Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’

Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled “How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain”, María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just “languages of exile and persecution” but as “quixotically defiant memory palaces”.

Five traditional Ladino songs are included in Za Górami, a new album by Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado, providing a kind of structure for the 11-track sequence featuring Zawadski’s voice, violin and viola, Mullov-Abbado’s double bass and Thomas’s piano, drums and vielle (a fiddle favoured by French troubadours between the 11th and 13th centuries). The remainder of the programme consists of songs taken from a variety of sources.

Here’s what the three London-based musicians say, in a jointly authored sleeve note: “Collected on our travels and taughgt to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Though our musical and cultural backgrounds encompass Europe, Russia and South America, we were all three born in England. This happenstance was the product of love, war, exile, the arbitrariness of borders and the yearning for a new life.” All those themes, they say, are woven through the songs.

Za Górami is Polish for “behind the mountains”. Other songs come from Argentina (Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas”), Venezuela (Simón Diaz’s “Tonada De Luna Llena”) and medieval France (“Je Suis Trop Jeunette”). “Gentle Lady” is Fred Thomas’s setting of a text by James Joyce: “Gentle lady, do not sing / Sad songs about the end of love / Lay aside sadness and sing / How love that passes is enough.”

Recorded in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher, the music could be said to be a perfect manifesto for the ECM philosophy: the creation of a frontierless chamber music based on the instincts and practices of jazz but entirely porous in its acceptance of other cultures and idioms.

The Ladino lyrics are interesting for their closeness to more familiar languages: “Arvoles lloran por lluvias / Y montañas por aire / Ansi lloran los mis ojos / Por tí querido amante” translates as “The trees weep for rain / And the mountains for air / So weep my eyes / For you, my love.” That’s the closing track, a restrained lament consisting of three haiku-like verses that concludes: “I turn and ask — what will become of me? / I will die in foreign lands.” These are lieder for a modern world in which echoes of the past are inescapable.

If, as it happens, nothing here sounds much like jazz, it couldn’t exist without jazz, either. The clarity and subtle shadings of Zawadzki’s soprano, the handsomely shaped bass sound and calm phrasing of Mullov-Abbado, and Thomas’s reflective piano and subtle percussion work together to create a pan-national music in which elegance, economy and ardour are held in perfect balance. In its quiet way, this is one of the year’s outstanding albums.

* Za Górami is out now on the ECM label: the trio will perform at Kings Place on November 23 as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival. The photo of Mullov-Abbado, Zawadzki and Thomas is by Monika Jakubowska.