Charming Hostess


About
Calendar
Projects
Listen
Look
Press
Commune
Shop
Contact
Links

spacer
Related Sites
Big Hostess
Cantor Jewlia
Gramophone and Dynamo
Fellow Travelers
Red Pocket
Radical Film Series
Justice
Search

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

<

 

The Bowls Project Secrets of the Apocalyptic Intimate
WHAT IS THE BOWLS PROJECT? Learn all the details about the interactive sound sculpture/immersive performance installation created by visionary composer Jewlia Eisenberg with her ensemble Charming Hostess. And, visit the site to become a part of the Bowls Project: Send us a secret!

BIG HOSTESS

Jewlia Eisenberg
Founder, bandleader, and composer. Complete CV.

Ganda Suthivarikom
Ganda takes it on at her blog "Eating & Complaining in NYC". Two part series on recent ChoHo tour includes a run in with the law.

Scott Amendola
"Amendola, certainly the most accomplished and inventive drummer,... maintains a constant flurry of percussive sounds - drums, cymbals, tom-toms - smoothly shifting dynamics and rhythmic...

Dan Rathbun
Dan Rathbun is a musician, instrument builder, and sculptor of sound. Dan played for 12 years as a core member of the rock circus "Idiot Flesh" and for 8 years with "Charming Hostess". Sleepytime Gorilla Museum employs several of his self-made musical instruments. Dan co-owns Polymorph Recording and has produced and recorded countless CD's and records in a wide range of styles. Dan has worked with Shinichi Iova-Koga since 1996 and is a founding member of the performance collective known as inkBoat.

Ariela Morgenstern
"A champion of a wide variety of vocal music, Morgenstern performs regularly with the San Francisco Chamber Singers, a professional ensemble dedicated to the performance of new works. In addition, she recently toured the San Francisco Bay Area and New York with Jewlia Eisenberg's avant-garde a cappella group, Charming Hostes.

Carla Kihlstedt
" Carla Kihlstedt is a founding member of both Tin Hat Trio, (an accordion-violin-guitar trio), and of the art-rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Most recently, Carla is working on a solo project, Two Foot Yard, using both her violin and her voice simultaneously. She was one of three singers in the band Charming Hostess for six years...

Nils Frykdahl
The 90's saw many tours of a portable Idiot Flesh around the US and work with a related ethnomusicalogical group: Charming Hostess.  The close of the millenium saw the founding of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and the music/theater duo - The Faun Fables.

Shahzad Ismaily
Shahzad holds a masters degree in biochemistry and is a largely self-taught musician, having mastered the electric and double bass, guitar, banjo, accordion, flute, drums, various percussion instruments and various analog synthesizers and drum machines. Ismaily has recorded or performed with an incredibly diverse assemblage of musicians, including Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Jolie Holland, Laura Veirs, Bonnie Prince Billy, Faun Fables, Secret Chiefs 3, John Zorn, Elysian Fields, Shelley Hirsch, Niobe, Will Oldham, Nels Cline, Mike Doughty, Graham Haynes, David Krakauer, Two Foot Yard, Tin Hat Trio, Raz Mesinai and Burnt Sugar.

Pamelia Kurstin
iis a world-renowned thereminist who has played and recorded with such prestigious artists as David Byrne and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Pamelia performs solo theremin orchestra by using looping pedals, with the New York-based group Barbez.

Jenny Scheinman
"Jenny Scheinman, violinist/composer, was voted the #1 Rising Star Violinist in the 2003 Downbeat Critics Poll, has performed and recorded extensively with Bill Frisell as well as Norah Jones, Vinicius Cantuaria, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot...

Wesley Anderson
Wes Anderson is a native of Oakland, CA. He studied under funk/R&B master David Garibaldi, at PPSI with Scott Morris, and with Greg Sudmeyer. He toured the country wearing a large foam head and an inflatable head in the avant-rock troupe Idiot Flesh. He is currently playing jazz with Crushing Spiral Ensemble, nerdy nerd-rock with Schloss, punk-rock with Kap, and klezmer-punk-Balkan-funk with Charming Hostess.

Nina Rolle
NINA ROLLE is a hybrid artist (singer, composer, storyteller, voiceover artist, actor and clown) with a keen interest in Sonic Theater and a deep love of collaboration. She has a BA from Naropa University, where she worked with Meredith Monk, Barbara Dilley, Lee Worley, and Allen Ginsberg. From 1995-2000 Nina performed nationally as singer and accordionist with the acclaimed Bay Area band Charming Hostess. Her original show Zen Cabaret won Pick of the Fringe two years running.

Michael Pinkham
Michael has been drawn towards the rhythms of Africa, Cuba, Brazil and India. Michael studied tabla at the Ali Akbar College. The infectious driving rhythms of Brazil led Michael to join the traditional Samba batteria, Samba Do Corocao. He has studied privately with some of the greatest drumset players in the Bay Area, including Colin Bailey, Alan Hall, Robert Kaufman and Atma Anur. Michael plays and tours with Albino!, Superbacana, Diego's Umbrella, Monkey Knife Fight, I Am Spoonbender, and John Kalleen Group.

 

CANTOR JEWLIA

cantor jewliaJewlia Eisenberg is also available as a Lay Cantor for ritual practices including; weddings, b'ney mitzvah, and more. Here's a video of a marriage equality ceremony:


FELLOW TRAVELERS

Kugelplex

grim arithmetic of waterKugelplex is the West Coast's rockin'-est purveyor of klezmer and old-world party music. The group plays wild, soulful dance music at weddings, concerts and festivals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Recent highlights include leading the Oakland Symphony and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir in an epic 150-musician niggun at the Paramount Theater and our shtetl-blasting 15-piece collaboration with Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Frank London at Cafe Du Nord. For weddings, Kugelplex can act as expert ritual facilitators, helping plan your event every step of the way. From tish to toasts, the group plays in a variety of configurations and styles -- chamber music, cocktail jazz, wild dancing, beautiful horas, dance instruction, DJing.

 

 

The Grim Arithmetic of Water

grim arithmetic of waterA collaboration with Jo Kreiter's Flyaway Productions.  "The Grim Arithmetic of Water" is an evening length dance performance that responds to the urgencies of water-its scarcity, its depletion, its contamination, and our inescapable need for it.  Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's 2003 Multi-Arts Production Fund.

 


Graham Connah's 22-piece orchestra.

graham"The famously dry and self-deprecating genius (Graham Connah) stages one of his musical extravaganzas only once or twice a year, but always with such lustrous results. This last bid, however, with dueling trombones, bassoon, saxes (all the horns in Hornville, really), the roaming sailor chorus, acrobatic vocals by Jewlia Eisenberg (of Charming Hostess) and bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Ches Smith both anchoring and propelling the arrangements, it became more than just a spectacular show..." - SF Chronicle article by Beth Lisick

Semezdin Mehmedinovic

Semezdin Mehmedinovic wrote Sarajevo Blues. Charming Hostess has set Mr. Mehmedinovic's work in their latest release with the same name. Mr. Mehmediovic's work was written during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 and still powerfully topical, Sem’s micro-essays and poems are simultaneously war reportage, thoughts on sex, history, and politics, and a philosophical detective story. Violence is not always explicit in his work, but is most often felt seeping into simple daily actions. Sarajevo Blues witnesses terror, but also models love and resistance, in a city once cosmopolitan, charming, and culturally diverse, now brutalized and made narrow.


Lynne Sachs

"Lynne Sachs produces intricately layered films and videos that push traditional cinematic expectations about the use of sound and image in the documentary form. In her film..."

 

RED POCKET

re pocketGET THICK: Art-funk! The seedy underbelly of the Supremes! This CD by Charming Hostesses Jewlia Eisenberg and Marika Hughes features songs about sexuality and its discontents. Thick is filled with passion, catchy hooks and avant-garde lyricism. Read an early review. Hear a clip from Thick!

Jewlia Eisenberg plays bass and sings. Experimental vocal technique meets freak of the week. After years of leading avant-pop girlcore extravaganza Charming Hostess, the songs she writes for Red Pocket are filled with the joy of romance.Marika Hughes plays cello and sings. Classically trained, she now prefers to rock the low end: Her cello parts incorporate lyrical melodies, funky bass riffs and rhythm guitar punch. Outside of her work with Red Pocket, she plays with Two Foot Yard, Etienne De Rocher, Eric McFadden.

Scott Amendola is an amazing drummer who plays with everyone (Nels Cline Singers, TJ Kirk, Scott Amendola Band) because he is so damn good. Incorporating live electronics and hand percussion with the genius of the great funky drummers, Scott holds the estrogen in Red Pocket together.

Artwork by Cybele Gerachis

 

RADICAL FILM SERIES

The Radical Film Series

Two musicians avoid rubber bullets at an anti-war demonstration and ask questions. Why does the left always eat itself? Will revolution come to our shores? Why do we feel alienated and crabby at a perfectly good demonstration? To build community and have a good time, we decide to make a traveling movie house for the red and the black. This is a meeting place for the new left and the whatís left, anarcho-syndicalists and leafy Greens, social democrats and democratic socialists. Guaranteed a popcorn - and politics-filled good time for all. Muscians: Jewlia Eisenberg and Devin Hoff

 

JUSTICE

Azadi

A benefit compilation CD for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). A diverse 2-CD set of avant-rock, electronic, world, experimental, jazz, folk, noise, improv, hip-hop, dancefloor, and modern classical music.

 


Balkans Without Borders

Omnium has put together a special benefit CD showcasing the music of the Balkan region played by bands from the USA and Europe. All the artists & labels have donated their music for this release, which includes liner notes from NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu: "Here is the unmistakable sound of the Balkans, full of spirit, romance, and life..."

Real Audio Clips of Charming Hostess Big Band


SEARCH

Google
Web www.charminghostess.us



   
Copyright 2006 Charming Hostess

Last updated May 14, 2011

choho@charminghostess.us Charming Hostess