As part of this month’s Polyphonic Ground Digital Residency, we’re profiling the organizations and professionals who support Toronto’s culturally diverse music scene. See all of the profiles here.
What’s your name, role and organization?
Eric Stein, artistic director, Ashkenaz Foundation.
Tell us about Ashkenaz Foundation’s signature events.
The biennial Ashkenaz Festival is our signature event. It was founded in 1995 and our 12th edition of the festival takes place this summer from August 28 to September 3 at Harbourfront Centre and other venues across the city. Ashkenaz is North America’s largest festival of global Jewish music and culture. The festival features over 80 acts and 250-plus artists from across Canada and around the world, with a majority of events free to the public.
While the festival is multidisciplinary, we specialize in music and emphasize both traditional artistic approaches and contemporary, cutting-edge work. We also prioritize diversity within the vast spectrum of diasporic Jewish cultural expression (Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, African, Latin American) and beyond by highlighting cross-cultural music that blends Jewish styles with non-Jewish styles. The festival is one of the most unique forums anywhere in the world for Jewish musical and cultural expression to be shared with a diverse audience.
Beyond providing great cultural programming, does Ashkenaz Foundation have a larger mission you’re working towards?
Our mission is to preserve, promote and share Jewish creativity and Jewish cultural and artistic brilliance with as large an audience as possible. We believe in celebrating our history and traditions, while also looking forward to forge a dynamic and evolving cultural synthesis that includes interaction with, and artistic contributions from, the wider community. We believe a critical part of our mission is to create opportunities for diverse cultures to connect, to build understanding and collaboration among all peoples. We are extremely committed to supporting both the local and the worldwide community of artists and scholars who work within Jewish artistic forms and move the culture forward. We are equally committed to feeding the souls of our diverse audience members with inspiration, surprise, joy, delight, sorrow and provocation.
Tell us about one highlight from a past Ashkenaz Foundation event that illustrates why you love what you do.
Last year we presented Ethiopian-Israeli artist Aveva Dese at Lula Lounge. We partnered with one of our other PG colleagues, Batuki Music Society, and succeeded in drawing an incredibly diverse audience. Seeing that crowd of people in the same space together enjoying an artist whose work could speak to such an eclectic audience underlined our sense of mission and purpose. The music served as a lightning rod to bring together diverse peoples who might otherwise never find themselves in the same cultural space. We have had numerous experiences of this sort with various other artists and communities, and these never cease to bring a great sense of gratification that what we do makes a difference and helps contribute to the cultural fabric of our city and our world.
Describe some of the specific challenges organizations like yours face in promoting world music in Toronto.
I won’t mention financial challenges because those are universal and obvious – it is always challenging to raise money for music and the arts. One of our greatest challenges is breaking through pre-conceived notions about our artists or events. Being culturally-specific in our mandate, we inevitably battle the perception that our work might be seen as insular or sectarian, when that is the furthest thing from the truth. One does not need to be Jewish to appreciate our artists or participate in our events. In fact, many of the artists we present are not Jewish themselves. Ironically, we also battle misperceptions about our work from within our core audience community, who may have their own misperceptions or baggage related to Jewish arts and culture.
Another challenge we face is competition with mainstream, popular and commercial forms of music and entertainment. Most of the artists we present do not have name recognition, so what we’re often selling to the public is an idea, an experience and, hopefully, a recognition and trust in our curatorial excellence. In other words, you may not know who we’re presenting, but if it’s us presenting it one can expect it to be amazing.
Name one artist, band or performer who’s taking part in an upcoming Ashkenaz Foundation event that you think audiences will love.
This year’s Ashkenaz Festival is spotlighting women in Jewish music and culture. We have dozens of amazing female artists and thematically much of the festival program will explore women’s issues and women’s perspectives from a musical and cultural point of view. Among all of the great female artists we are featuring this summer, I would highlight A-Wa, a group made up of three Yemenite-Israeli sisters who use ancient women’s music traditions of Yemen as a jumping off point for an explosive contemporary fusion of ancient sounds with funk and electronic beats.
Most of the group’s songs are in Yemenite Arabic, and their unique cultural identity as Mizrachi Jews (hailing from Arabic lands) highlights the not well-understood depth of integration in contemporary Israeli music and culture between Jewish and Arabic influences. A-Wa scored the first-ever Arabic-language song to hit the top of the Israeli music charts and has earned a following across the Arab world. I would like to think that by highlighting this deep, historically-based cultural fusion between Jewish and Arabic musical styles, the group helps counter the black-and-white narrative of conflict in the Middle East. Their musical and cultural perspective reveals the many shades of grey and the many ways in which Jews and Arabs have achieved a harmonious cultural intersection in the Middle East, through music at least.
What are some of the benefits of partnering together with similar music/event promoters in Polyphonic Ground?
Strength in numbers. Individually, we are a small fish compared to other larger cultural institutions and often find ourselves competing for media and audience attention with better-resourced and more mainstream music and culture presenters. Together however, we can represent our sector with a collective voice, highlighting our impact socially, culturally and economically, in making Toronto one of the world’s great cities, where diversity is our strength and our calling card.
Of course, the sharing of resources and knowledge through our collective partnership is also a tremendous benefit to us all, allowing us to learn from each other, collaborate, develop economies of scale for our work and to produce events and audience development initiatives that might not otherwise exist.
