Album Notes

"Yardena y Son Ladino," my CD of Ladino-Afro Cuban Jazz, arranged by Naomi Bloch and Chacho Schartz. This project which I conceived and produced, represents a fusion of Jewish or Middle Eastern music and Cuban rhythms.

Both share important roots in 15th century Spain, whose already thousand-year-old mix of Moors, Jews, and Gypsies gave to Iberia the essence of habanera and flamenco. In the then newly discovered Cuba this music combined and evolved with African percussion for 500 more years, becoming among the most vital of all musical genres.

As Spaniards migrated westward to Cuba after 1492, the simultaneous expulsion of the "heretics" resulted in the Jews of Spain, a land they called 'Sepharad,' dispersing eastward. They took with them their Castilian language, now known as 'Djudeo-Espanyol,' or Ladino, a language frozen in time. In a long odyssey from Moorish North Africa to Greece, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East itself, and even to the New World, colorful words and rhythmic variants were absorbed into songs handed down, mother-to-child, from antiquity.

It is no wonder that the musical-linguistic reunion of these two traditions with so much common ancestry comes off as so natural as to sound inevitable. The Sephardic ballads and romances, with their language still reminiscent of Columbus and Cervantes, take on a soulful and very dynamic new life, refreshing the family of Afro-Cuban sounds like a long lost relative.

I would love for you to hear this unprecedented addition to the universe of World Music.