“Wild and Wide-Ranging”

The North Coast Journal

The e-mail from Vagabond Opera was intriguing, offering “passionate Bohemian vaudvillany, gut-bucket swing, Paris hot jazz, Arabic bellydance, tangos, Ukrainian folk-punk ballads, klezmer and vigorous originals mingling with Absurdist, Neo-Classical and European Cabaret style…” It sounded wild. I asked them to send a CD, which had an equally wild, wide-ranging feel.

My conversation with Vagabond Opera founder/accordionist Eric Stern was also wild and wide-ranging. I began with a simple request — “tell me about the genesis of the band” — and with occasional breaks to soothe his three-month-old son, Jascha, Eric launched into his life story. It began in Philadelphia, where he grew up in a bookstore run by his anarcho-syndicalist parents and which had a record collection that included music from all over the world. Despite the leftist leanings of his folks, he became interested in opera, and pursued operatic training even though he realized that it tended toward elitism. “At first opera was a beautiful, wide-open, wonderful world, but it became narrower and narrower. And my peers weren’t going to opera I also had a broadening appreciation of my own Jewish and Eastern European heritage, and I realized that there was much more of a mix to be obtained.”

And thus horizons, and his musical palate expanded. He explained that his bandmates share his broad interests and include ethno-musicologists and jazz players. But, I wondered, where did the accordion come in? That launched another long tale, one that involved a trip west, when he “tuned in, turned on and dropped out,” took a mind-expanding visit to a Rainbow Gathering and made the acquaintance of a woman in Portland, Sylvia. “I met her in her garden and fell head over heels,” he noted. Unfortunately, she eventually dumped him. He could not get her off his mind, at least not until the day he saw an accordion in a Philly pawn shop window and went inside and played it for an hour of more. “I realized I hadn’t thought of Sylvia the entire time,” he recalled.

He would eventually busk his way back across country to Oregon, assemble some like-minded musicians in Portland’s wide-open scene and begin his experiment in re-thinking the idea of opera. The rest is history.

Bob Doran - view publication’s website