Profile

Charming Hostess is three women in a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess. Their music is intensely physical, rooted in the body—voices and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. They live where Jewish and African diasporas collide, incorporating doo-wop, Pygmy counterpoint, Balkan harmony and Andalusian melody. Their music is deeply engaged with text and with questions of authenticity, montage, and the effect of music on non-verbal languages.

Charming Hostess was founded by Jewlia Eisenberg to make ambitious music for voices and rock out at the same time. Their genre might best be described as NERDY-SEXY-COMMIE-GIRLY. Charming Hostess is Jewlia Eisenberg, Marika Hughes, Cynthia Taylor and often Ganda Suthivarikom and Pameliya Kursten (all voices).

Exclusive Interview
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Special Message

Rock On! We, the ladies of Charming Hostess, are writing this letter to say more about our music to all the other Nerdy-Sexy-Commie-Girlies out there. Our names are Jewlia, Marika, and Cynthia. We live in San Francisco and Oakland. One of us loves cats and two of us love bicycles. One grew up in a wine-growing village, one in a Black and Jewish commune, and one as a princess. Our music centers around the expressive palette of the human voice. We bring the sexy, soulful sound of 60's girl groups to the 21st century avant-garde, incorporating Jewish, African and Balkan musical influences along the way. We work with text and the sounding body—vocals and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. You can hear some of our music @ www.charminghostess.us.

A lot of our work has to do with translation and diaspora consciousness. Our music lives where Jewish and African diasporas collide, incorporating Judeo-Arabic praise songs and Pygmy counterpoint, doo-wop and Yiddish nigunim, field hollers and Torah chanting. The goal is not to blend every voice to the point of erasure, but rather to create a multi-faceted whole—where differences can be transcended yet particularity is maintained. The goal is to have lots of questions!

We have a new album out called Sarajevo Blues (Tzadik, Radical Jewish Culture Series). Working from text by Bosnian poet Sem Mehmedinovic, we sing of love, resistance, and freedom under extreme constraint. In Sarajevo Blues, we take history and news as a context, but steer towards poetry as a way to focus on real human experience, on daily life under siege in Sarajevo. Some songs explicitly speak of war, and some of cafe culture, underground sexuality, and the nature of evil. It sounds heavy, but we swear it’s mostly about the triumph of the human spirit.

It also explores these questions: What is illuminated when we look again at the familiar themes of slaughter, nationalism, the nature of evil, freedom under extreme constraint, and the response of art to grim conditions? Is an understanding of historical parallels useful for changing the present and future? Is it possible, or even desirable, to create emotional connections to brutal events that most Americans will never experience?

Exciting things coming up: We will be touring the former Yugoslavia with Bosnian, Kosovar, Croatian and Serb artists, poets and musicians on a UN-sponsored refugee reconciliation tour. Also we will be headed to the Sulha, a Palestinian/Israeli peace festival, to learn, to sing, and to party with the peaceniks!

Q&A
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Contact
www.charminghostess.us
Booking: rae@leafygreen.com
Publicity: ann@bkmusicpr.com