Stone Room Concerts @ Hill Center Featuring Celebrated Ladino Singer/Songwriter Nani

Curated and Hosted by Stone Room Concerts Founder David Holiday

“Nani shapes a remarkable rollercoaster of emotions accompanying herself on piano & her earthy trombone, while delighting the audience with her scatting melismas”

– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Through her gorgeous songs, singer, composer, and instrumentalist Nani Noam Vazana helps lead the effort to preserve Ladino, the endangered language of the Sephardic Jews—a Jewish diaspora that was once concentrated in the Iberian Peninsula. The catalog of Ladino traditional music is rich but limited, given a history of dislocation and loss, so Nani has begun to chart a celebrated course performing and composing songs that call into being a Ladino with continued vitality in the modern world.

Ladino has its linguistic roots in medieval Spanish, combined with Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. When the Spanish Inquisition forced the Spain’s Jewish population to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews were scattered through the Mediterranean and beyond. Complex sociocultural factors and forces, including Ladino’s status as the language of the home in contrast to the Hebrew of religious life, worked against the retention of a unique language. Yet today political changes like the recent decisions by Spain and Portugal to extend citizenship to the descendants of the exiles, and governmental recognition of Ladino as an official language in Spain, go hand in hand with a resurgence in Ladino song led by older divas like the late Flory Jagoda, and now the sparkling voice of Nani Noam Vazana.

About David Holiday: David Holiday — a lifelong music aficionado who in his youth performed with the Grammy-winning Texas Boys Choir and numerous youth orchestras and ensembles, founded Stone Room Concerts together with his wife in 2012 to bring  intimate, high-quality performances by local, national and international independent musicians to the DMV area.  He has hosted more than 200 shows over the past decade in homes, churches and other eclectic venues, including for several years at Bikenetic,a full service bicycle shop in Falls Church. Stone Room Concerts also serves as the fiscal agent for Niñas Arriba, a charitable project of Latin Grammy-nominee Gina Chavez and their wife Jodi Granado, which they set up to support the college education of young women in El Salvador and Central America.  In keeping with his long standing professional involvement with Central America, Holiday is part of a team supporting the Maya Kaqchikel musician Sara Curruchich.  In 2023, he had the privilege of serving as tour manager for Curruchich’s first-ever US tour, including major venues and festivals in New York, California, Colorado and Illinois.