ABOUT

About

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

The history of the project

Who We Are

Meet the band members

Craig Judelman

violin, voice

World-renowned violinist, composer, researcher and educator, Craig Judelman was raised in Seattle, spent his formative years in New York and is now based in Berlin. He has built a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his thorough research and passionate playing of both American folk music and Eastern European Jewish music, performing and teaching at major festivals as well as organizing a couple himself. He has toured and recorded with leading artists in both genres including a duo album with one of the pioneers of the modern klezmer movement, Michael Alpert and an album with legendary American ‘Old Time’ musician John Cohen.

“As an American from a Jewish family with roots in the Baltics, connecting to Yiddish culture has been a crucial part of my own journey of self discovery. Sadly there are so few examples of Baltic Jewish music that this particular part of myself has often felt like a distant dream I cannot grasp, embody or share in any significant way. Throughout my career I’ve been moved to encounter many musicians from the traditional lands of Ashkenazi settlement who are committed to understanding the culture of the Jewish people as a way of completing their own cultural identity. I am grateful to be a part of this project and believe deeply in our commitment to understanding what makes each culture unique while promoting a vision of the culture of a place as a way of creating unity and continuing the eternal conversation between cultures..”

Eli Ellere

voice, percussion

Eli Ellere is a singer who specializes in Latvian traditional multi-part singing. As a big believer in “what changes will survive”, they challenge traditional music into new forms of existence in various genres and projects, such as the Latvian Balkan folkrock band Alum Alu, the folktronica duo Sun Horse, the neo folk-punk project Drisā Rudzi, and the back-to-the-roots traditional singing group Saucējas. With Saucējas, Ellere has presented Latvian heritage to audiences all around Europe.

“This has been a very eye-opening and educational project for me. I love to learn new ways of singing, challenge myself with other languages, and find similarities between cultures – Black Rooster Kapelye perfectly covers all of these aspects.”

Ilga Vālodze Ābele

voice, bagpipes, flutes, kokle, vargan

Ilga Vālodze Ābele has been connected with folklore since birth, playing various folk musical instruments and mastering traditional singing techniques. In 2016, she and a group of like-minded friends founded the folk group Banga, which develops conceptual projects and concert programs, among them the “Džingale” programme of Latvian Jewish music (2020). Ābele is also a doctoral student at the University of Latvia, focusing in her research on the Latvian folklore movement and the transmission of the revitalized tradition.

“First, I see Black Rooster Kapelye as a beautiful and thoughtful tribute to Emilis Melngailis, who was one of the most prominent Latvian folklorists and who to me has been like a huge floodgate making it possible for me to access the heritage of Jews in Latvia from the past centuries, feel it through musical vibrations, and take part in its life in present-day Latvia. Black Rooster Kapelye is also simply a unique project of Jewish and Latvian folklore sounding together.”

Ilya Shneyveys

accordion, guitar, flutes, voice

Originally from Riga, Latvia, but now based in Brooklyn, NY, Ilya Shneyveys is an accordionist and multi-instrumentalist, educator, composer, arranger, and producer of Yiddish music. With expertise spanning from traditional klezmer accordion to experimental and fusion projects, he performs and teaches at festivals around the world, in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to your local synagogue catering hall. A renowned scholar-practitioner, Shneyveys is equally at home within and outside the boundaries of tradition, constantly searching for creative ways to harmoniously blend together different genres and cultures, which he successfully implements in various projects and collaborations.

“I feel happy that, after researching this material for over ten years, this project is moving forward in such a beautiful way! We bring life and sound to this music, that for so long existed only on paper, adding our own experiences and influences, and using the manuscripts as an inspiration and invitation to create a new sound that is deeply informed by the tradition. The combination of Jewish and Latvian music is quite unique and meaningful for me as a Latvian Jew who has been involved in both cultures.”

Jānis Zemgus Jātnieks

accordion, mandolin, voice

Jānis Zemgus Jātnieks has been involved with Latvian folklore since birth, originally as part of the Latvian community in the USA. He has participated in the folk group Banga and others, gaining experience in celebrating traditional festivals, performing, singing, and other skills in Latvia and abroad. He currently plays in the Latvian Balkan folkrock band Alum Alu and plays regularly for folk dancing events in Latvia and around the Baltic region. His understanding of traditional culture has been deepened through his work at the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia and his long-standing involvement in its cultural life.

“Black Rooster Kapelye is a harmonious blend of two things that are very close to me: history and music. The opportunity to explore traditional music and traditions that cross borders and are influenced by each other is a very beautiful thing and also a completely different approach to creating music and expressing oneself. The whole process has been very stimulating and also quite challenging. The Jewish community reminds me of the Latvian diaspora community I grew up in, and thus this project feels very natural in a way that I could not have foreseen in the beginning.”

Sasha Lurje

voice, poyk

Sasha Lurje is a Riga-born, Berlin-based singer and educator renowned worldwide for her wide expressive range in both traditional and contemporary music styles. While being best known for her knowledge of traditional Yiddish song, her work includes projects ranging from the Yiddish progressive rock band Forshpil to early 20th-century music with the Semer Ensemble, the Helsinki Yiddish Cabaret, the traditional klezmer trio Lebedik, and Yale University’s Songs from Testimonies. Lurje co-founded the Berlin Yiddish culture festival Shtetl Berlin and Seattle Yiddish Fest and has performed and taught Yiddish singing throughout Europe and North and South America.

“After over two decades of researching and performing Yiddish music around the world, it is remarkably inspiring to have it bring me back to my homeland, not only to explore one of the oldest and least-known collections originating just around the corner from the shtetl where my grandfather grew up, but also to get to know and play more Latvian music with new colleagues on this journey. Black Rooster Kapelye is a fabulous creative experience and a cozy coming home with the culture I spent my life learning and celebrating, to the culture I grew up next to.”

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.