El Mazal of Mr. Gerry Neldo, with Judith Cohen

Lecture 15 in Josh Horowitz’s The Promiscuous World of Jewish Music Series

DATE: Monday, Aug 17
TIME: 11am California/2pm New York/ 7pm UK/ 8pm most of Europe

There is a Zoom limit of 100 participants.
Length: 1 – 2 hours.
Donations to Josh are accepted and appreciated, but not required.

Zoom Meeting ID: 967 8901 9038
Password: 156230

Moroccan Sephardic women – men too, but especially women – kept singing the old narrative ballads, and wedding songs, a generation or two longer than most of their Ottoman region counterparts. Most of the Ladino songs people are familiar with from recordings and performances are not found in Morocco – they appeared in today’s Turkey and Greece and the Balkans in the mid-to-late 19^th century and even later; but many older genres share texts across the Mediterranean, with different melodies. Judith Cohen has spent many years working with the Moroccan Sephardic community of her native Montreal, and in other cities on other continents. She’ll give us a close look at this repertoire, along with a glance at a couple of notable non-Moroccan Sephardic women she recorded in Montreal in the 1980s, and, if there’s time, a quick teaser of her ethnomusicology fieldwork with the Crypto-Jews of village Portugal and/or at a few of Spain’s “medieval Sephardic festivals.”