Shotns - Shadows, Songs from Testimonies, Vol. 3 album release
Shotns - Shadows: Songs from Testimonies, Volume 3 cover art by Yulia Ruditskaya.
Dear friends,
I am beyond excited to announce the digital release of the NEW ALBUM - Shotns שאָטנס - Shadows: Songs from Testimonies, Volume 3. It is scheduled for tomorrow, January 19, but one can pre-order it now. The album has been more than two years in the making and is the newest addition to the music series of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, where I am honored to serve as Musician-in-Residence. On this album that we recorded with the wonderful singer Sasha Lurje and Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble (Joshua Camp, accordion / piano; Dmitry Ishenko, bass; Craig Judelman, violin; Zisl Slepovitch, woodwinds, artistic direction), you can hear songs in Czech, Polish, Greek, Ladino, Hebrew, and Yiddish, that cover a wide span of musical genres, from Ashkenazi Jewish traditional niggunim (religious chants) and Old World Yiddish songs to cabaret, tangos, rhymes of the courtyard singers and beggars of the Warsaw ghetto. “Shadows” could not come out timelier, and I am saying this with profound sadness. However, some Holocaust survivors have explicitly stated that composing and singing songs together, under harshest of conditions, helped them make it mentally, and that is exactly the feeling I have at this moment in history, when the Jewish people is going through a new series of devastating events. These songs, while extremely diverse in style, origins, and contents, all convey the message: we are still here.
Digital edition and the double vinyl album (but not the CD) also include remastered snippets from the original testimonies (audio only).