Mais j’aime encore cette chanson.
I was gonna do some translations of it until I realized that it’s widely recorded as a jazz number. Now I just wanna know if Cléoma Breaux was listening to jazz or vice versa.
Tag: jazz
Avishai Cohen, an Isreali jazz bassist, performing a song sung in Ladino:
I came across his music recently and it grew on me very quickly. He manages to intermingle music from various culture in a very natural way and has a great since of song structure to boot. But what interests me most today is the language.
Ladino is the language that many Jews speak in Spain. It’s actually a Romance language. That might seem odd considering Hebrew is a Semitic language completely unrelated, but this sort of thing seems to happen with Jewish people outside of Israel. Yiddish is a Germanic language and Juhuri is a Persian language. Jews seem to be one ethnic group that excels at developing their own languages out of the dominant languages of the countries they live in. My hunch is this is due to being a minority everywhere–before Israel came into existence–and having a much stronger urge to maintain their cultural heritage due to it being tied up with a religion. (I mean c’mon, Hebrew? No other language revitalization has ever been so successful.)
Although I may simply be ignorant of how often this happens with other ethnic groups. Maybe Chicano English will end up becoming a language separate from English, for instance. But then this never happened with the English dialects spoken by Italians who immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th century. Most of the examples I can think of are from previous eras and the results are already obviously different from what has happened with Jewish ethnic groups. I’m sure there are many more, though, if anyone cares to share.
I’m also curious about the mutual intelligibility of Ladino for native Spanish speakers. (The lyrics for anyone who wants to check it out.) I feel I can understand much of what Avishai sings (some is actually Hebrew here) with my imperfect grasp of Spanish. I imagine there’s much more cross-over for native speakers. Interestingly, I found this response while looking it up on WordReference:
I a m a native spanish and catalan speaker from Spain, and I just wonder why in the world would someone want to understand some kind’a weird bad-written variation of spanish called ladino.
The commenter is native speaker of Catalan, which is looked at derisively by many native Spanish speakers. WordReference is usually a forum full of people who have a strong respect and understanding of language so it’s amazing to me that someone who speaks a minority language that’s so caught up in controversy would make this extremely hypocritical statement.
*I’m kinda indulging in the parentheses so feel free to skip those parts. You’ll still get the point.
That right there is Allen Toussaint, who has only recently been brought to my attention as a New Orleans legend. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know of him until now. There’s something really great about the sounds that come out of New Orleans, and my hunch is it’s the blending of cultures, but it doesn’t seem to travel very far past the boundaries.
The reason I’m really posting is because this is because it’s a good example of the life of a song. This is actually a Jelly Roll Morton composition yet it sounds incredibly fresh, even when being played by a 71 year old. He doesn’t actually change all that much, either. It’s still clearly a blues. He adds some runs that you’d sooner hear Chick Corea play or a classical pianist, but they work. He throws in some minor 2nds, like the ones around 4:57, but sparingly, and those have always been pretty acceptable in blues, at least melodically. There might be some perfect fourths in the lower two voices at times, too, but that’s enough technical jargon.
The point is, he’s playing with 70-80 years of history between himself and Jelly Roll. Because others between the two kept the song going, kept making it fresh, it gave him a chance to continue it with all the influences he’s accrued in his own lifetime. It’s another version of folk music traditions, where the song doesn’t even belong to the composer because no one can remember who the composer was. It simply is.
(This is sort of echoed by other people. Kurt Cobain once said something like a song is never as good/the same as the 1st time it’s played. Kaija Saariaho–and Nico Muhly, too, I believe–once said she just composed her music, then it belonged to whoever was performing it. [Sorry, can’t find links, let me know if you can, or can correct me.] A pretty diverse crowd. It’s a good reminder that, really, music is a temporal experience that exists as something new with each repetition, even if the repetitions are reminders of earlier experiences.)
The title is a reference to the Jelly Roll version, which included words:
(Honestly, I like the lyrics a lot. Just remember, he came up in Storyville.)
(And for those interested in the technical stuff, there are definitely some strong impressionist influences in Toussaint’s playing. He often uses a 3 against 4 run that sounds straight out of the 1st part of Debussy’s Deux Arabesques and employs pentatonic scales that aren’t exactly the blues scales. The latter is something Debussy got from Asian music–or Russian music which got it from Asian music?–so Toussaint is sorta bringing the whole world together here.)
Seriously.
How can this performance not leave you in awe? I think this is what jazz is supposed to be all about though. It’s just fun. There’s nothing pretentious or stuffy about these guys. What you hear is some great musicians having a great time and showing you what their souls look like.
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