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Old Ladino, New Ladino
As the daughter of legendary Ladino musicologist Yitzhak Levy, Yasmin Levy’s fusion style has met with criticism. by George Robinson That is certainly what happened to Yasmin Levy, the acclaimed (and occasionally attacked) Sephardi singer who will be appearing at Symphony Space on Nov. 7. Her father was the legendary musicologist Yitzhak Levy, who compiled a monumental anthology of Ladino songs from across the entire Mediterranean, a 14-volume compendium of material that he elicited from aging Sephardim in Israel. Levy died when Yasmin was barely a year old, and she has no memories of her father. But when she began to forge her own career as a singer, interpreting Ladino with her own modern musical ideas, incorporating elements of flamenco, she displeased purists and academics. Needless to say, they invoked her father’s achievements as a metaphorical stick to beat her with. “Singing Ladino in a traditional way means singing a cappella, without accompaniment,” she wrote in an e-mail interview last week. “I realized years ago that if I want to bring these songs to young people and also to people who have no connection with this tradition ... that I would have to open these songs to different kinds of tradition, like flamenco, to make them more accessible.” The need to communicate Ladino songs to someone who didn’t grow up with them is a new dilemma, as Levy quickly pointed out. For a millennium, Sephardic Jews passed these songs from generation to generation, but today Ladino is a dying language, one which Levy, like her father, is trying to keep alive. Where her father documented the past before it could vanish forever, she is fusing it with other traditions and the present, hoping to disseminate the musical culture so that there will be others to receive it. “Some traditional Sephardi people were upset at this fusion, claiming that I am destroying this tradition,” she wrote. “They feel it is their duty and mission to preserve the Ladino culture in a traditional way at home. But I feel it is my mission to spread these songs around the world as much as I can, even if it means that I have to bring other influences to play and make the music more approachable for others.” Recently, the storm has subsided somewhat, she added. “Now, after some years, when [the traditionalists] have seen how well their songs and culture are accepted elsewhere, they are happy and proud of it,” she wrote. Oddly enough, Levy stumbled into singing almost against her will. She was studying reflexology so that she would have a “real” job, and taking flamenco classes as an avocation when her flamenco teacher pressed her into singing. The inevitable happened. “I realized that I am deceiving myself and decided to follow my heart,” she wrote. “My other and all my family supported every decision I made, and still do.” Her mother also supplied her with her initial repertoire, the songs that Yasmin had heard her sing in the kitchen. But when Yasmin decided to pursue a singing career, her mother, who was a trained singer, vowed to teach her “how to sing those songs properly, word by word,” Levy wrote. She hasn’t had to look much farther for repertoire since then. As she wrote, “It really has been my mom together with those 14 books of Ladino songs my . . . father published. I have the greatest fountain of Ladino song at home.” Yasmin Levy will be performing in a concert sponsored by the World Music Institute at Symphony Space (95th and Broadway) on Saturday, Nov. 7 at 8:30 p.m. For information, call (212) 864-5400 or go to www. symphonyspace.org. Levy’s latest CD, “Mano Suave,” is available on the 4Q label.
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