Vagabond Opera / The Mad Maggies / Amber Lee

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.

The Mad Maggies are eight musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area who happily careen across the musical map whipping up pleasingly unusual, dance-inducing tunes in a startling array of styles. Call it world-inspired, power folk, or try Gypsy-funk brass band bumps into Gaelic renegades take turns with neo-polka enthusiasts, whatever, no matter -- it's a pleasant frenzy.

Composer/singer/accordionist Maggie Martin is responsible for this musical mayhem of accordion, sax, trombone, tuba, trumpet, guitars and percussion. Her credits include 13 years as squeeze artist with Polkacide, San Francisco's one and only hardcore polka band.

Amber Lee and the Anomalies have a unique blend of fun, soulful and unusual songs that take you on an imaginative musical adventure. Combining accordion, banjo, fiddle, drums and vocals, they tell captivating stories about whaler’s wives, rural cemeteries, glowing estuaries, bumps in the road, and rodeo clowns in roadside bars. With influences ranging from Gypsy tunes, to Celtic Sea Songs, to Gospel and Old-Time music, their sound suggests distant, dream-like memories of traveling from the Old Country to the New, crossing the ocean in a wooden ship by the light of an oil lamp.