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Sefardic Celebration!

Sefardic Celebration CD Cover
Sefardic Celebration CD Cover (Trio Sefardi)

Tonight at 7:30pm, Trio Sefardi will be presenting a special concert at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church.  This will be Washington Revels’ second “salon-concert” presented in conjunction with the 2011 Christmas Revels show–offering a great opportunity to hear and interact with our guest musicians in a more intimate setting than Lisner Auditorium.  Tickets are available online or at the door tonight.

Trio Sefardi

Performers Howard Bass, Tina Chancey and Susan Gaeta share a love of and a wide-ranging experience with Sephardic music. Its members have performed and recorded with La Rondinella, the Western Wind, and with NEA National Heritage Fellowship awardee Flory Jagoda, the renowned Sephardic singer and composer, who will be joining them tonight in this very special performance.

Trio Sefardi
Trio Sefardi (Howard Bass, Susan Gaeta and Tina Chancey)

Trio Sefardi combines a respect for tradition with a creative approach to arranging and scoring to bring the vibrant past into the living present. After making their Washington-area debut on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in November 2010, the trio is now releasing their first recording, Sefardic Celebration this month! In fact, if you attend tonight’s salon-concert, you will have an opportunity to purchase one of the first copies of this new CD (Hear audio excerpts from their new CD online).

Learn more about the performers in tonight’s concert:

Learn More

What is Sephardic Music?
Music of the Sephardic Jews, including traditional songs encompass ballads, romances and wedding songs that were passed on orally and sung originally in various Iberian languages (Castilian, Catalan, Galician, etc.), as well as Hebrew.

Who are the Sephardim (Sephardic Jews)?
Those Jews whose roots can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula where Jews first appeared in the early years following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and exile from the Holy Land. There are references to a Jewish presence in Iberia from the time of Solomon, when Jewish adventurers sailed the Mediterranean Sea.  The first notated date is 79 AD.  Spanish Jews in Iberia lived in relatively good times under Moorish rule during the 10th and 11th centuries when Islamic power was at its zenith.  Jewish physicians, advisors, diplomats and financiers were important participants in the Islamic Courts in Spain.  They were classed as politically neutral and used as arbitrators in all disputes between Muslims and Christians.

Information on Sephardic culture excerpted from Susan Gaeta’s Web site (www.susangaeta.com)

Want more information on the show or to buy tickets? Click here!

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The Future Has Arrived

iPad Sheet Music at the InterFaith Concert
My friends, the future has arrived. Photo: Helen Fields

Tuesday’s InterFaith Concert was lovely – there was such a delightful variety of performances, from traditional choirs in formal wear to barefoot dancers in shiny costumes. But this may be the thing that amazed me the most that night…

See that thing on the piano? Ramon Bryant Braxton, the accompanist for the combined choir pieces, played from an iPad! I hope he had a paper backup. You’d hate to have the battery run out halfway through the song.

Actually, the fact that pianists are using iPads these days wasn’t the only fun new thing I learned while we were at the cathedral. Terry Winslow, one of the esteemed veterans of our chorus, told me he grew up a few blocks away from the cathedral and, in the 1950’s, played tag among the chapels on the lower level. Another chorus member has been performing there since she was in high school (and I don’t think she even grew up in the D.C. area). Still another sang in a wedding there sometime in the last few years. The best part of being involved in Revels is getting to hang out with all these cool people and hear their stories.

Want more information on the show or to buy tickets? Click here!

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A Night in the Cathedral

The Natananjali Dance Group lines up before their performance. Photo: Helen Fields

Yesterday afternoon I had an exciting trip: A fellow member of the Christmas Revels chorus picked me up at Dulles – I’d just flown in from a weekend in Ontario – and rushed me to the Washington National Cathedral. We were headed there to perform in the InterFaith Concert, which is put on every year by the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington. (We made it in plenty of time – we even got there before they cleared away the pizza from the pre-concert dinner.)

This year’s concert included sweet singing from the Mormon Choir of Washington and a really nice performance by a choir from Howard University. A gaggle of talented teenage girls represented the Hindu and Jain faiths with a classical Indian dance. The men and women of Sikh Kirtain Jatha sat on the floor to share one of the gorgeous hymns they sing in Sikh services. We performed right after the choir from Temple Sinai, which also sang in the first two InterFaith Concerts, 30-some years ago.

Revelers practice their handclapping for "Ríu Ríu Chíu." Photo: Helen Fields

Washington Revels isn’t a religious group. We were invited to perform because this year’s Christmas Revels is set in a time and place when three major religions coexisted. They weren’t always living in peace and harmony, but still, medieval Andalusia has come to be seen by some people as a symbol of tolerance and acceptance.

For the InterFaith Concert, we sang the spirited Spanish Christmas carol “Ríu Ríu Chíu.” The music for this year’s Christmas Revels is really exciting – there’s a lot of cool rhythms. A few members of the chorus were assigned to execute the complicated hand-clapping rhythm.

Washington InterFaith Concert - view of combined choir
The combined choir sings to open the concert. Photo: Elizabeth Fulford Miller

Now, here’s the exciting part for me: I sang a solo! In the cathedral! I am told that it sounded good. My completely unbiased source for that review is my parents, who were in the audience.

Singing in the cathedral is fun. The singers from all of the choirs joined together at the beginning and end to sing two pieces. It was so exciting to sing a big chord, cut off, and hear it ringing through the huge stone building. The cathedral has been closed since the earthquake in August; it opened for the first time this weekend, just in time to consecrate a new bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

The cathedral has a long rebuilding process ahead of it – the building has been declared structurally sound, but they’ll need to rebuild the limestone pinnacles atop the central tower. It was exciting to sing there so soon after it reopened.

Want more information on the show or to buy tickets? Click here!

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Greetings from Music Land

Rachid Halihal and Daphna Mor of Layali El Andalus working with the Washington Revels adults and teens
Rachid Halihal and Daphna Mor of Layali El Andalus working with the Washington Revels adults and teens

One month from now, we will be opening The Christmas Revels in Lisner Auditorium!  Whoa…

Over here in “music land,” there are lots of moving parts this year.  First, there is the chorus — made up of adults and teens, and numbering about 55.  We have been learning music in Spanish, Catalan, Judeo-Spanish (otherwise, known as Ladino), and Arabic.  We have been rehearsing since the beginning of September, but things are really picking up now!  This year, we have two groups of specialist musicians (in addition to the fabulous Washington Revels brass), and we have already gotten to work with both of them.

Last weekend, Layali El Andalus came down from New York City to  teach us their music, and then they performed in a salon-concert that evening.  You can learn more about them at http://revelsdc.org/revels2011/layalielandalus.html.  They are fantastic musicians and really great teachers.  We had lots of fun learning their music.

Last night, we had a visit from Trio Sefardi (Howard Bass, Tina Chancey and Susan Gaeta).  They specialize in Sephardic music (music of the Spanish Jews).  Howard plays lute and guitar, Susan sings and plays guitar, and Tina… well, she plays just about everything (there will be more about her later).  Learn more about these great musicians here: http://revelsdc.org/revels2011/triosefardi.html.  They will be presenting a salon-concert with Sephardic singer, Flory Jagoda, on November 17.

Meanwhile, we have an amazing group of children, busily learning their music — and guess what, they sing in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino, and Arabic too!  And we have lots of guitars (who happen to be members of our chorus), and some fiddlers, and a recorder player… so, stay tuned for lots more about this year’s music.

Want more information on the show or to buy tickets? Click here!

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A Visit from Trio Sefardi

Trio Sefardi
Trio Sefardi (Howard Bass, Susan Gaeta and Tina Chancey). Photo by Jeff Malet, MaletPhoto.

Here’s an instruction I haven’t gotten before: “I need you to channel your inner Fiddler on the Roof.”

Tonight was our first time practicing with all three of the members of Trio Sefardi – Susan Gaeta, Howard Bass, and Tina Chancey. They’re a local group that plays Sephardic music.

When Tina instructed us to find our inner Tevye, we were singing “Quando El Rey Nimrod,” one of the Sephardic songs in this year’s Christmas Revels. In the song, Nimrod, a king in the Bible, goes out to the fields, looks at the sky, and foretells the birth of Abraham.

Nimrod seems like a funny name for a king. But of course the king came first; it was only recently that his name came to mean “stupid person.”

I thought maybe dictionaries could tell me how that happened. The first one I tried only gave two definitions: the great-grandson of Noah, noted as a great hunter; a person expert in or devoted to hunting. The next dictionary was the same. The third, a dictionary of word origins, skips the issue entirely, going straight from “nimbose” to “nincompoop.”

A brief internet search tells me this question comes up a lot. One possibility is that it was because Bugs Bunny used “Nimrod” sarcastically to describe Elmer Fudd. Because he’s not a great hunter – get it? (The Online Etymology Dictionary refers to this hypothesis as “amateur.”)

Anyway, the song we were working on is about King Nimrod. It’s lovely, with flowing, melodic choruses and a bouncy refrain. Tina, Howard, and Susan sat facing the chorus, playing instruments and, in Susan’s case, singing. Tina leapt out of her chair to demonstrate how the song’s refrain should move and dance. And we all got even more excited about the music we’re singing for this year’s Christmas Revels.

Want more information on the show or to buy tickets? Click here!