Saturday Night on BBC London 94.9 FM

22 May 04

Yasmin Levy plus Naufelle from Aiwa

I am sitting four feet away from a woman with a red velvet mouth and eyes so dark and deep, a man could drown in them. I close my own eyes and Yasmin Levy fills my head with her voice, searing, soaring, sighing. When she stops, I unwillingly open my lids and face reality. There are six men in the room too, three of them musicians - Tigran Aleksanyan on duduk, Sagat Giray on guitar and Ishay Amir, Yasmin’s husband, on darbouka. Invisible to us, an audience of radio listeners is reeling, but I’m the one expected to say something. I open the microphone and struggle to find words.

Before the first of three songs, Yasmin mentioned that they were all from Turkey, but there seemed to be Spanish words scattered through them. Sure enough, these are Ladino songs from the repertoire of the Sephardic Jews banished from Spain in the thirteenth century, who held onto their language and culture wherever they settled, developing hybrid languages incorporating local words during the ensuing centuries.

I have heard records by Yasmin Levy, but nothing prepared me for the sound of her in live performance. She plays WOMAD Singapore later in the year, and I hope that will in turn lead to an invitation to play at WOMAD Reading next year.

Before the intense experience with Yasmin, I talked briefly with Naufalle from Aïwa, whose ‘Oudaïwa’ I have played a couple of times. Meeting Naufalle was a bit like an encounter during a traveling holiday, where strangers are liable to find much in common to talk about and compare, regardless of differences in age and background. Naufalle is the younger of two brothers whose Iraqi parents settled in Rennes in North West France, not far from St Malo. Starting to make music together in 1998, the brothers found a catalyst for a unique new sound when they recruited a young French woman, Severine, whose extraordinary mumbled singing style is instantly recognizable and completely fascinating.

When I played ‘Oudaïwa’ during the ping pong with Daara J a few weeks ago, we all agreed that she seems to be singing in English, so tonight I invited Naufalle to tell us what she was actually saying. He listened carefully, preparing to make notes, but at the end of the song admitted defeat. We must ask her to explain. Unfazed by the discovery that Aïwa means Yes in Arabic, I extended an invitation for a full-scale ping pong when the band comes to Britain in September.

I was about to write that I might not have been so welcoming to the British group called Yes, but have just remembered that I did once interview them for a television profile back in 1972. They were nice enough guys, but I was impatient with their music, and took the experience as warning about working in television – I was unlikely to have much influence about which artists to cover, and plumped for having more control as a radio presenter instead.

Speaking of TV, Pietra Montecorvino was featured on the episode of Later with Jools that went out on BBC2 on Friday, sharing the bill with Morrissey. He got four songs, she got one, and guess which singer made the bigger impact? To give him credit, Morrissey himself was effusive in his admiration of Pietra after the show. Many thanks to producer Mark Cooper for his adventurous decision, which Pietra amply rewarded. Although the cover picture of her album suggests a 1940’s film star, in person Pietra is more down to earth, closer to Edith Piaf than Anna Magnano.

More TV: over the past few weeks, the digital channel BBC 4 has been screening a series of blues films produced by Martin Scorcese, each of which has had at least one moment to justify the purchase of a digital decoder. Last week’s film, The Soul of a Man, was directed by Wim Wenders and highlighted the stories of Blind Willie Johnson, J B Lenoir and Skip James. I was uneasy with the ‘recreation’ scenes of Chris Thomas King enacting Blind Willie, but was riveted by the home movie footage of J B Lenoir, and amused by a Swedish couple’s account of how the film had been made. For the benefit of those without digital TV (ie, most of you), the whole series is being screened during the next few weeks as part of the World Got the Blues at the Barbican, which is where our show will be broadcast from next week.

More information about the whole festival at http://www.barbican.org.uk/worldgottheblues/

Radio London is at 94.9 FM and on DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) in the London area, and at www.bbc.co.uk/london worldwide. Each Saturday Night show can be heard ‘on demand’ for seven days at the BBC London website – the links can be found from the menu bar at the top of every page.

This site now contains a full listing of all the upcoming gigs mentioned on the show, stretching for several months ahead, which is displayed by activating the "What's On" link on the menu bar above. If you have pertinent information regarding live music in the London area, send it straight to Alan Finkel.