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Ramon Tasat - News & Reviews

Keeping a heritage alive through song

by Bernice August
Staff Writer
Aug. 17, 2001

Ramón Tasat performs with his ensemble Fiesta Sefarad on Thursday at Strathmore Hall.

Ramón Tasat is a songcatcher. Like the heroine of the new film by that name, he is a musicologist engaged in preserving a musical legacy. She strikes gold in the North Carolina hills in 1907: old British ballads sung unchanged by generations of mountain folk. Tasat's treasure, Sephardic music, is even older.

A millennium ago, the Jews of southern Spain (Sepharad in Hebrew) enjoyed a Golden Age. Living in peace with their Moslem and Christian neighbors, they developed a rich culture, becoming poets, philosophers and physicians. Their language was Ladino, a form of Spanish written in Hebrew characters. When the Jews were expelled by the Catholic rulers Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, they took their beloved memories of Sepharad with them in song. They settled around the Mediterranean, in the Balkans, North Africa and other areas of the Ottoman Empire -- and they never stopped singing.

"Many times, people talk about world music as fossilized, music that once was and no longer is," Tasat says.

He will debunk that view when he performs with his ensemble, Fiesta Sefarad, which includes mandolin, guitar, electric bass and percussion, on Thursday evening as Strathmore Hall's final free World Beats concert. The program will include music of Spain, Morocco, Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Israel sung in Hebrew, Ladino and Aramaic.

Tasat claims a unique position.

"I am at the verge of two traditions -- musicologist and performer," the 40-year-old tenor and guitarist says. Musicologists are knowledgeable but tend to be elitist, communicating only with their peers. Performers reach a larger audience but may not know Sephardic music or be familiar with Hebrew or Ladino.

"I have been in both worlds and am eager to have people know that it still remains fresh and vital -- but only if they sing it," he says.

Tasat is well aware of the empowerment of massed voices. The Sephardic synagogue services he grew up with in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were eminently participatory.

"Of course, there's a cantor, but everybody sings. They feel that the music and the prayers belong to them. I try to do this very much with concerts," to empower through song, to send the audience home singing, he says.

He does it in his role as cantor at Temple Shalom in Chevy Chase, too, planning musical Sabbaths ,a whole service of singing.

"I feel blessed that I can do what I do," the Silver Spring resident says.

With understanding employers, he is able to choose the 50 or so concerts he gives each year. Last year, his concerts at the weeklong Jewish Music Festival in Berkeley, Calif., sold out. So did the Smithsonian workshop on Sephardic history and culture he participated in this spring.

Tasat had "an incredible experience" just before Passover in Barcelona, Spain. During a radio interview, he spoke "about Jews who left Egypt in a place we had to leave, too."

Jews could not return to Spain until 1960, he adds.

In two well-received concerts, he was fascinated to see the audience transformed by the music. His songs needed no introduction since Ladino is so close to modern Spanish.

"It is very powerful to feel that historically, you're going back to where it all came from and to know that you are bringing back what they have lost," he says.

Tasat plans to return to Spain.

Growing up in a large, close extended family, Tasat learned Ladino and a love for Sephardic music and traditions at his grandmother's knee. His grandparents were immigrants from Syria and Turkey.

"We have always had a very strong sense of family, a value I cherish very much," he says, recalling a family gathering two years ago that included 75 great-grandchildren.

Although Tasat always loved singing, his first instrument was the guitar. He practiced diligently, but ultimately rejected classical guitar.

"The instrument, while very sweet, was very cruel. It was a lonely instrument," he explains, "one you could not share with anybody."

Tasat was 18 when a piano teacher at the Manuel de Falla Conservatory of Music heard his voice and suggested that Tasat sing -- and he hasn't stopped singing since.

At the same time he was at the Conservatory, he studied to become a cantor at the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. After graduating, he taught music in the Buenos Aires schools and took other musical jobs.

At 25, serendipity took a hand in his life. While visiting a friend at the University of Texas at Austin, he dropped by the Music Department. As a teacher, he wanted to know how American schools were able to do so many musical presentations. Tasat, who is fluent in and sings in Hebrew, Ladino, Spanish, Italian and English, impressed a voice teacher who invited him to sing at a faculty luncheon. As a result, the department offered him a scholarship to study in their master's program.

"But I am only here for a week," Tasat protested, then accepted the offer.

"Great was my surprise when I only went home to get a visa and come back," he recalls.

With the voice teacher as his mentor, Tasat thrived at the university, taking 18 credits (six above the required course load), singing in two choirs and the opera, and auditing master classes.

"I was thirsty for that activity," he says. "And yet I had the sensation that my peers didn't realize what they had."

Once, he was the only voice student at a master class given by the first violinist of the Berlin Philharmonic. When a fellow student questioned his being there, he explained, "We learn from people of that caliber."

He learned also from the renowned Dr. Robert Shaw. Auditioning for the eminent choral conductor after a particularly punishing performance of the Berlioz "Requiem," Tasat felt he was not at his best. Shaw, however, was impressed and asked if he would go on a two-month French tour with 39 other singers.

"Actually the place is not very important to me if you will be there," Tasat replied.

"If you bring your guitar, you're coming," the pleased conductor told him.

Asked by a friend if he was being paid for the tour, Tasat replied, "No, but I would have paid to go."

"Any musician who thinks he would come to this field for money should be in another field," he adds. "There's only one Placido Domingo, one Pavarotti. The rest of us are on a different turf."

Tasat's doctoral work on the music of the Jews from Tangier, Morocco will soon be released by Tara Publications, a companion to his "Sephardic Songs for All." Tangier is a fascinating place, he declares, an international city where the influence of European and Arabic cultures converge as they did in Spain in the 1400s.

Tasat's recordings, 10 and growing, include music from Spain, Morocco, Greece, Iraq and Israel as well as popular music of Argentina and Italy. His newest, "Libavtini," features Israeli music, part of "The Song of Songs," and one of his own compositions.

"I only do them [recordings] when I have something to say, when I see something has not been done," he says.

Salonika, he explains, "the Jerusalem of the Sephardis," had a Jewish population of 60,000 before World War II. Most perished.
Tasat is also setting Sephardic Holocaust poems to music. It is slow work.

"They are quite poignant. Again, I feel something that has to be communicated," he says.

Tasat fell in love with Washington, D.C. and "its vibrant Jewish community" during a brief visit 21 years ago. He returned to the area, serving as cantor at Agudas Achim, a conservative synagogue in Northern Virginia, for five years, before moving to his present position in 1999.

Serendipity -- or possibly a heavenly matchmaker -- intervened at a party where Tasat overheard a woman constantly talking about how much she liked her children. Impressed because of his own love for children, he asked her how many she had. Her response: "123."

Sonya Tasat, whose family comes from Cuba, teaches in a Montgomery County Spanish immersion program. The couple has been married for three "very intense years" and Tasat says he has gained a beautiful family.

Last September, he had another incredible experience, this time at Strathmore. A month before his scheduled concert of Argentine and Sephardic music, Strathmore's music coordinator Gabriel Purviance called him.

"Ramón, we have a problem," he said. "We have sold out your concert and have 50 people on a waiting list for tickets. Could you add a second concert?"

Tasat was happy to comply, and that concert sold out, too.

Tasat's pure tenor was a perfect match for the music room, Purviance says, but on hearing Tasat's ensemble, he exclaimed, "You deserve a larger room."

On Thursday evening, Tasat and company will get one -- as big as all outdoors.

Ramón Tasat and his ensemble Fiesta Sefarad will perform at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 23, at Strathmore Hall, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda. Call 301-530-0540.

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