Ashkenazic/Sephardic

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

At 03:51 PM 12/8/02, Tuna Pase wrote:
>Selam...
>as a sepharadic jew living in istanbul
>we never had dances of our own
>the dances they teached us were mainly ashkenaz dances which were
>accompaniament with klezmer music

This remark makes a nice frame for the following bit of 
Ashkenazic/Sephardic song travel which is recounted on the Hebrew 
University website
http://www.jewish-music.org/
under "Song of the Month."  (BTW This site makes a mouth-watering offer of 
an online "Thesaurus of Jewish Music," by which they seem to mean a 
Bibliography of Jewish Music ...unless I'm missing something...)

<<The klezmer tune heard at the beginning of our "Song of the Month" is an 
excerpt from an historical recording by the great klezmer Naftule Brandwein 
dating from 1925. This instrumental piece served as the basis for the 
Hebrew song "He and She" by the Israeli poet Natan Alterman who knew this 
tune from his childhood in Eastern Europe. The song by Alterman was 
composed for one of the legendary Purim parties of Tel Aviv in the 1930s. 
Later on, Alterman rewrote the song as a parody about a male baby born 
before the wedding from an unknown father. In this new form of a parody it 
turned into a shir rehov ("street folksong") sung at youth movements and 
among the working class in Israel. Yet, the most interesting issue in 
relation to this song is its transformation into the most renowned hit of 
Oriental (mizrahi) pop music in the 1970s under the title of "Hanale 
hitbalbela" (after the refrain of the parody song by Alterman). Various 
commercial recordings of this hit were released of which the one from 1975 
by Lehakat tzliley ha-ud with Rami Danokh as a soloist (heard in the second 
part of our "Song of the Month") is the best known. Other Oriental pop 
stars such as Daklon (Yossi Levy) recorded it later on. One final note: the 
song was reworked once again in 1976 adapted now to a text praising Betar 
Yerushalaym, "the" soccer team of the mizrahi working class, on the 
occasion of their first conquest of the Israel Cup.>>

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