Still Soft Voiced Heart
Traditional Crossroads Music
realeased 2001

This, the first recording by Marilyn Lerner and David Wall, is the culmination of two years of collaboration on original settings of modern Yiddish poetry by a diverse group of writers including Avram Sutskever, Kadie Molodowsky Zisha Landau and Peretz MIransky. Marilyn and David’s obviously wide range of musical influences and stylistic expertise have combined to create a beautiful and fascinating partnership.

Still Soft Voiced Heart, released on the reputable New York-based world music/folk label Traditional Crossroads in 2001, features fourteen brand new Yiddish songs. Based on a far- reaching assortment of 20th century yiddish poems, these works reflect the many musical influences of the two composers, drawing on jewish folk, jazz, classical, (especially 19th century German “lieder”), and liturgical/cantorial music. Marilyn and David’s project embodies a contemporary and edgy approach to Yiddish culture, reflecting a living, vibrant, multi-faceted artistic tradition. Many of the poems they’ve set are by modernist, challenging and difficult yiddish-language writers such as Avram Sutskever and Canada’s own Peretz Miransky and much of the original music-writing is both stylistically daring and wonderfully genre-blurring yet consistantly accessible.

“Settings that are so luminously lyrical in their immediacy — and their range of Jewish sensibility — that they speak to the human condition.
I was so deeply drawn into this fusion of music, poetry and memory that I keep playing this cycle of lieder entirely new to me and yet quickly familiar…”
-Nat Hentoff, The Wall Street Journal

“I usually say that I can count on two hands the number of Yiddish artists on the contemporary scene who inspire me. Guess I’ll have to add another couple of fingers.”
-Lorne Sklamberg of The Klezmatics.

“…among the finest, most distinctive contributions to the Yiddish cultural revival”
-Tamara Bernstein, The National Post

Still Soft Voiced Heart is available through Traditional Crossroads Records.

Track List

1. ALL MY YESTERDAYS WERE STEPS (Dora Teitelbaum/Wall)
2. TRILI (Peretz Miransky/Lerner)
3. ANOINTED BY THE MOON (Peretz Miransky/Wall)
[audio:http://davidwall.ca/mp3/solo_cds_mp3s/slow_soft_voiced_mp3s/Anointed .mp3]
4. MILES AWAY FROM MYSELF (Avram Sutskever/Lerner)
[audio:http://davidwall.ca/mp3/solo_cds_mp3s/slow_soft_voiced_mp3s/miles_for_myself.mp3]
5. HOW THROUGH GREEN GRASSED FIELDS (Zisha Landau/Wall)
6. TO A WOMAN SOCIALIST (Avram Reisen/Wall)
7. MY SHADOW (Peretz Miransky/Lerner)
8. EVERY BEING (Peretz Miransky/Lerner)
9. A WIND (Peretz Miransky/Lerner)
10. THE SINGER (Kadie Molodowsky/Lerner)
11. FROM BOTH ENDS OF THE EARTH, PART I (Avram Sutskever/Wall)
12. FROM BOTH ENDS OF THE EARTH, PART II (Avram Sutskever/Wall)
13. FROM BOTH ENDS OF THE EARTH, PART III, A HYMN (Avram Sutskever/Wall)
14. RUSISHE SHER (Trad.)
15. SOFTLY LET US ALL VANISH (Zisha Landau/Wall)