The challenge requires a certain sensitivity: how to respect a disappearing culture that dates back centuries, while modernizing it for a new generation? For reasons that have everything to do with his personal history, Nani Noam Vazana decided that the best way to honor the ancient language known as Ladino was to make his own rules.
Today, the Israeli singer is part of a wave of artists – Yasmin Levy, Baladino, Sarah Aroeste and Mor Karbasi – singing in Ladino. But what sets her apart from many of her contemporaries is that she doesn’t present the greatest hits from a past she never knew. On his new album, Ke Haberthe goal is to create something new, singing original songs in an ancient language that she is still striving to master while drawing inspiration from different genres as a songwriter.
“Some people are really interested in this and say to me, ‘You’re doing really amazing work and I have to tip my head to you,'” says Vazana, who arrived in New Orleans at the start of a North American tour. “And others say, ‘Um, we expected something different – we thought you’d do traditional stuff – and it’s not traditional.’ From my point of view, if you just do a time piece where you just try to write what other people felt, when they were experiencing those times a long time ago, you’ll end up faking something. Because you are not in that period today. But if you write a work from your own point of view, when you put things together, it becomes not only more authentic, but also real art. You are not copying something , so everything you do is from the zero point.
A Judeo-Spanish dialect that dates back to the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492, Ladino has evolved over the years to incorporate Arabic, Turkish, Greek and Balkan languages. The message of this multilingual melting pot is magnificent for a world that seems more than ever prey to endless conflict: no culture needs to be homogeneous. And the more commonalities we can embrace, starting with language, the better off we will be as human beings.
Rightly so, Ke Haber is a decidedly avant-garde record, heavily influenced by Ladino’s history as a matriarchal language often spoken between mothers and daughters at home.
On “No Kiero Madre,” Vazana addresses the world of arranged marriages – still a reality, she says, among segments of the Jewish population, with the punchline found at the end of the song. When a mother tells her daughter that she will eventually fall in love if she doesn’t accept the man already chosen for her, the daughter happily reveals that it has already happened.
More serious is “Sin Dingun Ijo Varon,” based on a 13th-century text in which a teenage girl comes out as transgender to her parents.
“The last sentence shows the mother accepting the child as he is,” says the singer. “It was mind-blowing to me. Even though I reorganized things a bit, the text dates from the Middle Ages. So it’s pretty cool that we’ve been discussing transgender transformation all this time. If we go back to millennials, we think we invented the pronoun wheel. This is not correct when considering older languages.
THE STORY OF VAZANA WITH Ladino is complex.
The singer was raised by adoptive parents, whose lineage came from the Sephardic Jews of Morocco. As racism against Morocco’s Jewish population became more prevalent after the war, his father left his hometown of Fez for Israel. Determined to assimilate and leave the traumatic memories of Morocco behind, he forbade speaking Ladino at home. That didn’t stop Vazana’s grandmother, however.
“My father didn’t let us speak Ladino, so I only spoke it to my grandmother when we were alone,” Vazana explains. “She didn’t speak Hebrew very well, and I didn’t speak Ladino very well, but there were a lot of fairy tales and songs while cooking. Lots of physical affection – it was a very primordial relationship, since she was my grandmother. But she died when I was 12, so I lost that connection. I started studying classical music and then playing my own material.
At 28, Vazana was invited to perform in Morocco, where she had a revelation.
“I’d never been there before, so I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I went to my grandmother’s town?’ » she remembers. “So I went to Fez to explore, and on the street there was a huge street party, with lots of different songs. One of them seemed very familiar to me: they were singing in Arabic, but after a few minutes I realized that it was actually a Ladino song that my grandmother had sung to me when I I was very little. This moment made me want to know more about my heritage.
“So I started researching online, mainly trying to find out what the song was, which was difficult because there wasn’t a lot of documentation,” she continues. “As I listened to other songs, I thought, ‘These are all really pretty.’ But often the people singing them were all about embellishment, to the point where it was more about embellishment than melody. So I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we played and made a purely musical traditional record?” So we recorded a few songs at home, put the songs on YouTube and they literally blew up with half a million views. Suddenly, people started showing up at Vazana concerts demanding that I sing songs in Ladino.
And so she did, but on her own terms. Musically, Vazana’s great strength Ke Haber ” is the way she sounds as at home in a century-old, candlelit tavern (“Gracias a La Vida”) as she does evoking the ghost of the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (the enthusiastic “Cok Seni Severim /Siverias A La Rana”) or channel the best of MOR radio from the 70s (“Una Segunda Piel”).
She is not the first artist in history to embrace the idea of appropriating something old. Think The White Stripes taking vintage Americana blues and country to create something fresh and exciting at the turn of the millennium. Or the Pogues infusing traditional Irish music with punk energy in the ’80s, knowing that for every thrilled kid in the front row of the 100 Club, there was a traditionalist convinced they were murdering everything the Chieftains once held sacred . Laughing, Vazana notes that she’s solidly on Team Pogue.
She knows that there are very concrete arguments that the Ladino language is dying. Five years ago, only 200,000 people spoke it on the planet. Today, Vazana says that number would be closer to 60,000, many of whom are elderly. But when the singer looks at her own audience, she sees a generation that may be looking to the future, but also looking to connect with its past in a disposable world of TikTok and Instagram.
“I think a lot of millennials are trying to search for their roots, their own lineage,” Vazana says. “If you look at me, I grew up in a house where lineage was not a topic of conversation. My father deliberately forbade us from speaking Ladino at home. And many people my age – especially if their parents were immigrants – learned to reject and distance themselves from their original culture. Now I feel, and I think more and more people my age feel, that we want to reconnect with our grandparents’ generations. It’s deeper, more engaging and sexier than what we often experience today. »