Charming Hostess

Charming Hostess is at the intersection of voice, text and diaspora consciousness. Founded by Jewlia Eisenberg, their mission is to make lovely noise about complex ideas. She draws primarily from the sounding body: voices and winds, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. Individual voices and communal experiences come together to create a dialogic, multi-faceted whole. Charming Hostess has played all over the world. Charming Hostess centers on three voices, most often, Jewlia Eisenberg, Marika Hughes, and Cynthia Taylor.

Jewlia Eisenberg

Jewlia Eisenberg works at the intersection of voice, text and diaspora consciousness. A composer, a musician, a ritual worker, the leader of the ensemble Charming Hostess and half of Book of J, her mission was to make lovely noise about complex ideas. Her music is mostly released on the Tzadik label's Radical Jewish Culture imprint. Recordings include Sarajevo Blues on Bosnian resistance poetry and Trilectic on the political-erotic world of Walter Benjamin. She often worked in immersive installation—making hybrid spaces that incorporate music performance, visitor participation, and non-coercive ritual. Installations include Teraphim (Meridian Gallery) on household gods; The Bowls Project (YBCA) on Babylonian women’s amulets and Fierce as Death, Queer as the Song of Songs, an upcoming collaboration with the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Jewlia's work has been curated into the Prague Bienalle, the Oakland Museum, and the Museum of Peace in Uzbekistan. She performed regularly in Europe and the Americas; she has been a visiting artist at CalArts, MIT, and YIVO. Her interests included bible study and home abortions. Brooklyn born and bred, she last called Oakland home. See C.V.

Charming Hostess (big band)

Charming Hostess, as a big band, blended eerie harmonies, complex rhythms, and a playfulness about gender. Charming Hostess 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, 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 Bugarian while a punk-klezmer band rocked out in accompaniment.The genre of this incarnation of ChoHo was KLEZMER-PUNK/BALKAN-FUNK. Recordings of Charming Hostess Big Band include “Nub City” (Vaccination, 1994), "Eat" (Vaccination, 1998) and "Punch" (ReR, 2005), and now “Feast”, (! a N G R r ! ,2024). 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), Dan Rathbun (bass)and Jenny Scheinman (voice, violin). Read more about the Hostesses.

Nina Rolle

Nina Rolle (she/her) is a singer, storyteller, recovering accordionist, and former professional clown, who makes her living as a voice actor for a nefarious corporate overlord. She sang in Charming Hostess for the better part of the 90s; performed her original show, Zen Cabaret: a contemplative burlesque from 2002-2007; was co-producer and co-host of Truth Be Told story slam in Boulder, Colorado from 2013-2019. In 2021, Nina launched Giving Voice, a pro bono voice over project that amplifies the stories of select female authors through audiobooks and social advocacy. Nina is also hard at work on her memoir, so if you have any amends to make, now would be a good time. ninarolle.com

Carla Kihlstedt

Carla Kihlstedt composer, collaborator, violinist, singer, improviser, educator and instigator. Her musical voice is grounded in the economy and immediacy of song form, which allows her to explore complex worlds – the ocean, dreams, imaginary creatures, the machine age, quarantine – through many different lenses. Carla’s music is a palimpsest, connecting and layering her divergent musical experiences. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory, she spent her 20s and 30s creating and performing music with bands/composers collectives including Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Tin Hat, 2 Foot Yard, Minamo The Book of Knots and Causing a Tiger. Aesthetically speaking, the Venn Diagram of these would all have only one thing in the shared center space: Carla. But they were united by three other things: their musical clarity, their commitment to collaboration, and the deep friendships that grounded them all. https://www.carlakihlstedt.com/

Nils Frykdahl

Nils Frykdahl has perused music in continuous bursts of public activity since his boyhood in the 1970’s, when he studied the flute and music theroy with childlike intensity. The 80’s saw the transferring of this devotion to the guitar, which by the 90’s had been superceded by the voice. A flowering auspices of a show called Idiot Flesh, a difficult and viceral rock band which embraced intrusions of theater, puppetry, and dance, collaborations which have led to inkBoat. The 90’s saw many tours of a portable Idiot Flesh around the US and work with a related ethno-musicalogical group: Charming Hostess. Nils performed in Europe in ’97 and ’99, the latter as a musician and “dancer” in the Ex-it! 99 International Butoh Festival. He has also worked with the Berkeley Reperatory Theater and the Underworld Opera. His compositions have been performed at UC Berkeley and Stonybrook. The close of the millenium saw the founding of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and the music/theater duo – The Faun Fables. http://www.faunfables.com/

Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is still making music. https://www.instagram.com/thehyenaboy

Dan Rathbun

Dan Rathbun is a musician, instrument builder, and sculptor of sound. Having spent 12 years as a core member of the rock circus “Idiot Flesh” and 8 with “Charming Hostess” he now plays with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Sleepytime employs several of his self-made musical instruments. Dan co-owns Polymorph Recording and has produced and recorded countless CD’s and records in a wide range of styles. Dan has worked with Shinichi Iova-Koga since 1996 and is a founding member of the performance collective known as inkBoat. His mission with inkBoat is to employ his knowledge of sound reproduction technology to create instruments and sound generation devices, which inspire the imagination visually, sonically, and choreographically. https://tapeop.com/interviews/10/dan-rathbun/

Jenny Scheinman

Jenny Scheinman is a violinist, fiddler, singer, and writer of songs with and without words. She grew up on a homestead in Northern California and has been performing since she was a teenager. She has worked extensively with some of the most innovative jazz artists in the world such as Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Brian Blade, Nels Cline and Marc Ribot. She has also toured and recorded with numerous American songwriting legends such as Lucinda Williams, Bruce Cockburn, Rodney Crowell, Lou Reed and Ani Difranco. She is featured on the original cast recording of Anais Mitchell’s hit musical Hadestown. In March of 2015 she premiered a multi-media performance at Duke University entitled Kannapolis:A Moving Portrait which she continues to present in theaters around the country. She has released ten albums of original music: Here On Earth, The Littlest Prisoner, Mischief & Mayhem, Jenny Scheinman, Crossing The Field, 12 Songs, Shalagaster, The Rabbi’s Lover, and Live At Yoshi’s. In the fall of 2019 she released an eponymous album with her band ‘Parlour Game’ which she co-leads with drummer Allison Miller. In Downbeat Magazine’s Critics Poll 2022, she was ranked the number two jazz violinist in the world. www.jennyscheinman.com

Cynthia Taylor

Cynthia Taylor was raised in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains at Garrod Farms Stables & the Cooper/Garrod Vineyards where she learned from Mother Nature, while coaching & competing in horse vaulting. She began music early-- from lullabies with her mother to public school classical violin, choirs & musicals, and some fiddling chops, to opera at SFSU. She has performed in R&B, jazz, & techno rock bands locally and in Germany and loves working with composers. She also performed for a decade with the Oakland Opera Theater and produced her own Lullaby CD. As an arts administrator/educator she’s worked with SFJAZZ, Oasis For Girls (executive director), UNESCO via ‘06 ZeroOne San Jose international art & technology festival (education director). The program she curated at YBCA, Young Artists at Work, won the Coming Up Taller Award, from The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Cynthia is currently consulting in executive & organizational leadership with organizations related to the arts, youth, race/gender/class, community activism and good people.

Marika Hughes

Marika Hughes is a native New Yorker, a cellist, singer, a storyteller on The Moth. She grew up in a musical family – Marika’s grandfather was the great cellist Emanuel Feuermann, and her parents owned a jazz club, Burgundy, on the Upper West Side. As children, she and her younger brother were both regulars on Sesame Street, and attended the beloved Manhattan Country School. Marika continued her education in the double degree program at Barnard College and the Juilliard School, graduating with BAs in political science and cello performance, respectively.

Marika has worked with Whitney Houston, Lou Reed, Anthony Braxton, David Byrne, Adele, Henry Threadgill, D’Angelo, Idina Menzel, Nels Cline, Somi and Taylor Mac, among many others. She was a founding member of the Bay Area-based bands 2 Foot Yard (Two Foot Yard, Tzadik 2003 & Borrowed Arms, Yard Work, 2008) and Red Pocket (Thick, Tzadik 2004). She is a master teacher and director for Young Arts and a teaching-artist at Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. She currently holds the cello chair at the Broadway show, Hadestown. Marika has self-released three albums: The Simplest Thing (2011), Afterlife Music Radio (2011) and New York Nostalgia (2016). She happily leads her bands Bottom Heavy and The New String Quartet and is the co-founder and co-director of Looking Glass Arts, an artist residency and youth education program in upstate New York. With a commitment to a sliding scale fee structure, LGA is democratizing access to the space, time and natural beauty critical to artistic and educational growth. Marika lives in the countryside of Kings County.

Jason Ditzian

As a multi-wind instrumentalist and composer, Jason has performed, recorded and toured with artists such as Oakland Symphony, SF Symphony, Dohee Lee, Joan Baez, Frank London, inkBoat, Kiosk and SF Mime Troupe. He is currently clarinetist and leader of klezmer ensembles, Kugelplex and Myrtle Street Klezmer, and Publisher of online community, Klezmer.com.  Jason founded Narluga Arts consultancy in 2019 to support artists and nonprofit organizations and to help further the field of socially-engaged arts.  Jason joined Charming Hostess in 2005. He worked closely with Jewlia for many years on many projects and together they shared many adventures. 

Ganda Suthivarakom

Ganda Suthivarakom was raised in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles. She began singing at Thai Buddhist temple as a child and was kicked out of show choir in high school for eating during rehearsal. She had no formal music education, and what she knows of rhythm and harmony she learned mostly from Jewlia. In addition to Charming Hostess, she has worked with Cibo Matto, Smokey & Miho, David Byrne, John Lindaman, +/-, and many others. She lives in Los Angeles.

Max Baloian

Max Baloian is a multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker based out of Oakland, California. Born and raised in the farming community of the Central Valley, he was influenced as a child by the traditional music’s of his Armenian heritage and by the eclectic jazz, soul, rock, and ethnic records he snuck from his father’s library. By 6 years old he was studying music and life lessons with members of the folk music and politically active ensemble the Bluestein Family where he was immersed in American roots, blues, and folk music as well as Klezmer, Mid-
Eastern music, Marx Brothers films, and Yiddish slang.

Working as a professional musician in the Bay Area since 1995, he has
incorporated his diverse stew of influences into a number of DIY ensembles ranging from Avant-garde experimental orchestras, Cajun Zydeco, 60s’ Soul, Jug Band, Punk Rock Polka, Psychedelic Mid Eastern, and both Jewish spiritual and Jewish party music. Unbeknownst to him at the time, all that "training" was building toward the very lucky meeting with Jewlia Eisenberg who put Max to work as guitarist and bass player as part of the greater Charming Hostess family. In addition to "ChoHo" they also collaborated together on side projects such as Gramophone and Dynamo, The Luckies, and Kugelplex.

Dan Cantrell

Dan Cantrell is an Emmy award winning composer known for his innovative and evocative film and theatre scoring approach, as well as his virtuosic playing abilities on the accordion, piano and musical saw. He holds a BFA degree from CalArts where he majored in Composition and Piano performance. Dan is a self taught master of the accordion, excelling at Balkan, Romani, Eastern European, and Klezmer styles. In recent years, Dan has performed and recorded with Tom Waits, Joanna Newsom, Beats Antique, Bono, Danny Elfman, members of the Klezmatics and Fishbone. Dan’s broad ranging musical portfolio reaches across video games, cartoons, film, television, web broadcast, and self produced albums.

Laura Inserra

Laura Inserra is a sound alchemist. She lives and creates at the confluence of music, wisdom schools, and cutting edge technology. Both a self-taught and classically trained musician, her career has had many facets — multi-instrumentalist, music teacher, sound therapist, and producer.

A world-renowned Hang musician, Laura plays a large variety of unique ancient and modern instruments - among others Zapotec clay flutes, the Mongolian shamanic jaw harp, Tibetan bowls, the Laotian khen, the Australian didgeridoo, the African djembe, shamanic drums, and numerous western percussions.

Born and raised in Sicily, she now lives in the SF Bay Area and works around the globe.

Jason Levis

The music of composer, drummer, and percussionist Jason Levis lives in the rich spaces where styles intersect and musical languages merge. His broad artistic scope to includes jazz, contemporary improvisation, and modern classical composition, and dub. His wide-ranging creative efforts are skillfully bound by his innate sense of timbre, sonic space, rhythmic force, and his insatiable interest in discovery. Over the years his passion and curiosity have led him to search out the intersections of musical paths less traveled, and the resulting unique perspective is reflected in his music. Levis has led and been a collaborator in numerous ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area and Berlin, Germany. These include the chamber/jazz ensembles Jason Levis Trio and Jason Levis Septet; live dub ensemble Joseph's Bones; the Berlin Boom Orchestra; the duo B. experimental band - a large ensemble for improvisers co-led by Lisa Mezzacappa; Italian cinema inspired group Citta di Vitti, Junior Reggae, and many more. Levis holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University of California, Berkeley and is a Professor at the California Jazz Conservatory.

Book of J

Book of J is engaged in new psalmody, drawing from the rich biblical commentary of Black and White American traditional music, Yiddish songs of ghosts and police violence, and piyutim (paraliturgical songs) with a queer bent. Expect old-time religion, radical politics, angels and demons, workers and bosses, diasporic languages, erotic longing, close-text reading, hard times resolved and destiny fulfilled. Also, singing along is good. Book of J is Jewlia Eisenberg (Charming Hostess) and Jeremiah Lockwood (Sway Machinery). Here’s more on the elements of our tight braid...

Jermiah Lockwood

Jeremiah Lockwood is a singer, guitarist, composer and scholar with an intimate knowledge of musical traditions and techniques that stretch from Piedmont blues to the cantorial tradition of his family. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. Jeremiah's music career began with over a decade of apprenticeship to legendary Piedmont Blues musician Carolina Slim, playing in the subways of New York City. He also trained under his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg and performed in his choir. Jeremiah’s band The Sway Machinery seeks inspiration from diverse realms of experience related to the cultural geography of New York City. Jeremiah received his PhD from Stanford University in Jewish Studies in 2021. His thesis and current book project focus on contemporary cantors in the Brooklyn Chassidic community.

Red Pocket

Where can you find the dark underbelly of the Supremes? With Red Pocket a bottom-heavy girl group where cello, bass, and drums groove under sassy vocals. Red Pocket’s genre-bending tunes will guarantee a soul-filled hoedown at the release party for their CD, Thick released on Tzadik!

Jewlia Eisenberg plays bass and sings. Experimental vocal technique meets freak of the week. After years of leading avant-pop girlcore extravaganza Charming Hostess, the songs she writes for Red Pocket are filled with the joy of romance. Marika Hughes plays cello and sings. Classically trained, she now prefers to rock the low end: Her cello parts incorporate lyrical melodies, funky bass riffs and rhythm guitar punch. Scott Amendola is an amazing drummer who plays with everyone (Nels Cline Singers, TJ Kirk, Scott Amendola Band) because he is so damn good. Incorporating live electronics and hand percussion with the genius of the great funky drummers, Scott holds the estrogen in Red Pocket together.