This article appeared in the Aug. 29, 2004 Jewish Advocate.

Voicing an international dimension:

Jewlia Eisenberg’s Charming Hostess to perform Aug. 30

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Corresondent

Growing up in a socialist, multicultural commune in Brooklyn, Jewlia Eisenberg was exposed to an unusually broad range of artistic expression. Music, poetry and dance from all over the world were integral to the group, not only in daily life, but in its day care and community center programs as well. Through college and a move to San Francisco, Eisenberg continued to bridge the boundaries of varied musical and performance genres.

This Monday evening at 8 p.m., her vocal group, Charming Hostess, will appear at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square, Cambridge. The self-described “nerdy-sexy-commie-girlies” will perform work from their “Sarajevo Blues” CD, to be released in November on New York-based avant-sax musician John Zorn’s Tzadik label.

The composition and musicianship classes Eisenberg enrolled in at Berkeley paved the way for Three Women's Voices, her first a capella group. She describes Charming Hostess, which also features cellist Marika Hughes and vocalist Cynthia Taylor, as “three women in a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm and radical braininess.” The group is in the midst of an East Coast tour; in 2000, they played in Philadelphia’s Sixth Annual Intergalactic Jewish Festival. They have also appeared in Tel-Aviv, where they are set to return in March.

Eisenberg’s father, a community organizer, was involved with the Brooklyn center for 25 years; her mother, a professor who writes for “Science Times,” eventually moved to Manhattan. Eisenberg, a composer, bassist and extended-technique vocalist, first learned and taught music at the enclave’s camp. Although its attendees were mainly Jews and African-Americans, Puerto Rican as well as civil rights and labor-themed songs were popular, as was Balkan music. Eisenberg lived among a group of black Jews; her first arrangement was The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela.” Prior to composing her own music, she also arranged the Black National Anthem, Civil War and other historic songs. “My music inhabits an African/Jewish Diaspora crossroads, where sounds are drawn from the female body,” she explains.

Eisenberg also curates the Oakland Radical Film Series, is an active Bay Area lay cantor, and a Tikea fellow, one of 15 educators of Jewish teens with the San Francisco-based Bureau of Jewish Education and the East Bay Federation’s Center for Jewish Living and Learning. At the Oakland Midrasha, she teaches "Fast Forverts," and “The J Train is Coming!” to teens. Both classes involve a trip that explores Yiddish culture in New York.

Her last CD, “Trilectic,” also on Tzadik, focused on political and erotic themes in the life of Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and his muse, Asja Lacis. She describes “Sarajevo Blues” as “music of love and resistance during wartime,” with doo-wop, Pygmy counterpoint, Balkan harmony and Andalusian melody in the mix. Set to the poems of Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, the work is a “form of love and resistance to the brutalization of war,” she says, noting that “the poems honor a cosmopolitan city that for many years successfully rejected the limits of nationalism and militarism.” She is also working on “Thick,” recorded with art-funk trio Red Pocket.

"I go to rock shows all the time, where there are not many women in the audiences,” she says. “But there are a lot of women, as well as a lot of people of different ages in ours.” The group sings in Eastern European, North African, and Jewish languages; among the Bulgarian village music are reworkings of the Yiddish "Sha Shtil*" and "Di Grine Kuzine,” as well as a Sephardic song, “Mi Dimandas.”

Charming Hostess will appear on Monday, Aug. 30 at the Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge St., Inman Square Cambridge (across from the S&S Deli). Wheelchair accessible. For information, call the Gallery 617-876-6060, or visit www.zeitgeist-gallery.org.