Ashkenaz 2006

Ashkenaz means “little tear” in Farsi. It also means “Germany” in Medieval Hebrew, the origin of Eastern European Jewry. The sixth Ashkenaz Festival of Diasporic Jewish Culture took place this past weekend at the Harbourfront Centre. Here were some of the highlights:

• Les Yeux Noir’s Yiddish lullabies, Romani anthems, and French ballads of futile desire.
• Maurice El Medioni, 78 year old Algerian Jewish piano legend, playing his French and Maghrebi Arabic songs with drummer Roberto Rodriguez and trumpeter Frank London.
• Aaron Alexander’s Midrash Mishmosh, with ever changing guest musicians, playing a mix of frenetic punk, soaring bulgars, and circus squawking.
• Aaron Bensoussan’s Dafina Orchestra, playing traditional Moroccan Jewish songs.
• Comic book artist Ben Katchor talk about how "life is here to make stories with".
• Susan Hoffman Watts, a fourth generation klezmer musician, playing her great grandfather’s songs with KlezKanada regulars such as Josh Dolgin, Eric Stein and Alex Kontorovich.
• The energy of Golem, playing anti-American Yiddish immigrant songs, Romani wedding tunes and the laments of Russian Jewish bagel vendors.
• The parade, with giant puppet musicians and instruments of every kind. The parade winded down Queen’s Quay for a block, and back across the Harbourfront. As the sun set, the band played a melancholic but majestic song that sounded like the end of the world, of finality, and total peace.
• Yasmin Levy’s Sephardi songs, about evil mother in laws, the love of a middle aged woman for a man twenty years her junior, and “Adio Querida”, with full audience participation.
• The finale, a tribute to the late great Bessarabian musician German Goldenshteyn (ז"ל) led by Michael Alpert and Alex Kontorovich. The musicians, a good thirty strong, each had a shot of vodka, and Michael made the l’chaim, wished German a “lichtig klezmerish gan-eyden”, and wished us all “sholem in di gantze velt”. An audience member responded: “s’iz a gute sho un a gute platz”!