Sufism is the mystical branch of Islam. The Sufi strives for a direct connection with God. The rapture of music and dance is frequently used to create a transcendental experience in which the ego falls away, allowing direct experience of the divine. There is a saying: ‘If a man claims to be a Sufi, he is not, and any true Sufi will never claim to be one’. To call a music ‘Sufi’ is to thereby bring into question its authenticity. If we claim this is Sufi music, it therefore must not be. What we can say, though, is that Shafqat Ali Khan’s music is thoroughly rooted in the Sufi tradition. Many of the songs are ghazals, a poetic musical form in which the singer, taking the woman’s perspective, longs for the return of her lover. This longing, expressed in a romantic form, is understood to be a metaphor for the soul’s longing to be connected with the divine. The spiritual expression of Sufi music is robust and intensely emotional. This is no quiet background music for meditation, but deeply passionate music that wrestles with strong emotions, from melancholy and despair to rapturous ecstasy. By directly going into the emotion, in a way somewhat akin to how an American blues or gospel singer might, we find transcendence. The music takes us on a journey, and we emerge somehow changed.

Hilda Bronstein’s passionate dedication to Yiddish Song stems from her close connection to the language that she learned as a child. She sees these songs as a cultural storehouse of Jewish history and identity. Her early training as a singer at the Royal College of Music in London, and her later work as an academic in English Language and Literature together inform her expressive interpretation of the music and words of these evocative songs. Since 2004, when she made her tentative return to the music of her childhood, she has become one of Europe’s leading interpreters of Yiddish Song. After the success of her previous album, Yiddish Songs Old and New, she competed in the International Jewish Music Festival at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in 2008 and was awarded the Mira Rafalowicz Prize for the ‘Best Interpretation of Yiddish Song’. For this album, Hilda has joined forces with a group of talented instrumentalists who share her love of Yiddish song as well as the exciting sounds of klezmer and swing. The collaboration has enabled Hilda to expand her repertoire of beautiful traditional Yiddish melodies and new songs from Eastern Europe. She has also added a number of exuberant up-beat numbers from the days of New York Yiddish Theatre, and demonstrates the resilience of Yiddish song by bringing this album firmly into the twenty-first century with the cool beat of ‘Yener Langer Zumertog’. As on her previous album, Hilda uses her original Polish dialect on some tracks and the standard ‘Litvish’ or Lithuanian dialect on others. While her natural tendency is to the native Polish Yiddish of her childhood, she prefers the Litvish in those songs where the meaning and rhymes of the lyrics seem to demand it.