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Yemen Blues
We are pleased once again to partner with the Aga Khan Museum in presenting Yemen Blues. Ashkenaz premiered Yemen Blues to Canadian audiences with an incredible show at Toronto's Mod Club back in 2011, and we invited them back the following year to headline the 2012 Ashkenaz Festival. The band has since continued its ascent to the top tier of Israeli world music artists, with their explosive combination of Yemeni song and poetry, Jewish music, West African groove, and funk.…
Find out more »Bint El Funk
Ashkenaz is pleased to co-present the Canadian premiere of Israel's next breakout world music sensation, Bint El Funk (Daughter of Funk). Bint El Funk’s style combines funk with traditional Jewish Yemenite music, influenced by Afro beat, jazz, Mediterranean music, psychedelic-Turkish music and more. Alongside Yemenite texts are love songs, social protest songs, Bedouin nonsense, and poetry. The group's performances evoke a tribal party, with sounds, rhythms, colors, and scents uniting in a feast for the senses that connects Sana’a in…
Find out more »The Ancient Law @TJFF
THE ANCIENT LAW DIRECTOR: EWALD ANDRE DUPONT GERMANY • 1923/2018 • 137 minutes • GERMAN text w/ English Subtitles (but... silent) SUNDAY MAY 6 2018 • 2:00 PM • THE ROYAL CINEMA Tickets: https://tjff.com/films/the-ancient-law/ “One of the hottest tickets at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival” (Hannah Brown, The Jerusalem Post) was the new digital restoration of E.A. Dupont’s The Ancient Law. This 1923 German silent film about Jewish life in 19th Century Europe is a precursor to Warner Bros’…
Find out more »2018 Ashkenaz Festival
The 2018 Ashkenaz Festival will take place Tuesday August 28 through Monday September 3 in Toronto, at Harbourfront Centre and other venues around the GTA. The Festival will once again feature artists from across Canada and around the world, including Israel, Russia, Poland, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and the US. Our weeklong celebration will simultaneously showcase diversity and cross-culturalism within the Jewish music and arts world, while also delving deeply into the Yiddishkayt that has always been at the core of…
Find out more »Yiddish Spring events
This spring, Ashkenaz celebrates Yiddish culture - past, present and future – with a city-wide initiative featuring exhibitions, concerts, screenings, lectures, and workshops. The lynchpin of this project is Ashkenaz’s partnership in presenting a unique exhibition and sound installation at the Canadian Language Museum from April 4 to June 27, featuring the work of Berlin-based musician Paul Brody and Toronto-based Yiddish doctoral student Miriam Borden (click here for more info). With the CLM as a homebase, numerous other events and…
Find out more »Yiddish Spring at Canadian Language Museum
This spring, Ashkenaz partners with the Canadian Language Museum to present a multi-media celebration of oral and written Yiddish. Berlin-based composer Paul Brody has created an exciting sound installation for the CLM based on the voice-melodies of Toronto Yiddish speakers. To create The Music of Yiddish Blessings and Curses Brody interviewed eight Yiddish speakers to explore their favorite curses and blessings, as well as the stories and memories behind them. He discovered that as the Yiddish speakers, young and old,…
Find out more »World Fiddle Day
Klezmer takes the spotlight as Ashkenaz teams up with World Fiddle Day as part of Yiddish Spring, at the Canadian Language Museum. Philadelphia-based guest artists Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer have been prominent figures in the Klezmer/Yiddish revival for nearly four decades as both performers and instructors. Come join them for a day devoted to learning, listening and playing the klezmer tradition on stringed instruments. Workshop participants will learn rhythms, melodies, chords and more, by ear (with sheet music available) as…
Find out more »Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird
Detroit-born, Berlin-based Daniel Kahn is a leading light of the New Yiddish culture scene and a perennial Ashkenaz Festival favourite. As a singer, songwriter, actor, translator, poet and multi-instrumentalist, he has performed worldwide in numerous incarnations, and achieved YouTube viral stardom with his Yiddish translation/performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” But it is with his band, the Painted Bird, that Kahn delivers his most poignant work. Against a klezmer-punk musical canvas, Kahn tackles timeless themes of class struggle, social justice, trauma,…
Find out more »Canada Day at Aga Khan Museum
Ashkenaz is pleased to be part of "Rythyms of Canada," the Aga Khan Museum's free multicultural Canada Day celebrations this weekend. Sunday June 30, 12-11pm & Monday July 1, 12-6pm Aga Khan Museum, 77 Wynford Dr. (Eglinton/DVP) Enjoy live music, food vendors, a Middle Eastern souk-style artisan market, family-friendly activities, dance workshops, and more, in a celebration of Canada's dynamic mix of world views, cultures, stories, and rhythms. Full event listings available on Facebook. Join us at 1pm…
Find out more »Shalom Bollywood
Ashkenaz is pleased to participate for the first time in Mississauga’s Bollywood Monster Mashup, Canada’s largest South Asian Festival. In partnership with our friends at MonstrARTity, Polyphonic Ground and Toronto Jewish Film Festival, we are presenting a special FREE screening of SHALOM BOLLYWOOD: THE UNTOLD STORY OF INDIAN CINEMA (2017, 76 mins, Directed by Danny Ben-Moshe). This colourful feature length documentary reveals the unlikely story of the 2000-year old Indian Jewish community and its formative place in shaping the world’s…
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