Artist & Festival Press Below

Despite the best efforts of music programmers, record labels and critics, when the vast majority of casual listeners hear the phrase “Jewish music,” they respond, “Oh, you mean klezmer, right?”

Not always, Erez a.k.a. dj handler would reply, emphatically.

Handler, better known as DJ Handler, the head of Modular Moods Records and a force in Jewish hip-hop, has made it a veritable one-man crusade “to take over the entire Ashkenazi consciousness that people associate with Jewish music and balance it out with Sephardic music.”

His lastest broadside in the campaign is the Second Annual Sephardic Music Festival, which kicks off a week of concerts, parties and dances on Saturday evening, Dec. 16.

From its earliest planning stages, Handler had always intended that last year’s event would be the first of many. “It was always promoted as the ‘first annual,’” he reminds his interlocutor.

He comes by his love of Sephardic and Yemenite music naturally. His mother is a Yemenite Jew and when the family was in Israel, he was taken to Yemenite synagogues regularly, where he fell in love with the sinuous modes of Mizrahi music.

“I was always trying to find recordings of Yemenite Jewish music and set them to beats,” he says. “And when you do that, it works really well. But I wanted to share these musics with more people, and the festival was a way to get a lot of this culture out there on a grand scale.”

The first event was an ambitious launch that coincided with Chanukah, and featured such high-powered acts as Pharaoh’s Daughter, Sarah Aroeste, Divahn and Modular Moods artist Y-Love. Much to Handler’s delight, the festival was a huge success.

“Last year was amazing,” he says gleefully. “Everybody wrote about it and except for one event, everything was all standing room only or sold out. I didn’t expect that. You could feel it was something big by the way people reacted.”

Needless to say, he’s hoping for more of the same this year. The event will again fill the eight nights of Chanukah and features several of last year’s faves as well as the Israeli hip-hop group Hadag Nahash, jazz diva Ayelet Rose Gottlieb and the brilliant song interpreter Ramon Tasat.

“I always try to present something new,” Handler says. “What I’m trying to do is to create a family atmosphere for the musicians, getting Ashkenazi musicians involved with the Sephardic traditions, too. For example, the concert ‘The Women of Tzadik,’ which was put together by John Zorn, features Basya Schechter, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb and Jewlia Eisenberg — they’re Ashkenazi artists all playing Sephardic music.”

He quickly notes that Schechter is actually half-Sephardic and adds, “It enriches the mix to have these Ashkenazi musicians responding to the Sephardic traditions.”

The Second Annual Sephardic Music Festival opens on Saturday, Dec. 16 at 8 p.m. with Y-Love, Pharaoh’s Daughter and special guests, at Makor (35 W. 67th St.); for the entire schedule and ticket information, go to www.sephardicmusicfestival.com.
- THE JEWISH WEEK(12.15.06)

The Village Voice previews the Sephardic Music festival, highlighting two artists; "...rapper Y-Love, a local Black convert to the mystical Bostoner sect of Orthodox Judaism, who spits verse in Aramaic...Kippah-wearing producer dj handler, spins in Lower East Side clubs by night and, by day, produces Jewish-infused hip hop, electronica, and jazz for his Modular Moods label."

"Sarah Aroeste Band, Smadar, Pharaoh's Daughter (Tuesday) Taking part in the Sephardic Music Festival, Sarah Aroeste's band plays "Ladino rock," with lyrics in the Castilian Spanish developed by Spanish Jews after 1492. Born in Israel to a Moroccan family, Smadar plays sings in five languages and incorporates accordion, Turkish clarinet, bass, drums and darbuka. They are joined by the jazzy klezmer group Pharaoh's Daughter...oel Ben Simhon and Sultana Ensemble, Divahn (Wednesday) The Israeli-born Moroccan vocalist and oudist Yoel Ben-Simhon and his Sultana Ensemble (playing here as part of this week's Sephardic Music Festival) combine original arrangements and traditional music from the Jewish Sephardic and Arabic cultures. The all-woman group Divahn, featuring Galeet Dardashti on lead vocals, finds inspiration in music and poetry from 19th-century Persia as well as the Ashkenazi cantorial tradition." NY Times, Sinagra


"Heeb Magazine takes o ver Happy Valley to help kick off the first annual Sephardic Music Festival, which aims to increase awareness of and interest in Sephardic culture. If that all sounds a bit to highfalutin don't worry; Tonight's going to be a good old fashioned hoedown with hip hopper Y-Love and DJs handler, Blast Crises, Ahmi and Chromeo's Dave providing a wide-range of rhythms. Go-go action adds to the appeal." - Time Out (critic's pic)

"Sephardic Music Festival. With this party/festival, Happy Valley might be taking over Adam Sandler's role as champion of those who light the menorah..." - Paper Mag

"SEPHARDIC SOUNDS The New York Sephardic Music Festival welcomes the Sara Aroeste Band, which fuses Latino folk music with contemporary sounds (8 p.m.); Pharaoh's Daughter, which blends Jewish spiritual music with world-beat sounds (9 p.m.), and Smadar, a six-piece group composed of musicians from Turkey, France, Bulgaria, and Israel performing music in Spanish, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew." - NY Sun

"On the third night of Hanukkah, Makor’s Sephardic Music Festival brings in three contemporary Jewish bands, but the highlight is Pharaoh’s Daughter—an act blending Middle Eastern and African music with Jewish spirituality." - NewYorkMetro


"The professorial downtown keyboard master's projects range from explorations of ethnic themes (Sephardic Tinge) to examinations of ethnic angst (Selfhaters). Tonight is part of The NY Sephardic Music Festival....Uri Caine with Ben Perowsky Embracing everything from jazz to modern classical to electronics to klezmer, Uri Caine is one of the most forward-thinking keyboardists of recent times. - metpo.com

"If you aren't sitting around the Christmas tree, maybe you want to get your dance on with a little Israeli Hip-Hop. Y-Love takes the stage as DJ Equal, Jake Break, and DJ Handler spin some tunes as part of the Sephardic Music Festival. FreeNYC points out that "the boys from Modular Moods provide the back drop as Y-Love drops Talmudic rhymes in English, Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew." - gothamist.com

"Chavlaz. As part of the ongoing Sephardic Music Festival,Sin Sin's upstairs Leopard Lounge hosts an evening of Israeli hip hop with Y-Love on the mike and Modular Moods' Jake Break and dj handler along with DJ Equal, schlepping their record boxes into the booth." - Time Out (critic's pic)

"Sephardic Music Festival. Raquy Danziger - an american woman who has mastered the art of Middle Eastern drumming - is backed by the electric bass, synthesizer and guitar of her band, the Cavemen. Guitarist Madof leads a taut, fluid improvising trio that draws on Jewish tradition but takes its musical leads from Jim Hall and Blood Ulmer" - Time Out (critic's pic)

"Sephardic Music Festival. Basya Schechter, frontwoman of Pharaoh's Daughter, takes the niggunim (Jewish melodies) from her Sabbath dinner table and mixes them with electronica, snatches of spoken word, orchestral swells, and polyrhythms from Turkey, Israel and West Africa" - Time Out (critic's pic)

"Sephardic Music Festival. Be right up close when the artists on the East-West bill - led by composer and multiinstrumentalist Yoel
Ben Simhon- explore the music of the Jewish and Arabic cultures." - Time Out (critic's pic)

"Set the New Year of Fire. Makor is rolling out poetry slams, a film (James Cagney in White Heat), cartoons and Frank London's KlezmerAll Stars to celeberate the double-whammy holiday (the 31st is the seventh night of Hanukkah). Balagan Boogaloo ushers in the new year, mixing baile funk, New Mediterannio, bhangra, and Afrobeat." - Time Out (critics pic)

THE JEWISH WEEK
The ‘Exotic’ Jewish Music
by George Robinson
11.28.07
Looking for an edgier sound at this year’s Sephardic Music Festival.
In a way, you might say that by staging his annual Sephardic Music Festival in New York City, Erez Shudnow, better known as dj handler, is paying back an old debt.
“My mom is Yemenite and my grandmother came from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Yemen,” he explained in an e-mail while preparing for the third annual installment of the event, which begins on Dec. 4 at various venues throughout the city. “I have been very influenced by their culture, especially sitting in synagogue listening to the hypnotic prayers which sounded more like meditative mantras.  The meter mesmerized me and I always wanted to replicate it in my music.”
He started out by doing Yemenite-based mixes, trying to get the message out that Ladino is
a dying language and that Yemenite and other Sephardic music are  underappreciated, particularly as the klezmer revival has helped to increase awareness of Yiddish.
“I thought the best way to get the most attention to the culture would be to throw a festival instead of a couple shows,” he wrote. “I wanted Sephardic culture not only to be seen as beautiful, but also as hip and fresh.”
There is another factor at play in the decision to stage a Sephardic music festival, he added.
“I think people are very intrigued by what they find mysterious and I think that a lot of people find Middle Eastern culture mysterious,” handler said. “This is probably why there seems to be more curiosity for a festival like this than, say, a festival called ‘Ashkenazi Music Festival.’ A lot of Jews already have a good idea of what [Ashkenazi] music will sound like, either A: a wedding; or B: calmer. Sephardic is an umbrella term for all the Jewish cultures that are not ‘Ashkenazi/Eastern European,’ which include Yemenite, Ladino, Bukharian ... A lot of this is exotic to the general public.”
Or to the Jewish public, for that matter. Despite the success of such Sephardic- and Mizrahi-flavored acts as Pharaoh’s Daughter and Sarah Aroeste (both of whom are performing in the festival this year), the overwhelming majority of Jewish music groups in the marketplace are klezmer or Yiddish in language or musical mood. And handler readily admits that the dominant feature of the Sephardic audience up to now has been its musical conservatism.
“The point for me was to stay away from some of the aspects that make Sephardic music appealing to the older crowd, which totally loses the crowd that won’t start listening to traditional music for another 20 years,” he said.
For an example of the edgier, hip-hop-informed musical mix that he aims for in programming the festival, handler points to a mix tape he compiled, which is available at www.modularmoods.com/store.
“The mix tape blends Michal Cohen, my favorite Yemenite singer, who used to live down the block from me, Yuri Lane doing a Mizrachi beat box, Arabic break beats, Ladino sped up over a Busta Rhymes instrumental and Afro-beat with Yemenite chanting over it,” he explained. “It really draws in people obsessed with the beat into a world where the melodies are probably very unfamiliar but maybe still very comforting.”
This has been a busy year of growth for handler and his various Jewish music enterprises. In addition to the full slate of releases on modular moods, the name of the label he founded, he has started a Jewish music Web site, www.shemspeed.com. Not surprisingly, this year’s Sephardic Music Festival is also bigger than its predecessors.
“The Sephardic Festival is a very mixed bag,” he wrote. “This year we put together a night celebrating world music with an emphasis on Sephardic sounds spun by [me] and the Israeli DJ crew Soulico, along with Y-Love on the mic. We bring in an act from Israel every year.  This year we wanted to bring in Shotei Hanevua, but they had just broken up so we brought the group that came out of Shotei Haneuva called Pshutei Ha’am.”
The festival is both a labor of love and an act of collaboration between many New York music presenters.
“The whole festival comes together through a lot of love and collaboration,” handler said. “Brice Rosenbloom [founder of Music Without Borders] always helps out a lot. The guys from Soulfarm who have extended their BB King “first night of Chanukah” gig to us for our Opening Night. It was perfect timing because Consuelo Luz just happens to be in New York at that time.  She lives in New Mexico and has been included on all sorts of compilations ranging from Buddha Bar to Putumayo collections.  We will be featuring her as well as [jazz musician] Ayelet Rose Gottlieb and Sarah Aroeste at the Opening Night BB King show.  The last night of the festival is Pharaoh’s Daughter and Pshutei Ha’am at the Knitting Factory. But for the Brooklyn folks who like staying around there we put together a show at Southpaw with Yossi Piamenta.
Handler concluded, “This year seemed to just fall into place very easily, but that might be because we laid down a nice foundation the first two years with the festival.”
You might say that this installment of handler’s indebtedness to his family and its roots can be marked “paid in full.” n
The Third Annual Sephardic Music Festival will run from Dec. 4-11 at venues all over New York. For information, go to www.sephardicmusicfestival.com.

THE FORWARD
Trying To Make Sephardic Music as Hip as Klezmer
MUSIC
By Alexander Gelfand
December 23, 2005

Benjamin Cardozo was one. So was Benjamin Disraeli. Some believe that FDR may have been one, at least on his mother's side. Camille Pissarro, Harold Pinter, Murray Perahia... Sephardic Jews, every one.

And yet, despite their notable achievements throughout the Diaspora, Sephardim have been noticeably absent from the North American Jewish music scene. (In Israel, where Sephardic Jews represent a much larger portion of the population, the situation is far different.) Until recently, you'd have been lucky to find even one Sephardic ensemble for every 10 nouveau klezmer bands on the Jewish music circuit.

But that appears to be changing, thanks to the efforts of people like Erez Shudnow, aka DJ Handler. A turntablist who samples everything from Brazilian baile funk to Yemenite songs and Ashkenazic cantillation, Handler also plays drums with Orthodox avant-klezmer outfit Juez and runs both a music label and a production company. In addition, he's the driving force behind New York's first Sephardic Music Festival, scheduled to run during the eight nights of Hanukkah at venues ranging from Mo Pitkin's to Makor.

Although the term "Sephardic" is often used as a catchall for anyone who isn't of Ashkenazic descent, it properly denotes those Jews whose origins lie in Spain and Portugal. Following the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, the Sephardim were dispersed throughout North Africa and the Mediterranean, where they continued to speak the various Judaeo-Spanish dialects that had evolved under Moorish influence. They also retained, and continued to develop, their own distinctive cultural practices — including their music, which bears the imprint not only of their earliest surroundings but also of the lands (Greece, Turkey, Morocco) in which they settled. The texts of many traditional Sephardic songs, for example, are cast in Hispanic poetic forms, while Sephardic melodies are often cast in Arabic modes.

While the Sephardic Music Festival will include traditional Sephardic acts like Joe Elias and his Ladino Ensemble, the emphasis will be on contemporary music, from the Sephardic jazz engineered by Anthony Coleman and Uri Caine to the various brands of Sephardic pop and rock performed by Sarah Aroeste, Raquy and the Cavemen, and Pharaoh's Daughter. There will even be some Mizrahic sounds on offer, most notably from Divahn, an all-female acoustic Sephardic-Mizrahic quartet led by the musician and anthropologist Galeet Dardashti. (Though often lumped together with Sephardim, Mizrahim are in fact a group unto themselves — namely, Middle Eastern and North African Jews who did not make a pit stop in Iberia.) There will also be plenty of hip-hop and dance beats served up by rappers and spinners like Y-Love, Jake Break and Handler himself, all of whom will appear on Israeli Hip Hop Night.

"DJs can do things that musicians can't," Handler told the Forward in an interview. A DJ armed with a pile of samples "can introduce things in sort of covert ways," Handler explained. "You could be playing a hip-hop track and suddenly be playing an Israeli track, and people wouldn't even know how they got there. As a DJ, you can introduce people to a different culture without losing them."

One of the central goals of the festival is to increase awareness of Sephardic music among younger audiences, and to make it as hip — and as popular — as modern klezmer. Aroeste, a singer whose grandparents immigrated to America from Salonika, Greece, was herself inspired to form a contemporary Sephardic ensemble after meeting Frank London, one of the leaders of the progressive klezmer movement. Though she studied traditional Sephardic song in Israel, her principle goal is to render the Sephardic tradition more relevant to her own peer group. "I grew up in America, and I'm a young, modern American woman. I love the traditional style, but it's not necessarily what I feel in my own being," she told the Forward. "I still make traditional music, but I make it new." To that end, Aroeste sets a variety of lyrics — some deriving from traditional Hispanic narrative ballads, others of her own design — to pop and rock grooves, while continuing to use traditional Sephardic instruments like hand drums and the ubiquitous Middle Eastern lute known as the oud.

Aroeste sees several reasons for the relatively low profile of Sephardic music in North America, from the insularity of Sephardic communities themselves ("We share our music with each other, but not necessarily with the larger [Jewish] community," she said) to the overall lack of Sephardic content in Jewish education. Certainly, Israeli children are far more likely to hear Sephardic or Mizrahic music than kids in the Diaspora — "America is located half a globe away from the Middle East, and most of the Sephardic music is happening in synagogues and [local] communities," said New York-based, Israeli-born percussionist Tomer Tzur — and that's unlikely to change overnight. But thanks to events like the Sephardic Music Festival, the sounds of Sephardic Jewry are at last beginning to get their due. "Our music," Aroeste said, "is starting to get on the radar screen."
- THE FORWARD