Audiences at this year’s Ashkenaz Festival will see a diverse range of performances and presentations from traditional European klezmer and Yiddish music to more contemporary cutting-edge events, the festival’s artistic director says.
The Balkan Beat Box (video)
“When the festival was first founded, it started as a place for klezmer and Yiddish music to be featured, and over the years, it’s broadened so much,” Eric Stein says. “The name of the festival is well established and has a strong brand, but it does mislead some people into thinking that in some ways, it’s insular or exclusive.”
But with more than 50,000 non-Jewish people attending the event, which runs every two years, this is certainly not the case.
“We do everything we can in all of our marketing and publicity, and, on the sheer volume of what’s programmed, to convey how inclusive we are and that we want to represent pan-Jewish culture with the best and brightest of contemporary creativity in the Jewish artistic and musical worlds,” Stein, the mandolin player and leader of the klezmer-East European fusion band Beyond the Pale, says.
Now in its 15th year, the program has grown to include more music from the Spanish and North African-influenced Sephardim, and from Mizrachi (Sephardi) traditions rooted in the Middle East and further east including Iran, Iraq and India.
“The artists that are working within Jewish music traditions today draw from a broad palate of ideas and traditions. More and more, the boundaries break down,” Stein says.
“Even if you talk about klezmer music in general, that term has almost been rendered meaningless over the last decade by the amount of fusion and blending that’s happened. So, you now have different variances of klezmer. There’s neo-traditional, punk and hiphop klezmer. It ends up being a lot of hyphenated genres that fall under the klezmer category.”
Stein says that within a city as multicultural as Toronto, it just seems such a natural for the festival itself, a celebration of Jewish culture, to also represent diversity between cultures and ethnicities, and fluidity and adaptability within the Jewish world.
The eighth Ashkenaz Festival includes more than 80 acts with over 200 individuals from more than a dozen countries.
Offerings include the world premiere of David Kaufman’s movie Song of the Lodz Ghetto featuring the music of the klezmer group Brave Old World.
One of the featured groups is The Other Europeans, a 14-piece-super group of Jewish and Roma musicians from seven countries, who Stein says are rekindling a historical symbiosis between Jewish and Roma musicians
Other shows include the funky-edged, Balkan Beat Box, the harmonica quartet Les Batards de Bouche (Mongrels of the Mouth) and The Sway Machinery with compositions by Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Colin Stetson of Arcade Fire.
Also presented is A Night in the Old Marketplace, an opera by New York-based, Grammy Award-winner Frank London, based on the words of the late, legendary author and playwright I.L Peretz, widely considered the father of modern Yiddish literature. It is described as a theatrical Yiddish ghost story shaped as much by old world folklore as by Tom Waits-style musical satire.
Ashkenaz sees the biggest gathering of Toronto’s Jewish community, Stein says.
“It’s something that brings together the community in a way that very few other things do, across lines that may ordinarily divide people, whether it’s religion or politics or whatever. Ashkenaz is very much about just bringing people together in celebration and unity to enjoy what is a very vibrant and accomplished culture.”
The Ashkenaz Festival runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 6. Most of the events are free, but some require tickets. Harbourfront Centre plays host to the Labour Day weekend events, but other venues participating include the Al Green Theatre at the Miles Nadal JCC, Caplansky’s Deli, Lula Lounge, the Free Times Cafe and the Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue.
For more information, call 416-979-9901 or go online to www.ashkenazfestival.com
