By Tina Eshleman

Nani Noam Vazana first knew Ladino as a language of secrets, spoken by women to each other in the kitchen, whispered by adults to keep information from children, sung softly by her grandmother at bedtime. Also known as Judeo-Spanish, Ladino was forbidden at home by her father, who wanted to leave the past behind.

But the past intrigues Vazana. The daughter of Moroccan refugees in Israel, she traces her family’s roots to medieval Spain, where the Jewish population faced persecution, pressure to convert to Catholicism and eventually expulsion in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition. Like other Sephardic Jews, Vazana’s ancestors spoke a Spanish dialect mixed with Hebrew, adding in bits of Arabic or other languages, depending on where they settled.

They also brought with them songs passed from one generation to another, including a lullaby that Vazana’s grandmother, Nona, used to sing to her as a young child. About two decades later, while visiting her maternal grandmother’s hometown of Fez in 2014 after performing at a Moroccan jazz festival, she heard a familiar melody being sung as she walked through the streets. She later identified it as the tune for “Durme, Durme” — “Sleep, Sleep” in English — the lullaby from her childhood memory.

“That style of singing that is very common was not appealing to me at all,” she says. “I think that’s also the reason I never really connected to these songs before, but at that time I had enough musical maturity to just listen to the song and not to the way that it’s interpreted. So then I did my own versions.””

— Nani Noam Vazana

“They were singing it in Arabic, so it took me time to realize that it was connected,” she says. “I couldn't place my finger on it, but I know that I knew it.”

Though it was not yet apparent to her, hearing that song would become a pivotal moment, connecting her with the Ladino music and language of her ancestors and sparking a desire to revive centuries-old traditions.

Today, Vazana is recognized as one of very few musicians worldwide who are writing new songs in Ladino, as well as performing and reinterpreting old standards. Joined by a guitarist and a percussionist, she will make her Richmond Folk Festival debut this fall during a tour that also includes shows in Canada and Vermont. She follows another Sephardic singer, the late Flory Jagoda, a Bosnian native and Holocaust survivor who settled in Northern Virginia and performed at the festival several times. After Jagoda died in 2021, Vazana wrote that she embodied the spirit of her own beloved Nona.

Vazana was born in Haifa, Israel, and grew up speaking Hebrew, studying the music of Bach, Beethoven and Schubert and playing piano and trombone. After completing studies at music academies in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Amsterdam — where she lives now — she launched a career as a singer-songwriter. By age 23 in 2005, she was performing internationally, singing original compositions with pop and jazz influences.

“I would say they were pop songs, but because of their harmonic structure they're a bit more complex so very often they were qualified as jazz songs,” Vazana says. “I released two albums with that repertory that did pretty well.”

Her albums sold a few thousand copies, garnered radio play and made into the top 40 in European music charts.

“I felt fine doing that,” she says. “I was not feeling like something was lacking, and then this memory came up and I started thinking about it.”

Digging deeper

Vazana began looking up traditional Ladino music online and the next summer, she gathered a group of musician friends to try playing some of the classic songs. They recorded two demos, “Morenika” and “La Rosa Enflorece,” that together were viewed over 500,000 times on YouTube.

“Then we thought, ‘Hey, maybe we have something here. Maybe we need to dig deeper.’”

After doing additional research, Vazana recorded an album of traditional Ladino songs, but with new arrangements that eliminated much of the usual vocal ornamentation.

“That style of singing that is very common was not appealing to me at all,” she says. “I think that's also the reason I never really connected to these songs before, but at that time I had enough musical maturity to just listen to the song and not to the way that it's interpreted. So then I did my own versions.”

Working with a couple of other musicians, she recorded 10 Ladino classics in her living room

“It was a live recording, so you cannot edit later on because it's what’s happening in the moment,” she says. “We just chose the best takes from the ones we played and we put them on the album. Later on, we added a little bit of percussion and that was it. We did the record in four days.”

When the resulting album, called Andalusian Brew, was released in 2017, the positive reception surprised her, because she didn’t follow the traditional vocal embellishments. She thought it might be dismissed as a departure from the customary singing style.

“Instead, they said, ‘Oh, that’s refreshing. Without the regular mannerisms attached to the style, you can now really listen to the music.’ So the album was accepted well and I started touring bigger stages than I was touring before.”

For the next two years, Vazana began working Ladino standards into her performances, combining them with her English songs. She also explored Ladino texts and studied the language to gain a better understanding of it. Soon, she felt compelled to do more.

“I felt that something was missing, because I was doing covers all the time, so I needed to compose new songs in Ladino and that’s how the new album came to be. It’s all about writing new songs in a dying language.”

In that spirit, her latest album is titled Ke Haber (What’s New). A single she released over the summer, “Una Segunda Piel” — meaning “second skin” — tells the story of an ancient custom that celebrates a Sephardic rite of passage.

“Usually when you arrive at retirement age, you would throw a party and invite your friends and family to sew the shroud of the dead around you,” she says. “And while you're in that cocoon, you're supposed to meditate and think about all the things you want to leave behind in this life. When it’s finished, the cloth goes in the closet and you just continue your life from that point on, so it's more of a symbol of rebirth than death.”

Another of her songs, “Fada de Mi Korazon” (or “Fairy of My Heart”), focuses on a ceremony at the beginning of life that involves passing a baby around a circle to protect the child from any bad fairies that may be lurking about.

“Sephardic culture is supposed to be Orthodox, but then you find out they believe in magic,” she says. “I like that a lot because it's not as serious as we pretend to be.”

Vazana’s music is often soulful — as demonstrated by shows in which she has paid tribute to Nina Simone — but can be playful and upbeat as well. Like the Ladino language, it incorporates elements from a variety of countries and regions — Spanish flamenco, African rhythms, Arabic strings. She intentionally bridges diverse musical styles.

“For me, it’s more about connecting with who I am and what kind of music I like,” she says. “I don’t want to leave Ladino in the realm of a dying language. I want to take it out of the closet and offer it to people who generally listen to Latin world music. I think that’s important for the longevity of the language and the survival of the culture and the songs.”

Strengthening a link to the past

While many adults of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations sought to keep their Sephardic heritage hidden, Vazana is part of a growing movement to bring it to light. She attributes reluctance to speak the Ladino language to the trauma endured by Jewish people dating back to the Spanish Inquisition and continuing with the devastation of the Holocaust.

“Jews who were around in the ’40s and ’50s, as adults, have this attitude about their own culture, as if it's irrelevant and they want to forget it,” Vazana says. “They want to reinvent themselves. It’s embedded in Jewish culture — because you've been persecuted, you need to adapt and blend in.”

During the Spanish Inquisition, an estimated 100,000 or more Jews fled the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, southeastern Europe and elsewhere. Despite the scattered population and pressures to acclimate, the Ladino language proved to be resilient.

Isaac Amon, director of academic research and program development at the Jewish Heritage Alliance, notes during the period from the 16th to the 20th century about 4,000 books and 380 newspapers were written in Ladino. The alliance is a global organization dedicated to researching and promoting the Sephardic legacy.

“In Turkey, there is the last remaining newspaper that's published by the Istanbul Jewish community,” says Amon, whose paternal grandfather was from Istanbul and was fluent in Ladino. “It’s called Shalom newspaper. It's written in Turkish today, but there is one page that's still printed in Ladino and there is a supplement that comes out monthly, called El Amaneser, in Ladino.”

Among the most prominent academic efforts to research, preserve and teach the language is the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies Program, which includes a digital collection of books, archival documents and audio recordings of Sephardic ballads. Amon adds that Israel has a national authority for Ladino culture and the language is taught at several universities there.

A few years ago, the Spanish Royal Academy recognized Ladino as a cultural treasure and announced the creation of the National Ladino Academy in Israel. Additional interest has been generated during what has been described as a “pandemic Ladino Zoom boom.”

“I’ve read numerous articles and seen classes myself where hundreds of people were logging in to Ladino educational classes online over these last couple of years, wanting to reconnect with their ancestral language, wanting to learn it,” Amon says.

Performers such as Vazana are doing a great service by making Ladino language and culture more visible and strengthening a tangible link to the past, he adds.

“Sephardic history is an enduring and fundamental aspect of Jewish and world history,” Amon says. “I hope that it will spark people’s interest.”