“Bohemian Rhapsody”

- The Oregonian; Portland, OR

Last night, I was in Paris, sipping absinthe and typing away furiously on an old Blickensderfer typewriter, as rain beat against my garret apartment.

Actually, in truth, I was sitting in the gymnasium of McMenamins Kennedy School, sipping water and listening to a band called Vagabond Opera play beneath an old basketball hoop while 4-year-olds danced about in stocking feet. But for those three hours, it was easy to imagine myself living out a bohemian fantasy.

What else could you expect from a band composed of classically trained musicians, ethnomusicologists and the offspring of anarchists, who toss around words such as “absurdist” and sing songs that evoke images of “thieves, Jewish weddings (and) Parisian tramps.”

“What kind of music is this?” a girl asked her father, as the show was about to start.

“Well, it’s sort of klezmer,” he said, searching.

“What’s that?” the girl asked. “Gypsy music?”

“No,” the man said, “But they do some of that, too. It’s hard to describe what they sound like, actually.”

And it truly is. As singer, accordion player and the band’s founder, Eric Stern stepped up to the microphone and the music began, you could hear whispers of not only klezmer and Gypsy tunes, but also opera, cabaret, early jazz, sexy tangos, drunken Irish dirges, Balkan songs and the undulating swells of Arabic belly dance music.

“We get so hung up on categories,” Stern had said, the day before the show. “We live in an age when we can cross genres.”

And apparently, travel back in time, too.

As the band played that night, dressed in bowlers and top hats, and, in the case of the cellist, combat boots, I found myself imaging gas lamps and rain-slick cobblestone streets, tuberculosis and fur coats, basement taverns and underground newspapers, phonographs and hooch, haystacks and shtetls.

On the band’s Web site, Stern — who grew up in Philadelphia (where his parents owned an anarchist book store and record shop), studied opera and ran away to Paris for a time to try to make it as an artist and a writer, and when he first came to Portland, lived out of his Oldsmobile and played accordion on the streets to earn money for first month’s rent — has written that the band is “driven by a desire to rediscover, reinterpret and refresh many vigorous forms of musical expression that have fallen by our cultural wayside.”

In person he puts it another way: “I am so sick of guitars.” (”Oh, boy,” he says and smiles as he watches me write this down, because he knows that it will probably go off like a bomb for some, but then, with his shaved head and commanding voice, he’s not the shy and retiring type. )

Vagabond Opera’s show on this particular night was packed, standing room only: Older, graying couples, families, cool kids with blue hair, bald heads and avant-garde glasses.

“Feel free to sit there and just enjoy the music,” Stern told them all. “But you can also come up and dance. Don’t be afraid to be the first one.”

The first to comply, curiously enough, were the farthest away from the Old World past this music evokes: the audiences’ children, of whom there were a dozen, at least. They flocked to the front, as though hypnotized. “That man,” saxophonist Robin Jackson told me between sets, nodding his top-hatted head toward Stern, “He’s a pied piper.”

Soon it was a preschool mosh pit, with children spinning and leaping and kicking up their heels and screaming in crazed abandon. Stern and Jackson got on their knees to serenade them with saxophone and accordion, and the children engulfed them, and I worried for a minute they might carry the two off in a frenzy, like an army of ants. But the children behaved themselves.

Gradually, adults followed, also transfixed. But the children clearly understood how to channel this music better. Maybe it’s because they are better at imagining things than adults, living in other worlds, but there were moments when I looked up and they did not look young anymore, but older than anyone here.

And then the belly dancer arrived, in a rustle of silk and the tinkling of her gold coin belt. And everyone watched in wonder as Yo Shina threw her hips to the beat. By 9:30 the children had taken their exhausted parents home to bed, and the mood changed.

Now, the candles were burning low. A man and woman took the floor and stared into each other’s eyes. He whirled her around, pressing his hips hard against hers.

If ever you have wondered whether it was possible to freak dance to an accordion, I can say now with great authority, that yes, it is possible. At least, if you are listening to Vagabond Opera.

Then, two women with feathers woven through their hair and fantastically embroidered clothing, took the floor and swayed sultrily, following their own internal rhythm.

At one point during the night, Stern had sung, “I wish I was Marlene Dietrich.”

Oh, but you are, I wanted to say.

Tonight, we are whatever we want to be. Young old children. Accordion lovers. Belly dancers. Bohemian writers.

At least until the music stops.

And then I am just a woman in a dirty Civic, driving home in the dark, far, far from Paris.

Inara Verzemnieks - view publication’s website