IMT and Temple Beth Ami are partnering to present the Guy Mendilow Band.
The Guy Mendilow Band’s latest CD, The Ladino Project, features centuries-old music from Jewish communities in places such as Smyrna, Salonica, Jerusalem and Sarajevo. Sung in Ladino, a language melding Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, these colorful canticas and romanzas abound with stories of sailors seduced by sirens at sea, intrigue, fantastic dreams and the treachery of kings and queens.
Led by Israeli performer Guy Mendilow, the quintet makes this ancient music relevant to today’s audiences by recasting it through the lens of modern migrations. Drawn from the places Mendilow and his musicians have called home, from Israel and Brazil to Japan and the United States, the resulting music is a blend of haunting Sephardi, driven with Brazilian street beats and tempered with blues. It is vibrant musical storytelling awash with warm vocal harmonies, intricate textures and spellbinding rhythms.
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When the Sephardi Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they eventually settled in communities from Northern Africa and the Middle East to the Mediterranean and the Balkans. In each new home, their language, food, customs and songs soaked in local flavors of new cultures, and came to be known as Ladino culture.
The Guy Mendilow Band is continuing the vibrant Ladino tradition. Drawing on the dynamic world music expertise of each of its players, the Guy Mendilow Band’s Ladino Project explores imagined, cross-cultural journeys: as if Sephardi music continued traveling and landing in Appalachia, or the streets of Salvador in Northeastern Brazil. What will these songs sound like when they both preserve their essence but also become steeped in these new, imagined homes, as they have throughout their historical migrations?
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The band challenges concepts of borders in songs like “La Reina Xerifa Mora,” a dark legend shared between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities of Andalusia, that the band brings alive with regal Appalachian melodies and a touch of gritty blues. Or the playful, upbeat setting of “Mansevo Del Dor,” a tongue-in-cheek warning against social vanity, featuring Mendilow’s berimbau and overtone singing, as though the song has wound up somewhere between Salvador and the Mongolian Steppe. Mendilow and his players are careful to respect and preserve the songs’ essential identities, even while working them through their modern, multicultural lens.
