Ladino traditional song
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Through her gorgeous songs, singer, composer, and instrumentalist Nani Noam Vazana helps lead the effort to preserve Ladino, the endangered language of the Sephardic Jews—a Jewish diaspora that was once concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula. The catalog of Ladino traditional music is rich but limited, given a history of dislocation and loss, so Nani has begun to chart a celebrated course performing and composing songs that call into being a Ladino with continued vitality in the modern world.
Ladino has its linguistic roots in medieval Spanish, combined with Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. When the Spanish Inquisition forced the Spain’s Jewish population to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews were scattered through the Mediterranean and beyond. Complex sociocultural factors and forces, including Ladino’s status as the language of the home in contrast to the Hebrew of religious life, worked against the retention of a unique language. Yet today political changes like the recent decisions by Spain and Portugal to extend citizenship to the descendants of the exiles, and governmental recognition of Ladino as an official language in Spain, go hand in hand with a resurgence in Ladino song led by older divas like the late Flory Jagoda—a longtime Northern Virginia resident, past Richmond Folk Festival performer, and National Heritage Fellow—and now the sparkling voice of Nani Noam Vazana.
Noam Vazana’s parents arrived in the new state of Israel in the 1950s at ages one and two, coming as refugees from Morocco. Wanting to leave the family’s traumatic history behind, Vazana’s father insisted the household only speak Hebrew. However, her grandmother, who gave her the nickname Nani, would sing her Ladino songs whenever they were alone, to ensure the language and culture survived. Nani went on to pursue a successful career as a professional musician, playing classical and jazz trombone and piano, even developing methods to play both instruments at the same time! In 2015, after relocating to Amsterdam, a serendipitous encounter after a sold-out performance in Morocco changed her musical trajectory. Wandering the old quarter of her ancestral hometown of Fez, Nani recognized a tune her grandmother used to sing as they were cooking together, this time sung communally in Arabic at a joyful street party.
This magical encounter inspired Nani to nurture the musical seed that her grandmother had planted, undertaking the study of Ladino and immersing herself in the music of her Sephardic heritage. After a celebrated album of traditional Ladino songs, Andalusian Brew, Nani has recently released what many experts say is the first-ever full album of original compositions in Ladino, Ke Haber (What’s New). As Nani describes one of her favorite compositions, the joy this new endeavor brings is abundantly clear. The song, “Una Segunda Piel” (“A Second Skin”), concerns a Sephardic ritual called la mortaja (the shroud), in which a person at retirement age is literally wrapped in a death shroud by friends and family. After a period of meditation, they emerge to a party that celebrates leaving the past behind. As Nani says, it’s a joyful song, “about shedding your old skin, getting ready to start a new path in life”—a perfect metaphor for her music, and her contribution to the revitalization of Ladino.
Read Nani’s tribute to Flory Jagoda
This project is supported by the Performing Arts Fund NL. It is presented in collaboration with NOVA Foundation for the Arts. Additional support and promotion provided by the Embassy of Israel to the United States.
