Vox Femina is the brainchild of Adrian Harris, the chief executive of the Queens Hall. “It sounds carefully constructed, but these opportunities came to us, to bring these fantastic female vocalists to the hall, and it began to look as if something was happening,” he says. “Personally, I’ve been captivated by these performers over the years. Some of them are regulars at the Queens Hall: Karen Matheson, Carol Kidd. Then, a couple of years ago, on World Music Day I heard Yasmin Levy for the first time. I thought, I want to bring that voice to the hall.”
Levy, who kicks the series off on March 5, is one of the more intriguing names on the programme. Born in Jerusalem, she mixes the romantic Ladino songs from her Sephardic Jewish heritage with Andalucian flamenco. Although she has adopted England as her second home, and been nominated for a BBC World Music award, she has never performed in Scotland before.
Her shows are, she explains, a cross between a concert and a history lesson. Ladino songs are on the verge of dying out and she sees herself as part entertainer, part ambassador, working to keep them alive and pass them on to a wider audience.
Ladino is part of the cultural heritage of the Spanish Jews who fled Spain in 1492. The songs were collected by her father, who died when she was a baby.
“He was the first to realise that someone had to keep them, so he recorded them and wrote down the lyrics and the music,” she says proudly. “They almost disappeared, all the people he recorded have now passed away. Forty years from now, I can promise you that nobody will speak this language.”
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Levy, now 28, absorbed the repertoire as she was growing up. “My mother was a singer, she learnt the songs from my father, she taught me everything. I will teach them to my own children.”
To most of her audience, however, Ladino is a new musical experience, which is why Levy makes history and translation part of every performance. Some find her through the world music scene, others are intrigued by her ethnic and religious roots. “So many people don’t know this music,” she says. “Even Jews. People come to my show and they cry, they get excited, I get e-mails from all over the world. They tell me they have started researching this music, they want to sing these songs. That is so important to me. As well as making a show people can enjoy, I want to try and save this language.”
In case all this makes an evening with Levy sound like a dreary ethnomusicology seminar, it should be noted that the New York Times’ reviewer, who described her “as an artist of unnerving power”, also found her Carnegie Hall debut full of “winning humour and light”.
In fact, the songs on her third album, which she is recording in London, are her own compositions. Although she speaks Hebrew, she writes in Spanish.
“Since I decided to be a singer,” she says, “I have never sung in Hebrew. I love Spanish, I find it a wonderful, sexy language.
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“I will always sing Ladino songs, but it’s time for me to develop in different directions. I think it can help my crowds to grow. At first in my country, the only people who came to my shows had a link to Sephardic culture. Then, all of a sudden, I start to see young people, Russian, Argentinian, in the audience. And I have such a big audience in England. I would have thought it would be Spain, but England has become my second home.”
Will Scottish audiences warm to Ladino? Harris is sure Levy’s voice and impassioned performance will work its magic in the Queens Hall.
For those who suspect archaic Spanish ballads accompanied by reed flute and zither might not be to their taste, the Vox Femina series has much more to offer. The Leeds-born jazz and blues singer Corinne Bailey Rae won the BBC website’s Sound of 2006 poll and has already troubled the charts with her first single, Put Your Records On. The young Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis is bringing the Hebridean tradition to a new audience, joining more familiar Scottish artists Karen Matheson and Horse, as well as the maverick Canadian Jane Siberry and American folkie Eliza Gilkyson in the line-up.
For Harris, this diversity is part of Vox Femina’s appeal. “We are hoping for cross-pollination,” he says. “We have low-priced tickets, called toe-dippers, for people intrigued by one of the artists but who might not be willing to risk £15 on a ticket. We are hoping this will tempt them to experience some of the others.”
He is also delighted to be able to help the likes of Fowlis advance her career — this is the first time she will play the stage on her own. At the other end of the spectrum, grey-haired legends such as Janis Ian, still performing after 40 years, show that girls with guitars were around long before Jools Holland discovered KT Tunstall.
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Harris is keen to avoid any charges of tokenism, claiming the acts have more in common than their biological birthright. “Without wanting to sound like a cliché, it is about quality, bringing the best established and best new and emerging artists to the Queens Hall,” he says.
www.thequeenshall.net/voxfemina/