Mano Suave

On first hearing, I dismissed this. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood - or perhaps it is an acquired taste?

Anyhow, a week later I gave it a second chance - and boy, am I glad I did! Once the taste is acquired it's definitely persuasive: the keynote of this music is a melancholic poetry.

Perhaps the standout track is no 3: Adio Kerida, which typifies the character. But I've also got a special fondness for the way track two goes off into a kind of jam session, with Levy's voice cascading all over the octaves.

Levy's Ladino style mixes Arabic, Jewish and Spanish influences: you'll hear vocal trills that echo Turkish music; there's the world-weariness of flamenco or fado; and there's that special Jewish melancholy.

The arrangements are excellent, adding greatly to the atmosphere: the mix of cultures shows in the use of clarinet (klezmer), oud (Arab predecessor of the lute 'al oud'), and guitar (Spanish). Add in Greek influences (the amazing-sounding Pontic lyre [aka kemenche]) and some astounding filigree harp playing (hear track one) by Keke Pedersen, some bits and bobs of percussion and a few more weird instruments (zurna or Turkish oboe-a-like; ney - a kind of Turkish recorder, etc) and you have a fabulous Mediterranean sound soup.

Nice.

You might also want to check out the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X, ASIN: B00068C8AQ. Alfonso El Sabio (Alfonso the Wise) gathered together Jewish Christian and Muslim scholars, and established the School of Translators in Toledo. Here, alongside those of Cordoba, scholars arguably started the Renaissance, translating the ancient Greek texts (such as those of Aristotle) into Latin for the first time.

The Cantigas are a very different kind of music but come from the same place and make a fascinating comparison.

It's a pleasure to get a new disc from this fine singer.

Her previous album La Juderia attempted (very successfully) to fuse ladino music with its Spanish roots in flamenco, here we have a much more middle eastern sound into which this music - to my ears - fits more naturally. In her hands it is very much a living tradition, her own songs are imbued with the same ageless grace as the traditional ones. This disc is also a somewhat gentler one than La Juderia, which at times tended to harangue the listener: which is only to say you need to pick your time to listen to it -there is nothing about the new one with background or mood music connotations - it's powerful stuff and fights for your attention.

Apart from her exemplary vocals - with echoes of Cesaria Evora on "Una Noche Mas": a fine song of her own composition, the musicians - with especial plaudits to the ney and turkish clarinet player complement the whole very well. All in all a fine album and worth of the attentions of any who enjoy world music (or indeed music of any kind)

I'm a German engineer and manager\ businessman who has the luck to live at the largest and most beautiful and most unseen desert of the Arabian Gulf region. I live at the Rub Al Khali desert, an ocean of sanddunes, hundred of thousands of square kilometres on the area of Saudi Arabia and Emirate Abu Dhabi.

As a German living in the Middle East - Gulf region: Oman, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, ... - I truly do appreciate the music from that area. The rhythm is always mystical and very highly personal. You can feel the instruments and the musical tones which the artist wants you to feel. The musician wants to take you on a trip. They want to take you to a world unlike any other. And in this album, JASMIN LEVY manages to do that.

.... a portrait
"THIS song is from my mother's kitchen to you," explains Yasmin Levy before leading her bandmates through a traditional Sephardic number augmented by sparse percussion, flute and flamenco guitar.

The back stories are important for Levy, a 32-year-old Israeli singer with an appreciation for history that belies her age.

Her father Yitzhak was a leading figure in researching and preserving Judeo-Spanish culture - and, in many respects, it's this legacy that informs most of her work.

Levy chooses to sing in Ladino, a 15th-century language long considered dead. But while the words may be unintelligible to her audience -- perhaps this is why each song is preceded by a lengthy explanation? -- it's hard not to be moved by their beauty.

Blessed with a commanding stage presence at the National Theatre, Melbourne, Levy performed songs off her latest album, Mano Suave, including a stirring rendition of the title track, a traditional Bedouin number recorded with Egyptian singer Natacha Atlas.

"People often ask me what the situation is like in Israel," she said, "and this shows that peace is possible."

To keep things fresh, Levy fuses Ladino traditions with Flamenco, but she's not a Flamenco singer, she explains, even though she studied the Spanish art for several months in Seville.

Indeed, it was the Flamenco numbers, delivered in Spanish, which provided some of the weaker moments of Levy's two-hour show.

Without the weight of 500 years of heritage and history, they lacked the emotional depth and authenticity of her Ladino efforts.

Still, when Levy was on song it was a joy to behold. She was ably backed by her five-piece band, which included an Iranian flautist with a bag full of tricks, an Israeli acoustic guitarist, a double bass player from France and her husband Ishay on percussion.

Her homespun stories were a treat too, in particular a yarn about her "evil" mother-in-law (delivered while looking at her smiling husband side of stage).

Ladino songs were traditionally confined to kitchens and synagogues, but thanks to Levy they've now found a more suitable home -- on stage.

........Interview with Yasmin Levy

Yasmin Levy is a significant new singer of Sephardic music. You'll understand better if you read this article that R. L. Reid sent my way a couple of weeks ago. "Echos of Forgotten Music", by Noam Ben Ze-ev in Israel's Haaretz (article is in English)

There was considerable discussion about Levy on the Jewish-music mailing list. First off, there was some rejoicing that Levy is, in fact, performing the songs using traditional instrumentation, and the expected scorn at those who are so used to international folk music with guitar and sound-alikes, that they don't recognize tradition when they see it, second, of course, lots of people think that she sings like an angel, and third, there was some discussion about an event referred to in the article in which her father's field recordings were all destroyed after he died, because he didn't want his transcriptions argued with. This was felt to be cultural vandalism of a nasty sort. Want to know more? Check out the article and her recordings!

What you might call 'pan-mediterranean' music is often soaked in nostalgia. Its delicate weave of Arabic, Jewish and Christian influences seems to lament that golden age when the cultural arteries of the region were open and vibrant, and music flowed alongside science, religion and ideas like the tides and currents of the sea itself. Nowhere was the charm of that era felt more keenly than in the southern Spain of medieval times.

It was there that the roots of JEWISH SEPHARDIC culture and the Ladino language were established. After the explulsion of 1492, Jewish refugees took their language and their songs to the far corners of the Europe and their music continued to evolve in ports and cities from Tlemcen to Thessaloniki and beyond. The eminient ethnomusicologist Yitzhak Levy was the internationally recognised authority on Ladino songs, which he collected avidly all his life, but it is his 28 year old daughter Yasmin who has managed to bring them alive. For twelve years the classically trained Yasmin was the accompanist to her mother Kochava Levy, an accomplished singer in her own right. Mother and daughter left their home in Jerusalem to tour the world on a regular basis. Then one day, with the encouragement of her flamenco teacher, Yasmin began to sing.

She has a voice that does strange things to audiences and critics alike. Normally phlegmatic hacks find themselves melting into rivulets of tears and effusive praise. Sephardis the world over experience the electric pull of history and a renewed fascination with their Mediterranean and Ladino pasts. Some say that Yasmin Levy has saved the language itself from what might otherwise have been academic mummification or even outright extinction. Charlie Gillett wrote with characteristic eloquence that when Yasmin Levy stops singing, 'I unwillingly open my eyes and face reality.'

Levy has also provoked a minor revolution in the international Ladino song scene by ditching the folksified accompaniment of Spanish guitars and returning to 'original' instruments like the Arabic oud, violin, cello, percussion and piano. She also spices up her interpretation of the songs with oriental trills and slides, thus 'Arabicising' what was once stubbornly 'Europeanised'. This has stirred the blinkered ire of purists, but fans have found that their appetite for her music continues to grow exponentially. In short, they just can't get enough of her. Her two albums 'La Juderia' and 'Romance and Yasmin' encapsulate that magical mix of memory, nostalgia, tender beauty and hope, to perfection.