This playlist is the advanced release of Yuval Music Series 14, Splendid Singing Birds: Jewish Women’s Songs from Kerala. This is one of the longstanding projects of the Jewish Music Research Centre. Led with diligence, profound dedication and meticulous scholarship by anthropologist Barbara Johnson, the project relies on fieldwork carried out in India and Israel for over four decades. Johnson’s work, in collaboration with singer and translator Tzipporah Lane, unravels the symbolic and aesthetic layers of the Malayalam language song repertoire, anchored in the life of the Jewish communities of Kerala, on the southwest seacoast of India.
See also the CD "Oh, Lovely Parrot! - Jewish Women's Songs from Kerala," published by the JMRC in 2004, which includes 42 songs representing the complete collection of traditional songs preserved by the Jewish women of Cochin.
