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PRESS KIT

CHARMING HOSTESS BIO

Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess sing from their revelatory new album, Sarajevo Blues (Tzadik), a tour de force of vocal brains and brawn. Working from text by Bosnian poet Sem Mehmedinovic, Charming Hostess sings of love, resistance, and freedom under extreme constraint. Jewlia's bold compositional voice brings the sexy, soulful sound of 60's girl groups to the 21st century avant-garde, incorporating Jewish, African and Balkan musical influences along the way.

Charming Hostess is three women in a whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm, and radical smarts. Their music is rooted in the body--voices and vocal percussion, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence. Charming Hostess lives where Jewish and African Diasporas collide, incorporating doo-wop, Pygmy counterpoint, Balkan harmony and Sufi melody. Their last CD (Trilectic, Tzadik) explored the political/erotic world with humor and sensuality. Their genre is best described as: NERDY-SEXY-COMMIE-GIRLIE.

In Sarajevo Blues, Charming Hostess takes history and news as a context, but steers towards poetry as a way to focus on real human experience, on daily life under siege in Sarajevo. Some songs explicitly speak of war, and some of cafe culture, underground sexuality, and the nature of evil. It sounds heavy, but we swear it is mostly about the triumph of the human spirit.

CHARMING HOSTESS PRESS

Trilectic is an album to file between Meredith Monk and Sweet Honey In The Rock. That's some space to occupy, but New Yorker Jewlia Eisenberg, now based in Oakland, California, covers a lot off stylistic ground, fronting the a cappella outfit Charming Hostess in a dazzling display of vocal agility, wit, emotional flexibility, and imaginative depth.
-- The Wire

The songs on Jewlia Eisenberg’s album, Trilectic, are blitheand frisky. 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.
-- New York Times

Jewlia Eisenberg’s new record, Trilectic, kicks brainiac ass.
-- Village Voice

Eisenberg’s songs are hilarious and touching, and they run the gamut from hard-edged and powerful to sweet and soulful.
-- New Yorker

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

Jewlia Eisenberg unleashes music brilliantly conceived and performed…The sound of these powerful voices coming together is truly uplifting and even implicitly political.
-- San Francisco Bay Guardian

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