Free concert of new Yiddish and Mi'kmaw music by Morgan Toney, the klezmer band Yene Velt String Ensemble and Burial Society, with a post-concert discussion.
Morgan Toney brings his Mi'kmaw songwriting and fiddling to the Joseph Strug Concert Hall on Sunday, October 25, as part of the Living Languages series. He'll be sharing the stage with the Montreal-based klezmer band Yene Velt String Ensemble and Burial Society, with King's alumni Rachel Kimmelman and Lucas Tennen joining in. The whole evening is presented by the Dalhousie Centre for Jewish Studies.
Toney's work blends the fast, driving fiddling of Cape Breton with Mi'kmaw songs, a style he calls 'Mi'kmaltic'—Mi'kmaq and Celtic woven together. Yene Velt String Ensemble and Burial Society bring the Yiddish side, their violin and tsimbl drawing from century-old recordings and manuscripts collected by travelling folklorists, alongside their own original compositions. Kimmelman and Tennen rework Yiddish dance into a modern art form, so the set pulls from both the archival and the new.
The concert closes with a discussion led by Halifax violinist and educator Gina Burgess, whose own background draws on both Jewish and Indigenous traditions. It's a night that puts two living musical traditions on one stage, with the conversation after the music giving a bit more room to the connections between them.
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It runs from 7:30 to 9:30 PM at the Joseph Strug Concert Hall, 1385 Seymour Street, and entry is free.
