Black Rooster Kapelye is a project dedicated to revitalizing the Jewish and Latvian folk music collected by Emilis Melngails at the turn of the 20th century. While Melngailis is well known as a prolific collector of Latvian folk songs, his Jewish music collection has remained virtually unknown and underappreciated for years. As one of the only such collections from the region, it offers a rare window into the life and art of Baltic Jewry of the time.
Melngailis means black rooster in Latvian, and kapelye is Yiddish for ensemble. Black Rooster Kapelye brings together six musicians fluent in Jewish and Latvian folk traditions, building a creative collaboration between the two historically neighboring cultures, which would not have been possible in Melngailis’ time. Composing a soundtrack for the present based on fragmented manuscripts from the past requires a particular blend of knowledge, research, and creativity, an openness to learning and self-discovery, and a vision for a world of unity and mutual understanding. By integrating traditional melodies and instruments with modern sounds and aesthetics, and singing about shared topics in different languages, Black Rooster Kapelye brings these seemingly distant worlds closer together, connecting the past and the present like a golden peacock flying over the oceans of time.

Craig Judelman - violin, voice
Eli Ellere - voice, percussion
Ilya Shneyveys - accordion, guitar, flutes, voice
Ilga Vālodze Ābele - voice, bagpipes, flutes, kokle, vargan
Jānis Zemgus Jātnieks - accordion, mandolin, voice
Sasha Lurje - voice, poyk
Who We Are
Meet the band members

Our Story
This music’s journey starts in 1899 in a small Lithuanian town, Kedainiai, where 25-year-old Emilis Melngailis heard Jewish songs for the first time. This unexpected encounter with folk music sparked in him a lifelong obsession with ethnomusicology: Melngailis went on to become one of Latvia's most prolific collectors and composers of traditional music, collecting at least 60 Jewish songs and over 5000 Latvian (and other cultures') songs throughout his career. While most of his Latvian music collection had been published during his lifetime (and is performed regularly to this day), the Jewish music collection remained concealed in his manuscripts for decades. Over the years, researchers such as Silvija Stumbre, Max Goldin, and Kevin Karnes have worked on uncovering and piecing together this rare and fragmented material.
In 2012, Latvian Jewish musicians Ilya Shneyveys and Sasha Lurje were approached by the director of the Museum "Jews in Latvia," Ilya Lensky, to create recordings of this repertoire for the Museum's permanent exhibition. Their work researching, reconstructing, and recording this material started a decade-long ethnographic journey that ultimately led to the creation of Black Rooster Kapelye. In 2019, the Melngailis manuscripts and museum recordings were discovered yet again by Ilga Vālodze Ābele, who introduced them to her Latvian folk ensemble Banga. The program created by Banga in 2020, through the lens of their experiences as Latvian folk musicians, brought a fresh perspective to this repertoire, emphasizing the similarities between Jewish and Latvian music. When Sasha Lurje and the American Jewish musician Craig Judelman attended one of Banga's concerts at the Žanis Lipke Memorial Museum in Riga, the musicians decided to collaborate.
In 2022, Sasha, Ilya, Craig, and Ilga, together with Ilga's colleagues Eli Ellere and Jānis Zemgus Jātnieks, began work on the new project, focusing on comparing and contrasting the two repertoires and finding common ground between their cultures. Through an invitation from Avery Gosfield, they traveled to the 2022 Dresden Jüdische Musik- und Theaterwoche Festival, which marked the band's first public appearance. Since then, Black Rooster Kapelye has recorded their debut album Vos Mir Zaynen (Lauska, 2024), documenting and performing some of these songs for the first time in over a century.