Ashkenaz Festival: cultures connect in Toronto

August 23, 2010 02:16 PM EDT (Updated: August 23, 2010 02:44 PM EDT)

by Kerry Dexter

Late summer in Toronto, a chance to hear familiar music and new collaborations, share a culture and meet people from one that may be new to you: all that is part of the Ashkenaz Festival, which runs from 31 August through 6 September at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre and several other venues in downtown Toronto. What you may also want to know: most of the events are free. There will be more than 200 artists involved in performances at this year’s festival, They will be celebrating music connected to and drawn from Jewish and Yiddish cultures of central Europe, and the many ways that culture continues to evolve across the world.

The first Ashkenaz Festival was held fifteen years ago, and it has become one of the largest celebrations of Jewish culture in the world. “The idea of resurrecting music and art rooted in east European Jewish traditions was actually pretty subversive in its day, “ said festival artistic director Eric Stein “The Festival founders were really countercultural insurgents, challenging the status quo of a fairly conservative Jewish community and angling for mainstream world music respectability.”

The festival continues that pioneering spirit, programing artists whose music reaches far beyond well loved horas, freylekhs and folk songs well known in Yiddish and klezmer styles -- though there’s likely to be a good helping of all that too. “Our festival now reflects a whole universe of contemporary Jewish music and art,” Stein pointed out, “whether it’s Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Mizrachi or cross-cultural.”

This year the sounds of two of the headline artists, Balkan Beat Box, whose music could be called pan Mediterranean funk, and the fourteen piece supergroup The Other Europeans, whose musicians explore and crete new connections between Jewish and gypsy music, are clear examples of the fun and adventure to be had, whether you know anything about Jewish music or culture, ot not. “Every year, nearly half of the more than fifty thousand attendees at the festival are not Jewish,” Stein said.

What else could you see and hear at the Ashkenaz Festival? This year, Frank London’s Night in the Old Marketplace, a theatrical Yiddish ghost story shaped as much by old world folklore as by Tom Waits style musical satire. along with with songs from octogenarian Bosnian Ladino music legend Flory Jagoda and third generation Philadelphia Klezmer drumming icon Elaine Hoffman-Watts. Nightsongs from a Neighboring Village will find two Yiddish and Ukrainian musicians exploring how the voices of Yiddish and Slavic folk bards once intertwined, while the band Divahn explores Persian and middle eastern fusion and other artists connect aspects of Jewish music with Indian classical form and the music of Cuba, just to point out a few possibilities.

Canada’s own artists are well represented among the musical superstars from across the globe. “Canada is home to some of the most creative musicians in this scene today, ” said Stein. Global fusion from Jaffa Road, Bulgarian gypsy funk from Kaba Horo, hipster jazz by Zebrina , and a world premiere, festival commission from Les Batards du Bouche, who are four Quebecois harmonica hotshots resurrecting sound of harmonica quartets to render an all-new repertoire of serious Jewish harmonica music. Festival director Stein himself will get into the act when he picks up his mandolin to front his newest ensemble Tio Chorinho, which will pay tribute to the great Jewish mandolin master of Brazil, Jacob do Bandolim.

There will be workshops, talks as well as plenty of music. To learn more about how Ashkenaz audiences experience the past, present and future of Jewish music, and how you might join in, check out the Ashkenaz Festival web site.