Moni Ovadia: vocals, guitar
Michele Gazich: violin, viola, psychoacoustic percussion, vocals
Giovanna Famulari: cello, piano, vocals
A return to FolkClub for Moni, awaited for 19 years. With artistic direction and arrangements by Giovanna Famulari and Michele Gazich, “Yiddish Blues” is not a theatrical show, not theatre-song, but – for the first time – “the concert of Moni Ovadia.”
“Yiddish Blues” is a poetic and musical plunge into the cultures of exile, into the spirituality of stateless peoples, into pain and resistance transformed into song. The show opens with “Es brent!” (It’s Burning!), a manifesto-song written in 1936 by Mordechai Gebirtig, recounting the burning of a city as a metaphor for persecution and injustice. It continues with “Gelem, gelem”, the anthem of the Roma people, which becomes the beating heart of the concert, a bridge between nomadic memories and denied identities. “Yiddish Blues” is a constellation of languages, songs, stories, and sounds that escape all categorisation. A non-canonical and profoundly heretical Blues, as Ovadia himself defines it, built from the stories of those forced to walk, to survive, but also to sing – to exorcise pain. On stage, we meet characters marked by maltamé, a term in the Venetian Jewish dialect that means “torment of the soul,” and which echoes the classic woke-up-this-morning of African American blues. On stage, Moni Ovadia gives voice and body to this wandering universe, accompanied by two extraordinary musicians: Giovanna Famulari and Michele Gazich. Together, they have created a concert that is a secular rite, a civil act, and a poetic experience – an act of memory and resistance. The songs become wounds that speak, instruments against oblivion, melodies for the bored ears of the executioners. We will drink the black milk of dawn, quoting Paul Celan, in search of a fragment of light for the dark times we are living through.
Moni Ovadia, born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and raised in Milan, comes from a Sephardic Jewish family immersed in the Yiddish and Central European cultural context – an element that profoundly shapes all his artistic work. Graduating in Political Science at the University of Milan, he began his artistic journey under the guidance of Roberto Leydi, debuting as a musician and singer with the Gruppo dell’Almanacco Popolare. In the 1970s, he founded the Gruppo Folk Internazionale, later Ensemble Havadià, performing at major European folk festivals. A multi-instrumentalist (violin, guitar, trumpet), he experimented with an innovative folk-progressive sound for the time, releasing several albums. He also collaborated with Stormy Six and founded the cooperative L’Orchestra, Italy’s first independent label. His research has always focused on the Jewish memory of Eastern Europe, reinterpreted in a musical, theatrical, and civil key.
Giovanna Famulari is a multifaceted musician, a graduate in cello from the Giuseppe Tartini Conservatory in Trieste. A well-rounded artist, she is also a pianist, arranger, and artistic producer, moving naturally from pop to jazz, from world music to contemporary, all the way to musical theatre and film scores. With a career combining classical rigour and openness to experimentation, she has received important awards such as the Premio Pavoncella d’Oro and the Premio AILA 2018. Active in theatre and television, she has collaborated with RAI as composer and performer in numerous radio and TV programmes. Alongside her solo projects, she works with Italian and international artists, taking her cello sound to stages worldwide, from Europe to the Middle East to South America.
Michele Gazich is a musician, poet, artistic producer, composer, songwriter, and a longtime FolkClub's friend. Professionally active in music since the early 1990s, he has toured in Italy, Europe, and the USA, collaborating with Italian, European, and American singer-songwriters (Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Eric Andersen, and Mark Olson); orchestras; theatre productions; poetry performances; film soundtracks; and universities and conservatories in Italy and abroad. To date, Gazich has collaborated on more than fifty albums and released twelve under his own name. A multiple finalist for the Targa Tenco, he has participated in albums that were Grammy Award finalists. He has performed at the Spanish Senate, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and the Billboard Auditorium in Tokyo. His is a dimension of artistic nomadism and constant research – which has become a way of life.
