L ifestyles /C ulture
Former Philly Duo Creates ‘Sephardic Treasures’
M USIC
ELLEN O’BRIEN |
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
WHEN A SPANISH soprano
met a Jewish jazz bassist in
2013, neither of them imagined
where their creative partner-
ship would lead.

“I don’t know why this
works but somehow it does,”
said Alan Lewine, the bassist,
composer and producer behind
the duo Soprano Meets Bass.

Lewine and Ana María
Ruimonte, the soprano half
of the duo, moved from
Philadelphia to Phoenix,
Arizona, in June, just before
the release of their latest
album, “Sephardic Treasures.”
Moving during the COVID-19
pandemic was never going
to be ideal, but Lewine and
Ruimonte arrived just as cases
were starting to rise in Phoenix,
which made the cross-country
road trip something of an
adventure. “It was pretty crazy, as you
can imagine,” Lewine said.

It was ultimately a desire to
be closer to his mother that took
Lewine and Ruimonte away from
Philadelphia. Lewine’s parents
retired to Scottsdale, Arizona,
two decades ago, and while he
lived in other parts of the south-
west and visited Arizona a few
times over the years, he was
happy to go there permanently to
be close to his mother.

“My mother’s a healthy,
strong, very well 89-year-old
woman, but I got to thinking
she deserved to have some
family around,” Lewine said.

“And besides, we were ready to
change things. I guess we’re a
Ana María Ruimonte and Alan Lewine, the unlikely duo of Soprano Meets Bass, in Havana
Photo by Pedro Abascal
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little restless by nature.”
That restless nature is
ref lected in “Sephardic
Treasures,” a genre-defying
anthology of Sephardic songs
and stories that features
musicians from across the
globe. The album was released
in July, just one month
after Lewine and Ruimonte
arrived in Phoenix. Since
then, Ruimonte said, the pair
has been busy promoting the
album with Zoom events and
one small, socially distanced
performance. The project was years in the
making. Since starting Soprano
Met Bass, the pair worked
on a project that focused on
the history of Jews who were
expelled from Spain in the 15th
century. “My background is Ashkenazi
Jewish, not Sephardic, and Ana
María grew up in Spain where,
of course, your background is
Catholic, but basically we’re both
devout musicians,” Lewine said.

“And I said, ‘Well, between us,
she’s Spanish, I’m Jewish — we’re
Sephardic, sort of.’”
Lewine and Ruimonte
began performing Sephardic
songs that would eventu-
ally make their way onto
“Sephardic Treasures” as early
as 2016, when they performed
with flamenco musicians at
Palacio de Los Olvidados, or
the Palace of the Forgotten, in
Granada. For Ruimonte, learning
the history of Sephardic Jews
gave her insight into the multi-
cultural heritage of her own
country. “It has been very inter-
esting to realize that I am a
mix of different cultures, from
the music to the songs to the
stories,” Ruimonte said.

Several of the songs and
stories that appear on the
album were part of the profes-
sional repertoire that Ruimonte
performed with choirs and
orchestras in Spain, and one
song, “Señor Don Gato,” was
something that her mother
sang with her as a child.

Ruimonte was also struck by
the significance of performing
the music that was kept alive by
generations of mothers passing
songs down to their daughters.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



L ifestyles /C ulture
That tradition was one reason
that it was important to
both Lewine and Ruimonte
to feature a female voice on
the album.

“These were stories that
women said to their daughters,
and their daughters to their
daughters,” Ruimonte said.

The songs were drawn from
the Sephardic Romancero, the
body of Sephardic music from
around the Mediterranean that
has been collected and studied
by researchers since the early
20th century.

“There’s so many fasci-
nating stories and it’s amazing
how much it shows that human
nature is constant across
cultures and epochs,” Lewine
said. “A lot of it resonates
with things that we see going
on today.”
Many of the songs tell stories
that offer snapshots of life in
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medieval Spain or present
fables complete with witches,
warriors and talking heads.

The wide range of charac-
ters that appear on the album
challenged Ruimonte to bring
the music to life with her voice.

Whether she was performing
as a queen admiring herself
in the mirror or as a daughter
going to war and falling in
love, Ruimonte tried to capture
the truth of the character in
her performance.

“I tried to give some kind
of theatrical expression to the
characters, because many of
these songs are romantic,”
Ruimonte said. “And these are
people talking, so one will talk
and the other respond, and
then they can accuse her or the
boy talks, so what I try to do is
to imitate voices.”
Guest musicians appear
on almost every song in the
album, from world-famous
flamenco musicians and a
popular klezmer violinist
to Israeli percussionists and
even a shofar blower. The
result, Lewine said, was a sort
of fusion of world music that
incorporated styles ranging
from flamenco and jazz to
classical and country.

“Duane Eubanks, who’s an
old friend of mine and a great
jazz trumpeter who came and
did this with us, said ‘Yeah, I’ve
never done anything like that
before,’” Lewine said. “That’s
good. We like that idea.”
Alicia Svigals, founder
of the popular klezmer band
the Klezmatics, is featured
in two songs on the album,
“Señor Don Gato” and “La
Infanticida,” but fans of her
work won’t hear any klezmer
music on the album.

“I said, ‘I’m going to get
you out of your comfort zone
here,’” Lewine said.

Another song, “El Rey
Cuando Amadrugaba,”
includes a shofar call. While
the sound doesn’t tie into the
lyrics of the story, the idea
for the shofar came from the
setting in medieval Spain,
where Lewine imagined an
army would be approaching
the city gates accompanied by
drums and trumpets.

“Everybody knows the story
of Jericho, when the walls
came tumbling down,” Lewine
said. “This is a king in ancient
Israel or Judea that the story
is about … and of course the
trumpets of that day were the
shofar. So at the beginning of
the song you can hear the army
marching in from the distance,
led by the shofar.”
The search for the right
shofar player led Lewine and
Ruimonte to Yonnie Dror, who
recorded the riff on the shofar
from his home in Israel and
sent it to Lewine and Ruimonte
in the U.S.

All in all, the collaborative
recording process took a couple
of years, Lewine said, followed
by another year of mixing the
tracks and getting the sound of
each song right. His goal with
each of the songs was to keep
the lyrics and the melodies, but
to give them a modern feel.

“When this was a living
music, the musicians who
played it wanted to be cool,
they wanted to be hip. They
didn’t want to sound like
musicians from five hundred
years before,” Lewine said.

“And I thought the best way to
honor them was if we kept the
melodies, we kept the lyrics,
but we set them in settings that
I thought were cool and hip.” l
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