Sophisticated classical and jazz guitars will combine with a generations-old folk music tradition in a program featuring Israeli classical guitarist Liat Cohen and Brazilian jazz guitarist Luiz de Aquino to kick off a two-year festival of Sephardic culture at Ezra Bessaroth.
Born in Tel Aviv and based in Paris, Cohen has recorded an eclectic repertoire from Bach to contemporary, frequently collaborating with other artists, including fellow guitarists, string quartets, symphony orchestras, and the occasional oud player. In Variations Ladino, her most recent album for which she is currently touring, Cohen explores Sephardic folk music roots and its extensions by composers of our time.
According to her Web site, Cohen commissioned new works based on Ladino folk melodies from eight different composers “to create a new Judaeo-Spanish repertoire for the guitar.” Her Variations Ladino recording (French label Buda Music, with funding from the French Jewish Foundation) includes, in addition to these new works, some of the original songs, sung by the Israeli duo The Parvarim. At the Ezra Bessaroth concert, the originals will be sung by one of Seattle’s true musical-heritage-keepers, Hazzan Emeritus Isaac Azose.
Cohen is dedicating the concerts on her current tour to the promotion of international friendship, as part of the 7th annual Daniel Pearl World Music Days. A loose collaboration of musicians linked by the desire to change the world for good, this month-long October effort, launched the year after Pearl’s murder, honors the Oct. 10 birthday of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter.
A passionate amateur fiddler and mandolin player, Pearl is said to have sought out local musicians to learn from and play with wherever his journalistic assignments took him. “Harmony for Humanity” is the theme of the annual World Music Days, which have grown from 117 concerts in 18 countries in 2002 to 537 concerts in 42 countries in October 2007. Liat Cohen and Luiz de Aquino’s Ezra Bessaroth concert (slipping in a couple of days after the official World Music Days calendar) repeats their October 28 Washington, D.C. program. This tour marks the first time these two guitarists have collaborated.
Ladino is the linguistic remnant of pre-1492 Jewish life in Spain (Spain is “Sepharad” in Hebrew). Five hundred years of mingling with languages and cultures across the Mediterranean have yielded a language and a music as sweet as honey-soaked baklava. The guitar suits this music perfectly: Deeply Spanish, by turns nostalgic and bright, this is an instrument that, like Sephardic culture itself, bridges between tastes and generations. Lovers of all kinds of music — rock, classical, folk, tango, renaissance, world, flamenco — find a home in the sound of the guitar.
Hank Finesilver happily reports why, as chair of Ezra Bessaroth’s adult programming committee, he was thrilled to bring Cohen as the synagogue’s inaugural performer in the run-up to its centennial celebration. An avid classical music lover, a Seattle Symphony subscriber, and a particular fan of guitar music, he fancied a new CD as he browsed in the gift shop of a famous Jewish educational institution in Chicago.
“On a lark, my wife and I bought this album, Liat Cohen’s Variations Ladino, at the shop at the Spertus Institute,” he recalls. “We were just taken with it.”
Back home, they realized the connection between the performer and a name that had come up in the Seattle Sephardic community’s cultural planning discussions. It turned out that Liat Cohen’s Paris-based manager, Patricia Johnston, is the daughter of a Seattle Sephardic family.
“But we weren’t interested in just putting on programs for the sake of programs,” Finesilver emphasizes. “We wanted to present as high quality as possible.”
Cohen’s work met his standards, and the plans took shape.
Watching experienced collaborators like Liat Cohen and Aquino should offer some unique musical thrills: Coordinating four hands with tricky rhythms and harmonies can’t be easy. Of course, coordinating millions of hands in the effort to create harmony in this fragmented world is the hardest collaboration of all. That harmony happens at all should be cause enough for celebration.
To hear a little of Cohen’s work, visit www.liatcohen.com.