Veretski Pass with Joel Rubin. The Magid Chronicles, 2019 (Golden Horn GHP 041-2)
Centered around music collected by Sofia Magid, a musicologist and ethnographer who worked intensively to document Jewish music in Belarus and Ukraine during the Stalinist regime of the 1920s and 30s. Veretski Pass and Joel Rubin’s work involves cleaning, deciphering and transcribing the transfers from the original wax cylinders, then arranging, performing and recording them, and finally teaching them to workshop students. An important facet of the project is a group of new compositions, improvisations, and re-compositions derived from and/or inspired by the Magid collection and drawing on traditions and cultures as diverse as Romanian, Turkish, Greek, and Hutsul traditions. Although derived largely from ethnographic work, this work is essentially a creative re-imagination of the material.
“a valuable treasure, brilliantly reburnished”
(Simon Broughton, Songlines)