The Ensemble
The Elias Ladino Ensemble was founded by Joe Elias in 1976. His son Daniel Elias has led the ensemble since 2000.
Daniel Elias
Clarinet and vocals
Founding member, leader since 2000
Daniel Elias is Joe Elias’s son and the grandson of Rabbi David Elias Cassorla. He has sung and played this music since he was fifteen, learning it from his grandparents, his father, and the residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged. He has led the ensemble since 2000. He studied Greek clarinet and won the 1982 concerto competition at Harpur College, Binghamton University, and he also plays klezmer, Greek music, jazz and for contradancing.
Maurice Sedacca
Guitar and oud
Founding member
Maurice Sedacca grew up with these songs. His mother, Esther Sedacca, sang them, and his grandfather Haim Azar played the oud and taught it to him; the family came from Çanakkale, in Turkey. He has played guitar since he was seven and professionally since 1964, drawing on flamenco, jazz, classical guitar and Arabic music, which he studied with Hakki Obadia.
Casey Bond
Doumbek and percussion
Casey Bond plays doumbek, riq and frame drum, and is a regular at belly dance and music festivals in and around New York. Casey founded the Raq Steady student ensemble, taught weekly drum classes on Long Island and in the city from 2006 to 2020, and has written some two dozen compositions for percussion.
Marco Brehm
Double bass
Marco Brehm plays double bass for concerts, dances, cabaret and recordings, and has played klezmer, Ladino and folk music across the United States, including at Lincoln Center, Town Hall and the Yale School of Music. Marco also plays with Daniel Elias in the Brooklyn Swing Ensemble.
Scott Wilson
Oud and kanun
Scott Wilson, the son of the New York dancer Serena, grew up in the city’s Middle Eastern music clubs and took up the oud in 1967. Scott leads the band Scott Wilson & Efendi, sits on the board of the New York Arabic Orchestra, and played on Ladino Lives! and on the ensemble’s 2023 tour of North Macedonia.
Joe Elias
March 3, 1933 – April 10, 2010.
Joe Elias was one of the first people in his generation to recognize the beauty and value of Ladino music. He made it his life’s work to collect these songs from native speakers of Ladino. Through his collecting and teaching, he ensured that future generations would have access to these songs.
Joe was the youngest of seven children of Rabbi David Elias Cassorla, who came to America from Monastir in 1909, and Sarah “Shorty” Elias. He grew up in a house full of Ladino songs. His mother could not read or write, but she knew hundreds of songs by heart, and Joe learned them from her by ear, the way they had always been passed on. In the 1950s and early 1960s he recorded her singing them, and those recordings are now kept by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He spent his working life in New York City’s public schools. As a young teacher in the 1960s he began collecting songs from the grandparents of his Sephardic students and from the residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged in Coney Island, where his father spent his last days, and he kept collecting for the rest of his life.
In 1976 he sang at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife in Washington and, encouraged by the Smithsonian, founded the Elias Ladino Ensemble. He led it until 2000, on stages from the Philadelphia Folk Festival to Merkin Concert Hall and at the opening of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Reviewing a 1994 concert, The New York Times noted that he did most of the singing and explaining “in an appealingly gentle, folksy way.”
He taught these songs as much as he sang them: in a weekly evening class at the Hebrew Arts School in Manhattan in the 1980s, with songbooks he made himself, and to the younger singers he mentored. One of his students, the writer Jane Mushabac, remembered him simply: “He was the real thing.”
Joe was married to Judy Elias, born Judy Goodglass. He was the father of Laura Elias and of Daniel Elias, who now leads the ensemble. He passed away on April 10, 2010.