its main cultural origins of Sephardic population from the Balkans (especially Bulgaria and Yugoslavia).

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