Get on the official e-mail list - email us at westphiladelphiaorchestra@gmail.com .
Check out our Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/westphillyorchestra
'Overflowing joy' and 'reckless abandon' are what we aim to achieve with our music. We open your ears with our compositions, arrangements, and improvisations, AND we get you dancing. We have played rock shows with Gogol Bordello, Dr. Dog, Dengue Fever, and Stinking Lizaveta, folk/world music concerts in association with Traditional Crossroads Music Series and the Philly Folk Song Society and the Noreaster Festival in Mio, MI and Ann Arbor's Top of the Park Festival, the Ollin Kan radical world music festival of Mexico City, Bethlehem Musikfest, the Philly Folk Fest, Philadelphia City Hall, and numerous street parties, clubs, treehouses, theater stages, hotel ballrooms and parks throughout the region. In the same week that we opened for Gogol Bordello, we also played a concert with a proper chamber orchestra, Camerata Orchestra, which was nearly too surreal a juxtaposition, but both performances were just right.
WPO will play happy music for weddings, bittersweet music for funerals, at Carnegie Hall, defiant music for protests, soundtracks to silent films (Battleship Potemkin was a huge success and we'll do it again soon!), silly music for children, road music for motorcycle conventions, rhythm tracks for Mavado, and sexy music for burlesque. Our monthly dance parties at Tritone have become a Philly institution.
Email all inquiries to westphiladelphiaorchestra@gmail.com or phone us at 215.804.9760 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 215.804.9760 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 215.804.9760 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 215.804.9760 end_of_the_skype_highl
. Check out our blog: http://www.westphiladelphiaorchestra.blogspot.com/
From a casual jam session among friends in Fall of 2006 on a West Philly porch to sizzling dance parties, debaucherous rock concerts, and international music festivals in 2010, West Philadelphia Orchestra, a brass band with musical roots in Eastern Europe, is a band that simply happened. There was no premeditated vision, no DNA, but rather our existence preceded our essence. Stewarded by percussionist/composer Gregg Mervine, WPO is an assemblage of eclectic Philadelphia musicians from a variety of backgrounds: Dawn Webster was a strictly classical trumpeter before she found WPO, while Patrick Hughes and Adam Hershberger were serious jazz players; Jack Ohly writes beautiful songs for voice and upright bass, and plays Brazilian music (Old Goats); and some of us had not much musical experience, like Janos Perge, who was doing neuroscience research and hadn't played violin in 10 years before he joined the band.
As we evolve, improvise, and explore other sounds and rhythms, we're incorporating broader influences like dancehall, klezmer, Turkish music, and jazz - especially the spirit of Sun Ra (the northwest Philly Arkestra). With the voices of Jack Ohly and Petia Zamfirova, the screaming sax of Elliott Levin, the barbaric yawps of Jim Parker's sousaphone, and the compositional ingenuity of percussionist Gregg Mervine and tenor horn players Larry Toft and Brendan Cooney, we're creating a unique sound that captures the many feelings of life. Our repertoire includes classic Romanian songs made famous by Romica Puceanu, Bulgarian wedding music, classic Serbian and Roma songs, as well as re-visioned jazz tunes, some old world klezmer songs, and original tunes that stretch traditional harmony (ala Bartok). This mixture can be heard on our debut release, 'WPO,' self-released in Oct. 2008, and a new record is in the works.
View the complete West Philadelphia Orchestra tour schedule
