SASHA LURJE

Shotns/Shadows, Songs from Testimonies (2024) is the latest volume in the Fortunoff Video Archive’s Songs from Testimonies project. Over the past four years, the Fortunoff Archive has worked closely with D. Zisl Slepovitch, a Belarusian-born and New York based composer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist, and Yiddish educator to document the songs recounted in the Archive’s collection. As the Archive’s first musician-in-residence, Zisl located songs and conducted research about their origins. He then arranged and recorded versions with his ensemble, featuring renowned singer Sasha Lurje. Sasha, a Latvian-born Yiddish singer, specializes in performing and teaching old Yiddish singing styles.

A group of musicians from New York, Berlin and Helsinki performs Yiddish revue songs by Helsinki-born Jac Weinstein (1883-1976). The songs offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of Helsinki’s Jewish community. The repertoire includes operetta songs, ballads and couplets that portray Jewish life in a humorous way, including good times and bad.

The sufferings of Jews under the Nazi regime were reflected in their music and musical life. Music offered women and men interned in ghettos and camps a way to express their humanity in inhuman conditions, to escape, revolt and cry for freedom. The act of singing is a human act of artistic performance that creates another world for the singer and the audience. The 13 songs selected here were recalled by survivors telling their stories and singing – words and music – probably for the first time since their liberation. These songs describe and witness places, ghettos, camps, deportations, slave labor and other harsh circumstances the survivors had to struggle with. When these songs are sung – both now and then – they create moments of relief and comfort for the singers and their listeners.

Dark and obscure women's a capella love songs from the turn of the 20th Century resurface once again in a parallel universe - an imaginary world where secular Yiddish-speaking youth of the mid-20th Century re-discover their Jewish roots by playing their grandparents’ folk music in their garage bands. In this world, Yiddish language and culture transcend nostalgia, vaudeville theater and ultra-orthodox Judaism. Here, Yiddish-speaking women are free to sing, speak and flaunt their hair in public. 

In 2018, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, along with musician-in-residence D. Zisl Slepovitch and former Hartman fellow Sarah Garibova, began production of an album of songs recalled in testimonies. This album, Where is Our Homeland? Songs from Testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive, reached fruition in Fall 2019, composed and arranged by musicologist and musician D. Zisl Slepovitch.
 
Performers:
Sasha Lurje (vocals)
Joshua Camp (accordion, piano)
Dmitry Ishenko (contrabass)
Craig Judelman (5-string violin)
D. Zisl Slepovitch (composition, arrangements, artistic direction, clarinet, alto saxophone, flute).

Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird live up for their name as "radical Yiddish borderland bandistas with punk attitude” with their new album The Butcher's Share, the first in five long years. It is the most powerful and complex work of the band so far and is dedicated to the great political and personal themes of our time. Featuring a killer line-up (Christian Dawid, Michael Tuttle, Hampus Melin, Jake Shulman-Ment with guest vocalists Sarah Gordon, Michael Alpert, Sasha Lurje, Lorin Sklamberg, Psoy Korolenko, and more), these are revolutionary anthems for the apocalypse. Sometimes funny, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes deadly sorrowful, this collection of originals, translations, and adaptations smuggles songs over the borders between languages, histories, cultures, and genres: Punk, Klezmer, jazz, Brecht, Waits, and folk ballads are all part of the sound.

A Golden Age of Jewish music almost forgotten - the songs captured in 1930s' Berlin by Hirsch Lewin on his Semer label. The Semer Ensemble brings this astonishing music back to life with critically acclaimed concerts and their first album, recorded live at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, in November 2015.

Performers:

Alan Bern (director, Piano, accordion)

Paul Brody (trumpet)

Daniel Kahn (voice, accordion, ukulele)

Mark Kovnatskiy (violin)

Martin Lillich (bass)

Sasha Lurje (voice)

Fabian Schnedler (voice)

Lorin Sklamberg (voice, accordion)

If you are searching for well-executed renditions of traditional tune to make you get up and dance then, this album is for you - Songlines magazine, UK

With:

Samuel Maquin - clarinet

Sanne Möricke - accordion

Michael Tuttle - double bass

Hampus Melin - drums

and 

Sasha Lurje - vocals

Guest musicians: Vanessa Vromans - violin and Christine del Pierro - trumpet.

n the United Nations of World Music Forshpil represents Yiddishland, a legendary country where shtetl musicians play electric guitars along with fiddles, while traditional Yiddish ballads are as popular as rock anthems. Forshpil emerged on this planet in 2003 in Riga, Latvia. Since then the band has been committed to studying, preserving and creating traditional Yiddish culture. Led by singer Sasha Lurje and keyboardist/arranger Ilya Shneyveys, Forshpil has traveled all over Europe and North America playing and teaching at major Jewish and world music events. 
Forshpil re-energizes traditional Yiddish songs, Hassidic nigunim and klezmer tunes with modern rhythms, harmonies and instruments. Age-old songs of love and despair induce themselves with psychedelic rock, funk, jazz and other addictive substances. Deeply rooted in tradition, this unlikely fusion feels weirdly authentic. If Pink Floyd and The Doors had ever jammed together at a Jewish wedding it would have sounded like this! 

Download here!

Dzelzs Vilks dates from the year of Latvia’s renewed independence, 1991. It started as a metal band, but then migrated to alternative and finally folk rock. Fronted by Juris Kaukulis, Dzelzs Vilks has kept busy with concerts and recording albums. The band’s 10th album, Dzelzs Vilka Teātris was released last year.

Forshpil has been around just since 2003 and performs either as a duo or as a four-piece band. The group presents, in Yiddish, the music of the Ashkenazi Jews, but with a modern twist, combining such elements as klezmer and jazz.

Released in November on the Pasaules mūzika label, Borsh includes nine tracks that make for an interesting mix of sounds, including the vocals of Forshpil singer Sasha Lurje.

Besides Kaukulis, who performs vocals, the mandolin and the guitar, Dzelzs Vilks on Borshincludes Kaspars Tobis on keyboards, Mārcis Judzis on percussion,  and Valērijs Cīrulis on vocals and bass. And besides Lurje, Forshpil has Ilya Shneyveys on accordion and reed pipe, Inna Raihmane on violin and Artjoms Vesna on percussion.

For a taste of the bands’ collaboration, watch the YouTube video of them performing “Dieviņš brauca.”