Jewlia Eisenberg to Speak at MIT: Sept 15

Jewlia Eisenberg

For Immediate Release: August 8, 2005
Contact: Mary Haller
Director of Arts Communication
MIT Office of the Arts
20 Ames St., Rm E15-205
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-4006, e-mail haller@media.mit.edu

"She sets lyrics about politics, jealousy and pizza to a world of styles, from klezmer to pygmy-style counterpoint, humanizing a great thinker while having plenty of fun."
--The New York Times

"Jewlia Eisenberg's work is irreverent and ambitious. Charming Hostess radiates female energy and their singing transforms the spirit."
--The San Francisco Chronicle

"Jewlia Eisenberg's new record, Trilectic, kicks brainiac ass."
--The Village Voice

Cambridge, MA....MIT presents composer and musician Jewlia Eisenberg in the 2005 Katzenstein Lecture: "Sounds Like Home: Voice, Text, and Diaspora Consciousness in Nerdy-Sexy-Commie-Girlieland, A Conversation with Composer/Musician Jewlia Eisenberg" on Thursday, September 15 at 7 p.m. in Room 6-120, (enter 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge). Eisenberg will discuss her music with the band, Charming Hostess, an oral world "where Jewish and African diasporas collide, incorporating doo-wop, Pygmy counterpoint, Balkan harmony and Andalusian melody."

While a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from September 13-16, Eisenberg will visit classes and labs and meet with faculty, staff and students.

A New York native, Eisenberg grew up in a Black and Jewish commune in Brooklyn where many of her caregivers were labor and community organizers. As a young girl, she was a part of what she calls "a musical culture" in which she was expected to "lead songs on picket lines, demonstrations, meetings, to teach and preach... A lot of my preoccupation with diaspora consciousness and multiple voices in dialogue comes from my oddball childhood."

Eisenberg was further influenced by the combined musical tastes of her parents: a mother who played classical music in their home and a father with a strong interest in world music. Fittingly, she followed formal music study at the University of California at Berkeley with trip abroad to study the music of Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Israel, and Egypt.

For the past eight years Jewlia Eisenberg has collaborated with Marika Hughes and Cynthia Taylor to form the group, Charming Hostess. Their music, composed by Eisenberg and performed by the vocal trio, chisels out a genre of its own. One might best describe it as belonging to the genre of "NERDY-SEXY-COMMIE-GIRLIE." Eisenberg has received critical acclaim for her albums: Trilectic and The Grim Arithmetic of Water; and Charming Hostess albums: Sarajevo Blues, Punch, Thick, and Eat.

For more information on Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess, please visit: http://charminghostess.us/.

Eisenberg's talk is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are necessary. Info: (617) 253-2341.

August 31 UPDATE -- Charming Hostess concert added.

Charming Hostess, whose music is rooted in the body—voices and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence, will perform a free concert on Friday, September 16 at 8 p.m. in Room 54-100 (access via 21 Ames St). The performance will feature works from their new CD, "Sarajevo Blues" (Tzadik), which draws on Bosnian poetry of love and resistance, celebrating the triumph of the human spirit. In "Sarajevo Blues," Charming Hostess takes history and news as a context, but steers towards poetry as a way to focus on daily life under siege. Some songs explicitly speak of war, and others of cafe culture, underground sexuality, freedom and the nature of evil.

"Charming Hostess makes music like no other… Thrown in with lively North African wedding songs and Eastern European folk songs are originals that display a proudly feminist, radical-Jewish, pro-sex sensibility," wrote the New York Times.

The concert is presented by the MIT Office of the Arts and the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies.

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