O•VAD•YA is a new adventure in music. Six unique people combined to fuse an utterly uncategorizable, addicitve sound. The originator's [Hurley] previous band received affirmations such as label offers, positive reviews from Chicago Tribune, Illinois Entertainer, Guitar World, New York's CMU and charting in CMJ, etc., etc., and is excited about the unique combination found in these seven people to flesh out an extremely unusual aural journey...

BS: Starting off, what are the instruments that you all play?
Deeanne Ebner: Rhythm Guitar, Lead and Backing Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Roger Ebner: Tenor sax, Wind Synth, Duduk
Ben Ebner (sometimes play with us): Dumbek, Oud
Linda Wolf: Electric Violin, Alto Sax, Vocals
M Hurley: Lead and “lhthm” guitar, some bass, mandolin, some banjo, acoustic in multi tunings lead and backing vocals, most songs
Jordan “Pi” Lemon: Drums and Percussion
BS: When did you start to play them?
Hmmm, I’ll guess based on what the guys have told me:
Linda grew up playing viola, and picked up sax in college, just to see if she could do it. She also is learning drums and bass. Deanne picked up guitar early teens (it won out over gymnastics); Roger in Junior High (Sax) and is learning the Duduk, an Armenian reed instrument for the MidEast textures. Pi wanted to play drums as a kid but couldn't for various reasons and then as an adult (34) started. Then when he was taking jazz lessons I found him slumped over the xerox one day and asked him to flounder around in our band. I started at 8 or 9. I saw my first electric guitar as a kid and went ape-doodoo. So I hocked my mom and she bought me a railroad tie with an action of six inches off the neck from Turnstile and the rest is history. Ben (he's 20) is a born genius. His mom had an unusually hard labor and when they pulled Ben out he was clutching in his tiny little fingers, a Dumbek. Even then. No kidding.

BS: When did you start performing in public?
I was 16, coffee houses. Linda, maybe college? Roger in college, Deanne as a teen, Pi-ball—well with us...
How did you all meet to form the band? I had a band (a very serious band aiming strictly to the major labels, back when we were all several pounds and years lighter). Just when things were heating up, I got sick and was out of the scene. Then after five years, I asked a friend just to consider maybe doing a couple open mics. That friend plus Linda, plus another friend who did us a favor by playing bass made “Ovadya lite.” I decided to resurrect my harder stuff and nabbed Pi over a xerox machine (he heard me play bass and was stupid enough ask if I was a musician).
We needed a bass player and mutual friends knew of a one who joined, and Deanne went to my congregation. I saw the passion with which she led the music and sang (granted, not rock and roll but I forgave her) and I wanted to ask her to consider. So she joined dragging Roger and our horn section was born. (What's amusing to me is that up til then the way I always formed bands was to do the auditions, the display ads, the music referral services, the flyers. This was all pretty fluky and casual.)
What were some of your individual influences in music and how did that shape the development of O Vad Ya? (In terms of the music and artist related influences.)
Linda: Earth Wind and Fire, Roger, bands like Rat Dog, Pi: Zappa, Flecktones, Zappa, anyone who ever played with Zappa, and more Zappa, and me, well my tastes are frightening. Let's just say that if you stuck Rachid Taja, System of a Down, Hassan Erraji, Shlomo Bar, Tuvan Throat Singing and Kings X in a blender I'd be severely happy. (Don't know the names? World/Ethnic music + Hard psychedelic rock = bliss.)
BS: Where did the name come from?
I forced it on the band basically. I lived in Israel briefly, studying for a Mdiv degree I didn't finish and partying in the Mea Shearim. I liked the sound of what is a common name over there, Ovadya. (Ovadya's like "Mike" or "Bill.") The dumbed down western way to say it which I hate is Obadiah (As in “OO Buh Dah yuh, hand me that there six pack will ya?”) we are not Obuddahya.
Anyway the name actually means “Servant of God” which I suspect is a lot to live up to. Turns out there's more to it: Ovadya is a famous ger in Judaism (which means convert). One reason I was in Israel was to wrestle personally with the whole who is the messiah business and other things. I had considered a traditional ("Orthodox") conversion to Judaism. I didn't make that connection tho until about three years after the band was around (thanks Ben and Katherine).
BS: What would you consider to be highlights of your aural journey into becoming O•Vad•Ya?
Yikes. Probably not in individual experiences but in two areas: One is discovering that the whole can truly be greater then the individuals. Even as the main songwriter, when things jell, ands there's a chemistry between six very disparate parts, it's priceless. Two is in moments of transcendence if we are able to connect meaningfully with the audience and individuals thru both playing and lyrics.

BS: Who is the main song writer and who does the musical arrangements?
I usually present a fairly complete song and bark out what I want (“More purple!!!”) and then the band takes it over and it morphs into something totally other (see for example, Horeni, when we do it live. A lot of that is due to our then-bass player, Dave Greenspan. He just took it and spun it.)

BS: How does the song writing come about? Life. Deanne likes to say I write about death. Much as that is an admirable goal, I have to say there is a “melancholy hope,” to quote a friend behind this stuff. My dad was a violent alcoholic and we grew up in that environment. My mom struggled to keep things together and left us alone. It was a fertile environment to write in. My dad's legacy to me was providing a painful catalyst to write.

BS: Do you write the music first then song or song first then musical arrangement?
Yes.

BS: Molly I have read that you are self taught musician. What is the upshot of being self taught as opposed to having lessons?
Yee ha! (see below [tuning descriptors] for evidence of the limits of self taughtness.)

BS: I also read you play 11 different tunings? 10, but thanks. Not all ten at a show (thank G-d). (Double unison tuning, CGCGCD, DADGAD, EADGBE, Open G, Open C, Drop D, Drop D with a twist, open C with a twist, fourths, Nashville hmmm. I guess it's eleven. I'm shitty at math.)

BS: How do you describe your style of play guitar or mandolin?
“Lead and Lhythm.” Found out the hard way. I don’t play straight “rhythm” on anything. I do stuff that is kind of wacky or so I've been told. In other bands and with excellent lead guitarists, they always took the straight leads because they couldn't give me what I wanted (which is actually contrapuntal.) Good examples of that are Sleeping Giant on Driftless and in our current tune Techezena. Listen for the delay guitar (which may sound like a synth; it's not. Then there are leads over it; but there are also rhythm guitars underneath, so I coined the phrase “lhythm” tho I'm sure there's a real name for it somewhere.

BS: Molly your guitar playing style sounds like fret picking with your own running bass line, how did that come about to create the musical arrangement for some of the songs?
Hmmm. I think any guitar playing built into a song (and the lyrics) that I write is just my own weird stuff/style. And it is built into the song. So for instance if someone wanted to learn the song Sleeping Giant, they couldn't just play some chords, Therefore, it sets a tone for any layering of arrangements after that. So to a degree since the guitar is the matrix over which a song is hung (and for someone else it could be keys which is a whole different approach) any layering fits it. Example: If I presented a straight 1-4-5 2 bar blues, that immediately would unconsciously dictate approaches that we all came up with to arrange the song further.

BS: How would you describe your vocal tones and range?
It seems very harmonic in style, which I can't quite compare to anyone artist when describing you to others. Maybe seemlier to Joni Mitchell or sometimes I get hints of Sandy Denny or even Kate Wolf in your vocals. Right now I am so not impressed with my vocals. I frighten me. Really. Pi once asked in a nice way if my being sick changed uh... you know... my vocals. I think my voice used to be better, now it's just weird, but as we say about ugly talented actors in Hollywood, they're “Character” actors. My voice has character. That's why I asked Deanne who can blend and carry a tune and drive a tune amazingly. It makes me sound better.

Anyway, tho you are dead on. I have from the age of 17 been compared to Joni Mitchell, and also, by Illinois Entertainer and others, Sandy Denny, etc. that's probably because of what I'll call the glottal jumps. (Yodel or voice breaks). The harmonies were always there (I could hear them starting at age five). But my world expanded when a friend introduced me to Balkan harmonies, scales, intervals and esthetics (very different valuations on “good” voices), plus my time in Israel listening to Sefardic and Arabic music.
Molly your open tuning as been compared to that of Leo Kottke, Michael Hedge, Eric Johnson and others. Would you say that is a fair comparison to your guitar style? No. I am so not a genius like these guys. But I'm good at the .0000027 unique stuff I do. People compared me to a guy name Jorma Kaukonen, but I'll leave comparisons for others.

BS: Would you say your style is a mere mélange of blues licks, jazz chords and folks fingering?
Got me. Those adjectives sound like "Folk" and then when I thing of folk I think of Pete Seeger and strummed C chords. Our happy problem as a band is that (and this has been echoed by industry, not just the bass player’s girlfriend, etc) is that people can't come up with stuff to compare us to (in a good way). There's Horeni which truly veers into hard-core neo-metal, ending on an explosive Balkan style (think Ivo Pappasov’s Bulgarian Wedding Jazz band) ending after dipping into classic mid east harmonic minor scales. There's an “acoustic” song called Kaddish that starts out literally with a Turkish nikriz then veers into delta blues with a butt load of modal rock in between.

BS: What makes your songs so transcendently powerful on the CD Driftless and the new EP Black Fire?
Songs like “Blue Tubes” and “Kaddish” from Driftless which were my favorites; they seemed so delectable irresistible as well written tunes. Thanks. I hope they are powerful. Some people listen for a beat and a melody and their head takes them places as they listen. I do too. But we hope people read the lyrics. These songs are usually about struggles (like all of us) but sometimes with g-d thrown in the mix. For instance, Kaddish (named after a beautiful, traditional Jewish prayer said for a loved one who has passed away) is a true story. Before my mom died who I had been very close to, I had three dreams that she was going to die. We really did get a letter from her the day we found out. The last time I saw her, I knew it was the last. So in the song when I sing “Now that she is gone, it's finally you and me and you’re invisible, and all I want is once to see” is a dialogue with G-d. people will get what they want from these tunes, and I hope they (and us) get more.

BS: Would you describe yourself as a neo-psychedelic world fusion band? Yep. You cheated. You read our web site.

BS: I find your music is complex and multi-layered with different genres would you agree?
Yep.

BS: Where does the Jewish influence in your music come from?
For me: Israel experience, my prior commitment to Jewish people and culture. (That came ironically—or not—thru the back door of wrestling with the messiah business and my catholic-but-multi-cultured background [relatives were Jewish by marriage so I grew up comfortable both cultures] and all that led me into traditional Jewish sources. For the rest of the bandies, they have been involved also in Jewish culture/community in various ways and Deanne knows Jewish liturgical music so some of the jumps are pretty easy. (Got that? There’ll be a quiz next Tuesday.)
It is always hard to be objective about your own work, but what are the positives and negatives to your CD Driftless? Negatives: failing to capture what (at least I think what) we sound like live, especially on 9-1-1. I wanted certain tunes to be harder or more dynamic, to be faithful to the original vision in our heads. Positives: Roger found us Blaise Barton, a meticulous engineer, and drove the initial CD. So the CD could take shape. Oh yeah, and of course the art. THE ART IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOL!!

BS: How do you feel your music impacts people around you?
I dunno. If we are faithful to pull off a night where there aren't instrument glitches, if we can pull off the intricacies and the harmonies and get the meaning of songs thru, then hopefully people can connect with something higher then us all. If not, then, like Uncommon Ground recently, people will connect with a transcendent blast of ear-bleeding decibels. By accident!!! I'm so sorry!!! Really!!

BS: How do you all feel when performing and interacting with the audience? It's a challenge for anyone “up there” to break thru an invisible fourth wall. When it happens it's amazing.

BS: What would you describe as your best work?
One night in Columbus Ohio in 2000. I had a jones to jam. We pulled our guitars in a hotel hallway (not my band, just me and some friends.) We all played and a huge crowd gathered around and we were all swept up into someone bigger then ourselves.

BS: Since your music has a lot of musical influence, how do you feel certain cultures perceive music?
Way differently in some ways then Madison Avenue can ever dream of. I think of Bedouin campfires in the Negev, or singing off key powerful thousand year old songs in a Shabbat meal, or Rapa Iti Tahititian choir micro-tonal harmonized quarter-note walk up singing. There's some seriously outrageous stuff out there that would blow many of us away. It has nothing to so with MTV. On the other hand music is truly the universal language; I've seen it and sung it in other cultures and probably a lot of the readers out there could add their own experiences similar.

BS: Does that help change music and the way people look at music?
People change and evolve and so do their art forms. That process is sped up when we cross pollinate.

BS: How does this perceive notions affect the bands creative style in music?
I think everyone in the band O•VAD•YA is open to “world” influences and we’re all developing in ways we never thought we would go.

BS: The paradox of music is that it is always changing and regenerating whether through culture or creativity. How far do all of you feel we go to protect the rights of change in music?
In our music? Art changes and is necessarily dynamic. In art school our teachers talked about knowing when something was “done” versus not. All the music we do is open to changes, but sometimes we also decide that something is done.
If you mean in culture at large: because of my art school background, I am rabid believer in the intention making what becomes “art.” Intentions and aesthetics change. And therefore art forms change. Rap is one of the best samples of a modernized quatrain fusing with traditional African tribal call and response forms (of course it is much more then that). I respect it. (I also acknowledge that there is such a thing as bad and good art, including the song as an art form. To me a song should ideally be art.)

BS: Do you feel it is ok to let the advertising psychology and major labels dictate the change in music?
They don't anymore. That's why my band and tons of others are doing what we're doing. Advertising does reign supreme, tho. So it's a mix of self-hypage that bands have to do that's kind of weird but a necessity. There's a whole other area of discussion someday on the egregious double standards for women in rock. Briefly put, that's where being a highly visual (being translated specifically to mean—sexuality and only sexuality) culture works against some artists who are not rated in a true artistic meritocracy but by low brow ad standards. But again that's a whole other dissertation.

BS: What did it feel like to be on the local anesthetic
Great. It was a 16th moment of fame/affirnation (at least for a cuple minutes) that the vision of what we do is maybe “caught” by others.
and have acclaimed music journalist Richard Miline’s from WXRT radio review the CD or Madalyn Sklar founder of GoGirls Music? Great. In my rare, better moments it would be nice to think that music could change the world.

BS: I’m impressed by artists that can write really good music and lyrics. Molly since you’re the lead song writer and singer, if you were around a campfire, whose music would you be inspired to sing and play other then your own?
If I could do it, Tom Waites. He's phenomenal. Or Dylan Thomas or John Dunne if they could be put to music. Traditional Hebrew tunes (like for instance 10th century Iraqi stuff) rocks ass.

Well, thank you very much for answering these questions for us today, we sincerely appreciate it!