Lily Henley
When singer, fiddler and songwriter Lily Henley set out to make an album of Sephardic Jewish ballads set to new melodies, she was looking for her own way to interpret a critically endangered tradition. On Oras Dezaoradas (out on Lior Éditions Records), Henley highlights the Ladino language, a threatened tongue that fuses old Spanish with Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish elements that is spoken by less than 100,000 people in the world today. She found herself directly connected to centuries of women spread across a forced global diaspora. The album is not a reinterpretation project—Henley’s newly-penned songs and melodies are a reclamation and contribution, a living line between her musical roots in American and Celtic traditions and the rich history and culture of her Sephardi ancestors.