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Charming Hostess

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Everybody’s favorite band (a self-defined genre), they are: Jewlia Eisenberg, Marika Hughes, Cynthia Taylor - plus, often Ganda Suthivarakom and/or Pameliya Kursten (all vocals).

Current Work: Today, 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.

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.
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