The pre-2002 Charming Hostess (also known as Charming Hostes… Read Full Bio ↴Early Work:
The pre-2002 Charming Hostess (also known as Charming Hostess Big Band) was a rock band that embraced a genderfuck sensibility (the women often wore mustaches while the men wore dresses). Early Charming Hostess music drew on women's vocal traditions (primarily from Eastern Europe and North Africa), and integrated them with American folk forms both white and black. Charming Hostess was founded in the fertile anarchy of Barrington Co-op (aka Barrington Hall), and nurtured by the West Oakland arts community, along with other coeval bands such as Fibulator and Eskimo. Half of Charming Hostess was also in Idiot Flesh/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. The final effect was of a hoedown where bodacious babes belted the blues in Bulgarian while a Punk-Klezmer band rocked out in accompaniment.
The genre of this incarnation of ChoHo is described by the band as "Klezmer-Punk/Balkan-Funk". Recordings of Charming Hostess Big Band include "Eat" (Vaccination, 1998) and the more recent "Punch" (ReR, 2005) Charming Hostess Big Band was: Jewlia Eisenberg (voice, direction), Carla Kihlstedt (voice, fiddle), Nina Rolle (voice, accordion), Wes Anderson (drums), Nils Frykdahl (guitar, flute, saxophone, percussion), and Dan Rathbun (bass)."
Jewlia Eisenberg, Marika Hughes, Cynthia Taylor,
Jason Ditzian, Shahzad Ismaily, Ches Smith.
- plus, often Ganda Suthivarakom and/or Pameliya Kursten (all vocals).
Honored guests on 2010 The Bowls Project album include:
Marc Ribot, Jenny Scheinman, Megan Gould, Jessica Troy, Nils Frykdahl, Dawn McCarthy, Ganda Suthivarakom, Boris Martzinovsky, Aaron Kierbel, and Nir Waxman.
Current Work:
The Bowls Project, an album and installation from Charming Hostess released Summer 2010.
The Bowls Project Album:
Based on inscriptions from ancient Babylonian Jewish amulets, The Bowls Project, Tzadik sings of mysticism and magic, angels and demons, and the trials and joys of love and sex. Especially audible are the voices of Talmudic-era women: their work, hopes and dreams. Weaving together Babylonian devotional songs, apocalyptic American folk music and a radical take on ritual power, The Bowls Project marks the deepest and most creative work by Charming Hostess yet.
The Bowls Project Installation & Sound Sculpture:
As a performance installation and interactive sound sculpture that takes place in a 40’ vaulted dome. Featuring new music composed and performed by Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess, The Bowls Project is based on texts from ancient Babylonian amulets. The culmination of five years of research, The Bowls Project will
run June through August 2010 at Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts. An estimated 15,000 people will visit and interact with
the installation.
The Bowls Project Background:
Bowl amulets were common 1500 years ago in the area
that is now Iraq. Simple bowls were inscribed with a
householder’s secrets and desires and then buried under
the doorway to protect the home. The bowl texts are
about “secrets of the home”: love and intimacy, angels and
demons, and the trials and joys of daily life. Audible in these
texts are the individual voices of women from this period
-their work, hopes, and dreams. These spiraled inscriptions
are among the few existing records of female voices during
the time and place of the Babylonian Talmud.
All Work:
The music primarily springs from three women with an emphasis in the body--voices and vocal percussion, hand claps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. The work grows from diaspora consciousness: both Jewish and African. Stylistically, Charming Hostess incorporates doo-wop, Pygmy counterpoint, Balkan harmony and Andalusian melody. Contemporary influences on the band include Meredith Monk and Reinette l'Oranaise. The music often explores existing text and overlays the composer's (Jewlia Eisenberg) own questions of authenticity, montage, and the effect of music on non-verbal languages.
The 2002 CD (Trilectic, Tzadik Records) explored the political/erotic nexus of Walter Benjamin and his Marxist muse, Asja Lacis. The 2004 CD (Sarajevo Blues, Tzadik) sets Bosnian poetry by Semezdin Mehmedinović as a form of love and resistance to the brutalization of war.
Expulsion
Charming Hostess Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
That day, one of them- holding the body of a dead sparrow by its claws - came up to someone walking along King Tomislav Street and said:
"You'll be dead too, when my army gets here."
The lyrics of Charming Hostess's song Expulsion paint a vivid picture of the horrors of war and the displacement of people that often accompanies it. The Chetniks, a Serbian paramilitary group, are described as banishing mental patients from Jagomir to the city, indicating a callous disregard for the well-being of vulnerable individuals. The image of one of the mental patients holding the body of a dead sparrow is jarring, a reminder of the fragility of life and how quickly it can be lost in times of conflict. The patient's ominous warning to someone on the street of their impending death when "my army gets here" further underscores the sense of pervasive danger, paranoia, and hopelessness that permeates the song.
Overall, the lyrics of Expulsion convey a sense of dislocation and despair, as well as the senseless brutality of war. Through the image of the mental patients being banished, Charming Hostess highlights the plight of those who are often most vulnerable in times of conflict, and the futility of trying to make sense of violence and chaos.
Line by Line Meaning
The Chetniks banished the mental patients from Jagomir to the city.
The Chetniks forcibly expelled mentally ill patients from the town of Jagomir and sent them to the city.
That day, one of them - holding the body of a dead sparrow by its claws - came up to someone walking along King Tomislav Street and said:
On that day, one of the expelled patients, who was holding a dead sparrow by its claws, approached someone walking along King Tomislav Street and said:
"You'll be dead too, when my army gets here."
"You will also die when my army arrives," said the patient, possibly referring to a delusional army in their mind.
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