PUTNEY-Noam "Nani" Vazana, one of the few musician/songwriters in the world who writes and composes in the endangered Ladino language, has launched a tour that's landing her in venues large and small around North America and Europe.
One of her stops will be Putney, as Next Stage Arts hosts her for a performance this Friday.
BBC Radio 3 hails Vazana's as a powerful and soulful voice that "transports you from ancient markets to modern jazz clubs in one breath."
Add to that her deeply-resonant trombone, nuanced piano, mariachi guitar, and percussion, and Vazana's sound evokes faraway places and other times - all with contemporary character.
What's most unusual about Vazana's work, though, is that her songs are largely in Ladino (also known as Judeoespañol), a language that traces back to Sephardic Jews.
As she captures the language and its culture, she infuses it with relevant lyrics furthering empowerment, addressing migration, celebrating essential human goodness - all through stories and melodies inspired by flamenco, jazz, and world music.
'A unique and beautiful part of my upbringing'
Vazana, also a composer and educator, relocated to Amsterdam from Israel 18 years ago. A lifelong musician, she attended conservatories in three countries, where she studied trombone, opera, voice, and conducting.
She represented the Netherlands and won the 2024 Liet International song contest, a competition designed to be an alternative to the Eurovision Song festival for artists performing in minority languages. Her work was preserved by the Library of Congress in 2023 and added to the library's archives as part of the American Folklife Center's Homegrown Concert Series.
Her 2022 album, Ke Haber (What's New), has earned worldwide recognition and accolades, reaching #11 on the World Music Charts Europe list in March 2022.
In addition to frequent tours, Vazana has performed at the Kennedy Center, BBC Radio 3, the London Jazz Festival, and the Jodhpur RIFF Festival in India, among others.
A professor at the London Performing Academy of Music and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Vazana chairs the Amsterdam Artist Collective and founded an online course in self-promotion for musicians, Why DIY Music, and her own music booking agency, Nova Productions.
In a recent talk with The Commons, Vazana reflected on how her love grew for Ladino, with its Latin roots and elements of modern Romance languages.
As she notes on her website (nanimusic.com), "a gap exists between older and newer generations; for the most part, Ladino has not been passed on to the younger generation and is therefore at risk of extinction."
Ladino is a matriarchal language, both in scripture and in literature, she explained, but "you can find many mother-daughter dialogues [...] directly connected to Medieval Jewish culture."
While men of the time focused on learning Hebrew and the Torah in the synagogue, women stayed home learning the language needed "to haggle with merchants [and] exchange recipes and gossip - because that's how you got news back then. For recreation, they wrote and composed all the fantastic Ladino songs we know today," Vazana says.
"I wasn't really thinking about resurrecting it, at first," she says. "I was just enjoying it, you know."
Having grown up in a purist Hebrew-speaking household, Vazana says, she'd almost lost touch with this "unique and beautiful part of my upbringing."
"When I was a kid, my grandmother spoke Ladino, but my father made it impossible to speak it at home: He forbade it," she says. "So, I disconnected from the language for a really long time."
By the time her grandmother died, "I was already doing my own thing with classical musical education, and later with jazz."
Vazana released two English-language indie jazz albums "that did pretty well," she says. "They were on the charts and everything. And I played all over the world."
Then, while in Morocco playing a jazz festival, she took the opportunity to visit Fez, her grandmother's hometown. She recalls a street party full of music - especially drumming and songs.
"Some of these melodies sounded familiar and I tried to trace them," Vazana says. "I knew these from my grandmother."
Her research led to a cache of songs, which in turn sparked further interest in Ladino, which is spoken in pockets of some 30 countries, including Bosnia, Herzegovina, Greece, France, Turkey, Israel - and in the U.S.
'Ideas have their own life'
"I'm a big jazz fan," says Vazana, who is recording a new jazz album.
She describes Nina Simone, Bill Evans, and Ornette Coleman as her "three jazz pivots." "I learned a lot by listening to them," she says. She joined a big band, where she "learned a lot playing there, too."
Vazana has several other albums to her name, including one that she produced in 2022, Ke Haber, of original songs in Ladino.
"I believe that writing music is not my work alone," she says. "I get help from ideas that are floating around. I believe that ideas have their own life and for them to exist, they need to collaborate with a human and then they come to life."
Recognizing the times, she speaks of the role music plays in healing and in coping.
"My husband is American, so I feel your sadness firsthand," she says.
"I'm an artist. I'm not a politician. I'm not an economist. But I think that a lot of the things they're telling us are not true," Vazana says. "And it seems to me that the notion that we're separated, the notion that we're enemies, the notion that we cannot work together to make the human race work - that sounds like a lie to me."
Those in power, she observed, "reason that we need wars to solve conflict. I don't believe that. So as an artist, I think that my job, my duty, is to bring beauty to the world and show that there is an alternative way of thinking, that we could do this in a nice way."
She believes that "we don't need the violence, and we don't need conflict."
"A lot of things happening on the outside tell us that we're wrong and that we shouldn't believe in love and in peace and in magic, but I think we should," she says.
Nani Vazana's solo show is Friday, March 28, 7:30 p.m., at Next Stage at 15 Kimball Hill in Putney. Tickets - $20 in advance, $25 at the door, $10 to access a livestream - are available at nextstagearts.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.