"I found a woman there named Rachel Hazan, which turned out to
be a Turkish name, and I found some Ladino songs that she hadn't
heard in 50 years that brought tears to her eyes," Frankel
recalls. "I found as many as I could, and she would add to the
repertoire and sing to me." Hazan became one of Frankel's first
sources of music, or informants, and launched her on a years-
long journey to study the then little-known East-meets-West
tunes of the Sephardim. They are Jews who centuries earlier were
expelled from Spain and fled to Turkey, the Balkans and North
Africa. Frankel will sing tomorrow in a concert of Sephardic
music at A Traveling Jewish Theatre in San Francisco. The
concert, which also features Walnut Creek-based singer Lauren
Pomerantz and harp and string player Aryeh Frankfurter, launches
Jewish Music Wednesdays, a series that looks at the broad
musical spectrum of the Jewish world. Daniel Hoffman, who
created the series, said his goal is to expand audiences' ideas
about Jewish music beyond the klezme