True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero – really look – and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you.
Ursula K. LeGuin “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”
Ashkenaz Festival started in Toronto fifteen years ago, as a celebration of the worldwide revival of Klezmer and Yiddish culture. It became a biennial event, held on Labour Day weekend at Harbourfront Centre, and my own smouldering appreciation for Klezmer music was brought to full vivid flame by performances I saw there, by bands such as the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, and Andy Statman. There were free shows along with paid shows, theatre, a parade, art, and of course lots of good food.
It was exciting, back then, because it was both old and new, and of course for many of us who had grown up in North America, a lot of the old stuff was new. I’d never been exposed to Eastern European Jewish music, the roots of Klezmer, before. When I played it to my parents, who had grown up in Western Europe, it was new to them as well: they had been raised on Mozart and Beethoven. Yet somehow this music called to me, and sounded like coming home in a way that much other world music didn’t. And it had a good beat and you could dance to it, too.
As Ashkenaz grew I enjoyed its new shoots, participating in 2002 with the then newly-formed Tikkun Toronto in a thinly veiled allegory called “Two Brothers Near Jerusalem”, a play about two brothers who feud with each other to their families’ mutual harm, till they finally reconcile. Ashkenaz was overtly non-political, but our audience seemed not to mind. We were a hit, and Tikkun Toronto was inspired to create a number of successful performance pieces thereafter. But that’s another story, though one that started at Ashkenaz.
This year’s festival has just concluded, and my experience of it was something very different. I haven’t been listening to as much Klezmer as I used to, and I wondered whether I’d find the festival to be variations on what I’d heard before. Had I outgrown Ashkenaz, I wondered. Mistake. As I’ve been changing, so has Ashkenaz. There is an extraordinary range in the over 200 artists who performed, as the organizers have moved into a far wider scope than the original mandate. Why I was so blown away? Read on….
The first group I saw was “The Other Europeans” This is a fourteen piece band, composed of eight Klezmorim and six Lautari. (Lautari are to the Roma culture as Klezmorim are to the Jewish). Sometimes the two arms of the group play separately, as an octet or sextet, but mostly they play as a single unit, though there may be a quiet dialogue between an accordion and a piano that opens up into a crescendo of horns, or a call and response between violins and percussion. It is extraordinary music viscerally, and fascinating intellectually; I’d been vaguely aware of some similarity between Lautar and Klezmer, but this intimate juxtaposition was enlightening, in the full sense of the word. There’s a fine film that goes into the formation and history of “The Other Europeans” available on their website, and you should certainly listen to “Goldene Khasene/Hora de la Cahul” a piece that starts in Lautar and winds up in Klezmer here.
But if that was stretching tradition, it was nothing compared to Mycale. Mycale is the latest quartet formed by John Zorn, the avant-garde American composer whose “Masada” project consists of over 500 short pieces, each of which must be playable on any set of four instruments. (Zorn describes the project as “Ornette Coleman and the Jewish scales together”) Mycale, Zorn’s latest incarnation of such a quartet, consists of four women vocalists, each of whom already starred in her own band. They sing acapella, often with one or two singing percussion while the other two create counterpointing melodic lines. It is a difficult music to describe (a quadraphrenic Bobby McFerrin on ecstasy?) but utterly expansive and compellingly captivating to hear. Fortunately you can hear a sample of what they sound like, (and you should!) just by clicking here. The lyrics (in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, or French) are drawn from the Bible, Rumi, and form part of Zorn’s “Angels” , part two of the Masada series. But it’s the music that matters… haunting, unique, and unforgettable.
There were other pieces I wanted to see, but missed: Frank London’s new play, “A Night in the Old Marketplace”; Balkan Beat Box; Galeet Dardashti’s gloriously textured and lushly styled history of middle-Eastern musics celebrating middle-Eastern women from her soon to be released album “Naming“. And I heard some of the traditional Klezmer music that had first brought me to Ashkenaz (Elaine Hoffman Watts, at 70, still drumming impeccably for a band featuring her daughter, whom I’d previously heard in the Klezmer band “Mikveh”). There was a parade with some old puppets and some new ones. There was an new astroturf surface that replaces the mud pit fringed with scraggly grass where we once performed “Two Brothers”. But most of all there was a deep sense that as my own interests grow and expand, Ashkenaz remains a place where I could find those interests reflected and deepened. Such a gift!
