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, Turkish, and Persian elements spoken by less than 100,000 people in the world today.
What she didn’t expect was to find herself directly connected to centuries of women spread across a forced global diaspora.
Known for her expressive songwriting, gifted fiddling, and bell-like vocals, Henley brings new life to these songs and the independent female characters in them, drawing from a well so deep that disparate listeners all feel a connection to their own heritage. With a repertoire encompassing both her Sephardi musical lineage and a broad expanse of influences from across the folk world, in concert, Henley weaves ancient and modern languages, cultures, and styles to reveal their interconnectedness, and ours.
For the past year, she has toured as a front-woman with mystic-folk band Rising Appalachia and has collaborated with John Doyle, Brittany Haas, David Krakauer, Rushad Eggleston, The Duhks, and many more.
For this show, she’ll be with her husband, world-class musician known for his chameleon-like qualities on the fiddle, cello, and other stringed instruments, Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello, guitar, bouzouki, voice).
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