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Sing Out! Summer 2008 SONiA and Disappear Fear tango Disappear 1012 Proudly embodying her lifelong commitment to a world without fear, Sonia Rutstein (with her musical partner Laura Cerulli) fearlessly reimagines her own music on tango, a collection of new and previously-recorded songs sung in Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and English and set to Latin and Middle-Eastern rhythms. The combination of languages reflects the album’s ambition – to break down political and national boundaries by breaking down linguistic barriers (the name tango was chosen because it is a word that has the same meaning in all four languages). It also is the result of SONiA’s eye-opening visit to the Middle East in 2006, when she stayed in bomb shelters, kibbutzim and Palestinian villages and camps. That experience gave this album, originally intended to be all in Spanish, an expanded direction, one of showing how music can create unity and peace. A beautiful example of that theme is “Mica Mocha”, a moving anthem woven from the Hebrew prayer Mi Chamocah (Who is Like You?). Although the Mi Cahmocah is pointedly parochial, asking “Who is like you, O Lord, among all the Gods that are worshipped?, it is contrasted with the chorus “I think your God likes me/And my god likes you, too.” Similarly, “Shorashim”, sung as a duet with SONiA’s rabbi and former opera singer Elizabeth Bolton, sums up nationalism this way: “The seagulls rest on the buildings at the borders/They fly without a passport/They don’t speak in English or French or Herrew or Arabic.” All told, tango presents thirteen songs, of which seven are in Spanish, three in Hebrew, three in Arabic and English, From disappear fear’s twenty years of recording come Spanish versions of “Sexual Telepathy” “Fallin’”, “Be The One”, “Because We Are There, and “Millions of Rope”. The Latin-inflected songs show a true study of that music, including Flamenco flourishes and intricate rhythms. The Midddle-Eastern melodies are modal and haunting. Rather that “world music”, this is a fearless experiment in “one-world music” , and it works. Just so, 18 cents from each download of the album ( in the Hebrew tradition, 18 represents “chai” or life, so that a donation in a multiple of the number 18 is considered a gift of life) are donated to the United Nations World Food Program, which is the cost of one school meal for one child. –SS |