West Philadelphia Orchestra
WPO
Self Released
By Jose Fritz
When I am ill I sometimes hallucinate. I mean seriously ill and bed-ridden, not just the sniffles, I mean fucking feverish, with the hot and cold flashes, the sweats and body pain. This is not an unheard of symptom. My hallucinations bear a full set of stimuli for the senses: tactile, gustatory, olfactory, all unreal sights and sounds are available in psychedelic Technicolor™ compatible with Qdraphonic™ systems. The soundtrack, even when I was a very small lad, was always gypsy music.
I called it gypsy music. I was too unworldly to know about klezmer or about the Romanys, Slavic folk music, or Turkish wedding bands for that matter. I was ignorant. All I knew is that a mad 12-piece band was playing accordions, fiddles, clarinets, and a that their small brass section was ablaze playing the devils serenade.
So I understand why the West Philadelphia Orchestra gives me the fear. The music has a magical quality, and I mean that in the darkest and most arcane sense or the word. They manage to produce originals that feel both modern and authentic. Raymond Scott has nothing on their inventiveness and verve. Their version of the traditional “Geaba Mai Ma Duca Acasa” would make Romica Puceanu weep.
The West Philadelphia Orchestra includes over a dozen mad musicians from the City of Brotherly Love. This many-headed beast was born in September of 2006, when Gregg Mervine assembled seven musicians on a porch in West Philly porch to raise a ruckus. The mêlée continued and spilled over into a regular eudaemonistic series of gigs at Tritone.
Most of this self-titled album is instrumental, as the hooks don’t work around the words dance, hey, baby, honey, love, lover, girl, girlfriend, woman or yeah. The hooks emanate directly from composition and songcraft. Mervine becomes the encomiast for the ancient discipline of klezmer. The meaning of each song is as mysterious, and equally imbued, as they are with feelings of despair and mirth. The wordless songs are tales of death and decay in a big city, and also of life, exaltation, and escape to the moon.
If you don’t get this record, then I got nothing for you. It’s not a rock record. You’re going to have to leave your comfort zone. I’m not going to be able to put you there, or to break it down so that you’ll understand. Some people didn’t get it when Van Morrison sang TB Sheets in 1967, but it became stately, a classic unto itself and an archetype even to musicians that were stately and classic themselves. The record is every bit as great as I claim. All I can do is offer this counsel, listen to it again, enlightenment will come.
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