Vagabond Opera and Jason Webley

It's Vagabond Opera's biggest show of the year! Come join us in style in celebration of all things dead, living and in between! A stunning night of music, theater and more and featuring a long-awaited collaboration with Jason Webley, the original monster on the accordion!

Based in the Pacific Northwest, yet encompassing the world, Vagabond Opera delivers passionate offerings of Bohemian cabaret. Paris hot Jazz, Yiddish Theater, Tangos, Ukrainian folk-punk ballads, and vigorous originals invoke a world of Riverboat gambling Queens, Turkish Belly dance, and the enigmatic Marlene Dietrich. Weaving elements of Kurt Weil, Duke Ellington and Edith Piaf with absurdist flair, theatrics and an old world mood, Vagabond Opera presents the new wave of opera--lusty (trained) voices singing in 11 languages, with accordion, saxophones, bass, percussion, dance, and costumes, all played with exuberance, skill and a gritty Vagabond edge. This is Opera liberated and reinvented for the rest of us.

Jason Webley is foot-stomping, tomato-loving accordionist from Seattle. His combination of folk, gypsy, and punk is most often compared to Tom Waits or Vladimir Vysotsky but also draws from Leonard Cohen, Shel Silverstein, Bob Dylan, Neutral Milk Hotel, Nick Cave and the Dead Kennedys.

Some of Webley's most famous songs are the apocalyptic "Dance While the Sky Crashes Down" (which appears on his album Against the Night), and his most common show finale, "The Drinking Song" (which appears on Counterpoint). He has recently released a series of "collaborative singles" -- including ones with Seattle poet Jay Thompson, Michigan songwriter Andru Bemis, and Reverend Payton's Big Damn Band. His fifth album, "The Cost of Living", was released in October 2007.