the hum / By Bob Doran

Luminescent

(March 29, 2007)  The p.r. e-mail hooked me with its description of The Luminescent Orchestrii as: “a gypsy tango klezmer punk acoustic string band from New York City.” There was a link to the band’s webpage; I spared no time and immediately downloaded a few luminescent MP3s - brilliant shimmering songs with complex driving rhythms, amazing East-Euro-style harmonies on the vocals, a perfect fusion of old and new sensibility - then checked their MySpace for more music, pausing to click the button to add them as “friends.” Once I’d added the songs to iTunes, I started making a mix to burn for a friend, combining the L.O. music with tracks from Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, Klezmorim and Manu Chao among others. An e-mail showed up in my box midway through the process; someone had posted a comment on my MySpace, an invitation from the band to see them play at Humboldt Brews Wednesday, April 4.

Since the p.r. also had a Brooklyn phone number for fiddler Sarah Alden, I figured she had to be home and gave her a ring. Sure enough she was at her computer, although she said she’d rather be playing her fiddle. “But we’re just starting, and it’s a small business, so you have to do all this business stuff.”

Her path to NYC began on a farm in Ohio where she grew up and learned old timey fiddling. “I moved to Asheville, N.C., to work on another farm, and at some point I was kind of like, ‘I’m just going to become an old hag playing old time music and farming.’ I needed to break out of it. So I got into klezmer music, got this record by a revival band from the ‘70s, Klezmorim, and I e-mailed the guy from the band to ask them about the music.”

At that point in our conversation I told her about the mix I was assembling, which by chance included the same band that sent her life in a new direction. Turns out she knew most of the stuff on my mix - L.O. has even played with Ori Kaplan of Balkan Beat Box.

Her virtual exploration of klezmer eventually led her to Bob Cohen, a guy living in Budapest. “He was telling me all these stories and at some point wrote saying, ‘Just get a ticket and come over here.’ So I went there out of the blue.”

She traveled through the villages of Romania. “I learned a lot of dances and tried to learn the music, which was just way too fast for me, but I fell in love with the culture. It’s amazing the village culture - it’s my idea of heaven. When I came back I flew into New York and decided I’d try to make it here, so I stayed.”

While she could not make inroads with the insular East European community in New York, she found some like-minded musicians and assembled a band. That was a few years ago. Since then the band has toured in Romania and recorded a couple of albums stateside.

“We’re working on our new album, recording right up until we leave to go on tour,” Sarah reported. “Then we have another huge European tour we’re going to do. We’re excited about coming out there. We’re playing with Fishtank Ensemble after the show in Arcata; I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. It’s a great band. Their fiddle player is someone I met the first time I went to Europe eight years ago. He was traveling around - he and his girlfriend had built this wagon and traveled with another amazing musician with horses and wagons. They went from France to Romania collecting songs. I ran into them in this Romanian village and thought, what the fuck, who are you guys? They eventually disbanded - Alice [the girlfriend] is still there, she bought a house actually and she’s doing Gypsy rights stuff - Fabrice came back and met Ursula and he and Ursula are in Fishtank, where he plays fiddle. So after meeting there a long time ago, we reconnected like two years ago. Crazy huh?”

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