FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Brooklyn-based singer and actor honors the largely forgotten legacy of North African Judeo-Arab music with a spellbinding debut
Watch the video for “Yafa Vetama”
Release concert at New York’s Joe’s Pub, July 11
NEW YORK, NY — Laura Elkeslassy’s debut studio album Ya Ghorbati (يا غربتي) — Arabic for “Oh, my exile” — arrives July 10 on all digital platforms, with vinyl pre-order now available via Ayin Press, and an album release concert at New York’s Joe’s Pub on July 11. The album is an act of excavation and reclamation: a journey into the largely erased musical world of North African Judeo-Arab divas of the early-to-mid 20th century, and a deeply personal reckoning with what it means to recover a language, a culture, and a name.
Elkeslassy — Brooklyn-based, Paris-born, and descended from Moroccan Jewish roots — spent more than a decade studying Arab-Andalusi music and the oral traditions of maqam (the Arabic melodic system) before building the repertoire that became this album. Working with music director Ira Khonen Temple, she drew from the catalogs of figures like Line Monty, Zohra Elfassia, Habiba Msika, and Salim Halali: performers for whom the intersection of Arab and Jewish identity was simply the sonic reality of their lives, before colonial upheaval and ethno-nationalist politics largely erased that world.
The album weaves together traditional Andalusi music, Chaabi (a North African popular music style rooted in folk and classical traditions), and Francarabe cabaret, a midcentury hybrid of French cabaret and Arabic song that flourished across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Elkeslassy’s ornamented, dramatically expressive vocals cascade over arrangements that layer lavish synthesizer lines beneath traditional instruments including oud, violin, and a rich percussion palette.
The album’s opening track and first single, “Yafa Vetama,” carries a discovery almost too extraordinary to believe: researching the Baqashot (devotional songs traditionally sung by Moroccan and Syrian Jews during winter Shabbat mornings), Elkeslassy was directed to a rare songbook called Shir Yedidut. When she found a copy, she opened the preface to find it written by her great-grandfather, Abraham Abitbol, who had organized the compilation in the 1920s. Deeper inside, she found twelve songs attributed to Shlomo Abitbol, her great-great-grandfather. “Yafa Vetama” is one of them.
The album also features a reinterpretation of “Abiadi Ana,” recorded by Zohra Elfassia and a standard at Moroccan Jewish henna ceremonies — a song Elkeslassy sang publicly for the first time at her sister’s wedding, shocking her family by performing in Arabic, a language suppressed within her family through generations of cultural assimilation.
“My family lost more than a country when they left Morocco; Arabic, their native language, was buried. My family’s exile is just one story among the many marked by the historical rupture that occurred between Jewish and Muslim communities in the 1950s and 1960s, after millennia of shared history and culture in the Middle East and North Africa.”
— Laura Elkeslassy
The album’s title carries its own autobiographical thread. Her father had shortened the family name, Elkeslassy, to “Lassy” to assimilate in France. With this debut, the full name returns.
Musicians
Ya Ghorbati features an exceptional ensemble: Ira Khonen Temple (Cabaret on Broadway; Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, Off-Broadway) on music direction, keys, accordion and production; Eylem Basaldi (Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), violin and production; Yoni Avi Battat (The Band’s Visit, Broadway National Tour), oud and guitar; April Centrone, co-founder and lead percussionist of the New York Arabic Orchestra, and Nizar Dahmani, drums and percussion; Zoe Guigueno and Marwan Allam, bass; Rachid Halihal, described by Morocco World News as “one of Morocco’s best ambassadors of music and culture,” oud and violin. Recorded and mixed by Chris Gilroy at Douglass Recording, Brooklyn. Mastered by Dan Coutant, Sun Room Audio, Brooklyn.
Track List
- Yafa Vetama
- Sidi Habibi
- L’Orientale
- Ala Srir Enum
- Rimoun Ramatni
- Ya Ghorbati
- Abiadi Ana
- Ahlan Wa Sahalan
- Alala Illali
About Laura Elkeslassy
Laura Elkeslassy is a singer, actor, and teacher specializing in Judeo-Arab music. She has performed at Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art and has toured the US, Canada, the UK, and France. In theater, she has worked with the National Opera of Paris, La MaMa ETC, and Classic Stage Company. Her film work has screened at the Venice Film Festival and appears in One Thousand and One Jewels by Ariella Aisha Azoulay, premiering in New York on June 11 at the Vera List Center. www.lauraelkeslassy.com
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Media Contact
Brendan Gilmartin
Chart Room Media
brendan@chartroommedia.com | 347-450-3048