PSU books renowned singer of Sephardic songs

By Amy Kaufman

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International recording artist Judy Frankel will give a free concert of Sephardic music in Portland on Monday, Aug. 9, at 8 p.m. at Portland State University.
Frankel, hailed as "one of today's most evocative Jewish singers," is a vital link in the survival of Sephardic music. She has collected songs from the lips of grandmothers and has put them on paper. When she performs, records or publishes the songs, she preserves "this wonderful Sephardic culture (most people) don't know about. Less than 10 percent of world Jewry is Sephardic . . . and it's very rich culture," she said.
It wasn't easy to glean the original melodies from "field tapes," Frankel said.
Frankel started her search in the 1960s, when she received a grant from the Fleishakker Foundation to gather songs in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino. She began by interviewing hospital patients at Mt. Zion Medical Center in San Francisco. The first patient she interviewed was a woman from Turkey.
"I sang the few songs I knew in Ladino, and this tough old lady became tearful," said Frankel. "She said she hadn't sung the songs in 60 years and hadn't even heard them in the last 30 years. . . . She was willing to teach me what she remembered."
The voices of hospital patients and the elderly were often "low, warbling, or off key, and they embellished the songs with their family's typical embellishments," said Frankel. She said she had to discern the melody "so I could transmit it to the next person."
She also had to decide which of the many versions she would record.
"You can have one song that's popular in Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Morocco and have four totally different versions," she said.
Frankel, who sings in 20 languages, had to master the old pronunciation of Spanish, with its archaic phrases.
"I became absolutely fascinated with Ladino, which I had been singing as a folksinger in Cambridge and Boston many years earlier, but I really didn't know what it was . . . until I started meeting Sephardic people in the Bay Area, and they began teaching me their songs," said Frankel, who is Ashkenazi.
The result of her years of labor is an extensive collection of Sephardic music that she says is quite close to the original.
"For me, music is getting to the heart of things, whatever it is," said Frankel.
She said people at her concerts would ask for cassettes, and at the next concert they would demand another cassette containing the new songs.
"They were the ones who kept pushing me down this path," said Frankel. "Sometimes in life if you're in a position to allow a path to open, and you can see it and feel it and it feels right, and it really kept me connected to Jewish culture."
Frankel has produced four CDs and a Sephardic songbook. In addition, she perpetuates Sephardic music by giving lectures and workshops.
Frankel is featured with Aretha Franklin and Patsy Cline in a compilation of famous women singers who have recorded on the Rounder Records label. Moment Magazine's readers voted her one of the 10 best Jewish musicians in the United States, with Itzhak Perlman, Debbie Friedman and the late Shlomo Carlebach. Frankel is also featured in numerous films and videos about Sephardic culture.
Her recordings, two of them on her own label, JFR, are available online from Tara Music Company and Amazon.com.
Frankel studied music at the Longy School of Music, the Berklee School of Music and Harvard University. She studied medieval music in master classes with Doriot Anthony Dwyer of the Boston Symphony and other musicians. She received a bachelor's degree in education from Boston University.
Since 1983 Frankel has been the vocal soloist for the San Francisco Consort, a medieval-renaissance ensemble. She sang with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus for 10 years.
The Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at PSU is presenting the concert in cooperation with the 14th Annual Conference of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, of which Frankel is a member. Rabbi Joshua Stampfer of Congregation Neveh Shalom is a co-founder of the society, whose first conference in the Pacific Northwest will take place Aug. 8-10 at the Monarch Hotel in Clackamas.
Frankel, who performed some years ago at Congregation Ahavath Achim, said she is looking forward to returning to Portland.
The concert takes place in Lincoln Hall, Room 75, at PSU, 1620 SW Park Ave.
For information, call Pam Minty at 503-276-4259.