Sarah is a singer and music researcher of Yiddish, Swedish, Irish, and Scottish immigrant family backgrounds. Larsson, her father’s last name, comes from her great-great-grandfather, who immigrated as a child from Sweden to New Hampshire and was the only person in his family to officially change the spelling of their last name back to Larsson from the Anglicized one-“s” version. Jagoda means “berry” in many Slavic languages, and is Sarah’s grandmother’s maiden name, the name of a corner of her family history that feels like a missing piece: that great-grandfather was absent from the family and took his stories with him. 

Sarah studies and sings music from Eastern European heritage as a way to build connections to history and heritage. As a person descended from European immigrants, Sarah grew up without a sense of connection to culture and heritage, and spent her years as a young person searching out culture wherever she could find it — borrowing Klezmer music CDs from the public library, attending concerts — and ultimately was able to study Eastern European folk music as a college student. Today, Sarah performs and teaches Eastern European, Balkan, and Yiddish music as part of The Nightingale Trio and Nanilo. She has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and performed at The Cedar Cultural Center, St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Zlatne Uste Golden Festival in New York, and ArtScape in Baltimore, and placed third in the Irish International A Cappella Festival in Dublin.

In performance and workshops, Sarah brings a strong storytelling element to presenting songs from immigrant heritage, tracing the stories behind the songs and the (often hilarious) experiences of learning music with master-teachers around the world.

Sarah is a student of Ethel Raim (New York / Yiddish song), Susan Gaeta (Washington DC / Bosnian Sefardi song), Sanja Rankovic (Belgrade / Serbian song), Vahidin Omanovic (Sanski Most / Bosnian song & sevdalinke), Nafie Hussein (Breznitsa, Bulgarian song), Lisa Gutkin (New York / Yiddish & klezmer music), Josh Waletzky (New York / Yiddish song), Jeff Warschauer (New York / Yiddish & klezmer music). Sarah received a BA and MA in anthropology from Yale University, and once performed with the Yale Slavic Chorus for the crown Prince of Serbia and Princess of Greece.

Sample Programs: Customizable To Site’s Needs

Workshops

 Singing Stories

These participatory workshops enable participants to trace family histories through music. Sarah sings some songs from her own family immigrant history and tells stories about the songs, demonstrating how songs and their lyrics trace a history of lived experiences and contain stories of real people. Sarah will work with participants to explore participants’ own family lineages (both family by ancestry and chosen families), and practice how to identify routes of migration and home places. Then Sarah will guide participants on researching songs from those places and how participants might craft stories about their own place in the world based on those songs.

Sing and Dance Like Your Bubbe’s Watching!

Especially great for choir classes, theater classes, or groups who already sing or perform.

Sarah teaches a repertoire of some of the most bumpin’ Balkan and Klezmer folk songs, complete with tight traditional harmony and dance steps. Participants will learn to count an odd-metered time signature like 7/8 or 11/16, learn new scales specific to Eastern European or Jewish music, and build understanding of the stories behind many of these songs. Are they meant to be played for dancing? To listen at a special event? To sing quietly just to your friends? Why do we sing the songs we do, and how do we express ourselves even in a language we don’t speak?

Most importantly, Sarah teaches the dance steps particular to each song style, including versions of the dances adapted for sitting and people who use mobility aids.

Workshop on Yiddish, Bulgarian, or Bosnian Folksong

Especially targeted towards elder communities with individuals of these cultural heritages, but open to everyone, this workshop engages audiences’ memories of music with songs from Sarah’s repertoire. Sarah performs a selection of music — in Yiddish, Bulgarian, or Bosnian, or a combination — and tells stories of the historical and contemporary singers of these songs. Participants are invited to respond with songs of their own, either as an open mic or nominating Sarah to sing them. These songs often connect deeply with personal memories for participants, and Sarah opens the space to hear and share these stories, and respond with songs that deepen the emotional and narrative material that participants share. A circle and an exchange of stories and songs, demonstrating how we can see more deeply into each other’s histories and experience through the folk songs we carry with us.

Performance

Sarah Larsson with Jeleche Trio

Sarah Larsson and Jeleche Trio perform songs from Yiddish, Serbian, Romanian, and other Eastern European folk lineages, complementing songs with stories from the musicians’ own travels learning music from master artists and playing music in pubs and palaces in Europe and beyond.

Hear music in the complex odd-meter rhythms, rich harmonies, and emotional melodies characteristic of music from these parts of the world — Yiddish love ballads, Romanian fiddle doinas, contemporary Serbian guitar, and more. Jeleche Trio plays this diverse repertoire of music with astonishing depth and technical skill, produced by the members’ respective decades+ of work studying this music with master artists in the US and around the world.

Musicians:

• Maja Radovanlija (classical guitar) / faculty, University of Minnesota, department of Music

• Colleen Bertsch (violin, voice) / Orkestar Bez Ime, Szaszka, and Ciprian Porumbescu Romanian Choir of Minnesota

• Sarah Jagoda Larsson (voice & percussion)