Judy Frankel, singer of Sephardic music, 65

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/30/BAIMVRQDC.DTL
Judy Frankel, singer of Sephardic music, dies
Jonathan Curiel, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, March 31, 2008

(03-30) 10:33 PDT San Francisco -- Judy Frankel, a San Francisco singer who
preserved and performed music that originated with Spanish Jews more than
500 years ago, died March 20 after a long illness. She was 65.

With her rapturous voice and sensitive guitar-playing, Ms. Frankel helped
keep alive songs that had been handed down from generation to generation,
across continents, by Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled from
Spain in 1492. For some of her songs, Ms. Frankel would interview older
members of the Bay Area Jewish community, write down tunes they remembered
from their childhoods, then record her own faithful rendition.

She became captivated with the songs of the Sephardim while singing for an
elderly woman at Mount Zion Medical Center in San Francisco.

"I found a woman there named Rachel Hazan, which turned out to be a Turkish
name, and I found some Ladino songs that she hadn't heard in 50 years that
brought tears to her eyes," Ms. Frankel told The Chronicle in 1998. "I found
as many as I could, and she would add to the repertoire and sing to me."

Ms. Frankel performed the songs - about love, loss and other topics - in
Ladino, the language that Spanish Jews used before and after their forced
exodus from the Iberian Peninsula.

She recorded four CDs, published a songbook of traditional Ladino music, and
gave concerts around the world. She was featured on the 1997 Rounder Records
release "Divine Divas: A World of Women's Voices" alongside such artists as
Ani DiFranco and Cassandra Wilson.

During her live performances of Ladino songs, Ms. Frankel would credit the
person from whom she learned a tune, and give the audience an English
translation of her words. Ms. Frankel performed Ladino music for 23 years.

"It was always about the tradition," said Anne Treseder, a close friend.
"Her voice was very beautiful, but that wasn't her emphasis. Her emphasis
was on conveying the tradition and honoring the people who taught her the
song."

Ms. Frankel, who was raised in Boston, moved to the Bay Area in 1969 after
graduating from Boston University. In college, Treseder said, Ms. Frankel
won a singing contest that gave the winner a recording contract and a tour
(among the runners-up: Tim Hardin, composer of "If I Were a Carpenter"). But
Ms. Frankel's parents insisted that their only child finish college before
embarking on a singing career. After getting her diploma, Ms. Frankel was an
elementary schoolteacher before refocusing her life on music.

She worked for a time as a resident musician at San Francisco's Mount Zion
Hospital, where she sang songs to patients, some of whom recognized her
Ladino songs.

Ms. Frankel, who was of Ashkenazi (European Jewish) descent, was interested
in many other cultures, but especially Spanish and Portuguese. In 1989, she
flew to Portugal to interview families of "Crypto Jews" - Jews who were
forced to hide their religious identity from Portuguese authorities who
didn't want Jews in the country. In 1994, she traveled with Treseder to
Macao, the former Portuguese port in China where East Timorese refugees had
concentrated. From one of the refugees, Ms. Frankel learned a Timorese song
about longing for peace in East Timor. The next year, Ms. Frankel performed
the song in Lisbon at a ceremony honoring Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the
consul general who saved thousands of Jews in World War II. The Lisbon
audience included the president of Portugal, Mario Soares.

"Judy does the concert, and she says through a translator, 'This is a song I
learned from an East Timorese refugee in Macao,' and she says what the words
are, and she sings it, and the audience was electrified, and they all got up
and clapped and made her sing it again," Treseder said. "It was connecting
all of these cultures and people who were trying to stay alive. She related
an East Timorese refugee to Sousa Mendes. That's the sort of thing she did."

In the Bay Area, she sang with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and the San
Francisco Consort, which specialized in early music. She also was featured
in the documentary "Trees Cry for Rain: A Sephardic Journey," whose
soundtrack uses her music.

A Bay Area memorial service for Ms. Frankel is planned.

E-mail Jonathan Curiel at jcu...@sfchronicle.com.