When award-winning folk singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist 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. The album is not a reinterpretation project — Henley’s newly-penned songs are a reclamation and contribution, a living line between her roots in American and Celtic music traditions and the rich history and culture of her Sephardi ancestors.

Known for her expressive songwriting, gifted fiddling, and bell-like vocals, in concert Henley weaves ancient and modern languages, cultures and styles to reveal their interconnectedness, and ours. Henley tours as a duo with multi-instrumentalist Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello, bouzouki, guitar, voice). She is a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright award and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Caramoor American Roots Festival, the Denver Botanical Gardens Summer Series, and the New York Sephardic Music Festival. For the past year she has toured as a front-woman with mystic-folk band Rising Appalachia and has collaborated with Irish guitar legends John Doyle, fiddler Brittany Haas, and Grammy-winning clarinetist David Krakauer. 

Duncan Wickel is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, singer, writer, and inventor.  The Boston Globe calls him “A considerable talent…as persuasive in a traditional ballad as he is country fiddling or ripping through cascading classical flourishes or atonal double stops.” Duncan has performed as a member of the Stay Human Band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and along with his band Rising Appalachia, he was featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. He has toured with major folk artists including IBMA Guitarist of the Year Molly Tuttle, The Wood Brothers, The Infamous Stringdusters, Irish music legends John Doyle and Karan Casey, and many others. Duncan has performed at Carnegie Hall, The Lincoln and Kennedy Centers, The Grand Ol’ Opry, and the famed Biblioteca Alexandria in Egypt. He has performed and taught in over 22 countries spanning every continent on earth that is normally inhabited by humans (sorry, Antarctica).

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Photo Credit: Ally Schmaling