Mixing and matching a variety of Jewish musical styles came easily to Lucie Skeaping and the Burning Bush, she tells Arminta Wallace
Nothing grabs the attention quite like a burning bush: God, let's not forget, used one to get a message to Moses. Now a band named after that fiery biblical hotline has a message for modern secular ears. The six musicians who call themselves the Burning Bush command a dizzying range of instruments and styles, from foot-tapping klezmer dance tunes to soulful Sephardic songs, from boisterous wedding music to ancient traditional melodies. It all comes under the heading of "Jewish music", but as founding member Lucie Skeaping explains, Jewish music is a pretty broad church.
"The story of the Jews in time and history is a story of settling and persecution and moving on," she says. "And the various countries where Jews have lived have all influenced the music. It's an incredible combination - that's what makes it so fascinating."
Skeaping, a period violinist and presenter on BBC Radio 3's The Early Music Show, got interested in the music in the early 1990s when she was asked to make a radio documentary to mark the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
"Many of the people who had to leave Spain at that time went to live in the Ottoman Empire," she says. "They carried on singing their traditional songs, but they took on the styles of the Eastern Mediterranean, so they sound quite Turkish and Greek to our ears." Mesmerised by this exotic repertoire, which was
almost unknown in the UK, Skeaping enlisted some early-music colleagues - including her husband Roderick - for a gig at the Purcell Room in London.
"We shared the bill with a dance group - which was lucky for us, because we didn't have a big enough repertoire to do a whole concert," she says. "But it was clear right away that it was going to work. Our first record attracted great attention, and the group really took off from there."
TO FORGE A musical identity from such a mass of disparate styles is no small feat, and calls for versatility as well as virtuosity from the members of the Burning Bush. They appear to be able to supply both - in spades. Skeaping does most of the singing, and shares the violin-playing with her husband Roderick. Robin Jeffrey, who spends part of his regular working life in Athens with Greek musicians, provides a Middle Eastern-style string section courtesy of a range of stringed instruments, including the oud, laouto and guitar. He also plays the goblet drum, or darabukka.
Bassist Robert Levy keeps the rhythm going, while keyboards - in the intriguing shapes of kanun, cimbalom and accordion - are looked after by Jon Banks, who has played everything from jazz piano to medieval harp and dulcimer. Clarinettist Ben Harlan, meanwhile, is apt to steal the show with his freewheeling improvisations, influenced by contemporary music and jazz.
"We're talking about two very different traditions," says Skeaping of their mind-bogglingly varied musical source material. "There's the Sephardic - 'Sepharad' means 'Spain' in modern Hebrew - and the interesting thing about this music is that although the Jews left Spain in 1492, they continued to speak their own language. It's called Ladino, but is basically Spanish. So you have all these songs which originate in the Ottoman Turkish world but are sung in Spanish; Spanish lyrics set to Middle Eastern tunes. The sephardic repertoire is very much a female tradition. It's passed orally in the home from mother to daughter, and the songs tend to be about the life cycle - marriage, birth, death.
"There are a lot of songs about love and courtship, and about old traditions. One of the loveliest songs we sing was sung by the Jews of Rhodes as they were being deported to Auschwitz. The words of the verses hark back to a beautiful medieval poem: 'The trees weep for the rain, the mountains for the sun, and I weep for you.'
"A beautiful, flowery love song - but to bring it up to the time of the second World War, a chorus was added on which says 'What will become of me? I will die in a strange land.' So you've got this marvellous and moving synthesis of the very old and very new."
THE YIDDISH REPERTOIRE of the klezmer tradition could hardly be more different, both in mood and in instrumentation. Instead of the sinuous sound of Middle Eastern percussion and the Arabic lute, the oud, it features the clarinet, and accordion and the double bass.
"It's much more music-hall, showbizzy repertoire," says Skeaping. "A lot of it comes from the Yiddish theatre. You get a lot of riddle songs. We have these in the English song tradition - and, I bet, in the Irish tradition too: 'I gave my love a cherry without any stone . . . I gave my love a chicken without any bone,' those kind of songs. There's a great song about a dancing rabbi which goes, 'Shh, be quiet, don't make a sound; the rabbi's about to get up and dance. And when he dances the walls dance with him, and when he sings, Satan is banished for ever.' "
The Jewish genius for storytelling is enshrined in these musical snapshots, many of which have been unearthed from the complex, tangled roots of European history. One song commemorates the Russian settlement of Zhankoya.
"It was a Jewish farming co-operative just before the war - which was quite rare because Jews generally weren't allowed to own land," says Skeaping. "The song says, 'We're so proud of our town, my cousin is on the tractor, my auntie is sowing the seeds. Who says Jews only count their money and eat greasy soup? Here at Zhankoya we're farming the land'. Zhankoya was completely wiped out by the Nazis."
The song has a particular poignancy for Skeaping, whose family roots also lie in Russia. "They were lucky," she says. "They got out in the 1890s, when the pogroms started. My great-grandmother was completely dumb. She was so shocked when the Cossacks marched into her house and raped the women that she never spoke another word in her life, actually." The family changed its name from Fink to Finch and settled, as did so many Jews at that time, in the East End of London.
"They wanted to integrate as fast as possible," says Skeaping. "They just wanted to get on with their lives, and it's hard to pick up any stories about what went on because they just didn't talk about it. That's why so many Jews of my generation have such trouble discovering their roots. The only reason I know anything about it is that we have an extraordinary photograph of my grandfather standing outside the synagogue in Pinsk with the elders."
THE BURNING BUSH concert at the Helix on February 21st will, in effect, offer two concerts for the price of one. In the first half the band will play their own set; after the interval, they'll be joined by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra for a larger-scale work called The Vanished Shtetl, which Roderick Skeaping composed in 2004 at the invitation of the BBC Concert Orchestra.
"It was quite a tricky thing to do, not least because of the difference in volume - traditional instruments are obviously much quieter than those of the modern symphony orchestra," says Skeaping. "So it was a real challenge. But it has brought the music to a much wider audience. The first time we did it was at the Royal Festival Hall, and most of the people came because they're followers of orchestral music - they wouldn't necessarily have gone to a concert by the Burning Bush. It's great to have the opportunity to do both: the music in the raw, as it were, followed by an artful take with the orchestra."
The Vanished Shtetl is in five movements, each of which represents a different aspect of Jewish life at the turn of the last century. So the music is suffused with tragedy - but also with joy.
"The Jewish sense of humour is, I think, an incredibly important part of the culture," says Skeaping. "And for me, klezmer music is like nothing else because it's got influences from absolutely everywhere. And it's not all meaningful and mournful, by any means. You can dance your head off all night to this music. You'll certainly find it very, very hard not to be tapping your feet during the performance." Now there's a promise Moses would have relished.
The Burning Bush performs with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, conducted by Robert Ziegler, at the Helix on Feb 21
