We are accustomed to listen to the Sephardic repertoire interpreted from a prospect of the world of the classical musicians, with all its tics: artificial voices, musicians corresponding with score and without space for the improvisation... Aman Aman prefers to throw the to arrive the fountain from where they themselves drank from the optics of the traditional music of those countries that accommodated the Sephardic ones, after the diaspora. Even, in some cases we have dared to mixing the music of the Sephardic ones with Turkish or Greek pieces, with those that have many resemblance.

The sonority of Aman Aman is based, as can listen in several recordings of field, in the sound of the strings, winds and percussion of the medium Orient, with the most "modern" contribution of the cello, although interpreted in the way of the modern orchestras of the Magrib, Turkey or Egypt.
The formation is compound for Aziz Samsaoui (qanun), Diego López (bendir, darbuka, zarb, doira and riq), Efrén López (ud, baglama, lavta, cümbüs and tanbur), Eleni Kalimopoulou (politiki lyra), Hristos Barbas (ney and kaval), Mara Aranda (voice and bendir) and Matthieu Saglio (cello).

The year 1492 the Christian kings Fernando and Isabel decreed the expulsion or conversion of all Spanish Jews that since the 1st century lived in the peninsula. In a few months more than 160.000 Jews of the peninsula departed and they went towards the Ottoman Empire, Provença, north of Africa, the Balkan states and also Italy and Holland.
The Jews of the diaspora transmitted the sons their mediaeval Spanish past: the habits, the music and the language, and like this, of generation in generation, these elements kept on preserving until our days.
_The traditionals songs of the Sephardic Jews, the Romance stories in language Jewish-Spanish (judezmo or haketía) in the one that at present is called wrongly "ladino". Eixemples written of this popular music have not remained, but a big part of this has arrived for us for oral transmission.
In the interpretation of the Sephardic traditional music the feminine voice predominates. The men who know the Hebrew participate in the synagogal liturgy. The women did not know, in general, the Hebrew escritpura, and sing the songs that makes reference to the cycle of the life, in Jew-Spaniard, who is the daily language: birth, growth, wedding and death.

The Sephardic lifestyle kept on merging with that of those places where they lived. And like this they integrated new melodies, rhythms, instruments, cadencials formulas and ornaments into their repertoire. Also words of these new languages and every element that was profitable to the purpose of the song.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the Sephardic colonies of the west and of the east of the Mediterranean constitute two cultures clearly differentiated and independent: that of the oriental Mediterranean (Turkey, Greece, the ancient Yugoslavia and Bulgaria) and that of the occidental Mediterranean (clearly influenced for Moroccan and Spanish elements).
At present the Jewish community in the Spanish State is from some 15.000 members. Besides there are thousands of descendants of converse Jews who are their ascendants unaware.

Discography: Aman Aman (Galileo-MC, 2006).

Videoclip: la Llotja (València), 04/27/2006. Amateur video.