Vocolot
| Vocolot | |
|---|---|
| Origin | California, United States |
| Genres | |
| Years active | 1988–present |
| Website | www |
| Members |
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Vocolot is a contemporary Jewish women's a cappella ensemble based in California currently consisting of Elizabeth Stuart, Talia Cooper, Shana Levy, and founder and director Linda Hirschhorn.
Vocolot began in 1988, when singer-songwriter Linda Hirschhorn informally assembled a group of musicians to record some of the songs she had written for four- and five-part vocal harmonies. When they had finished recording those, for the Gather Round album, she asked the singers to join her in an on-going group. The founding members were Rosalind Glazer, Max Ventura, Tay Holden and Linda Hirschhorn.
Vocolot has gone through many incarnations as new members joined and prior members left to start families and pursue other careers. Besides the current members and the founders, there were Kirsten Zerger, Alisa Peres, Helen Cohen, Ellen Robinson, Gale Kissin, Judy Larson, Sharon Preves, Abbe Lyons, Naomi Hannah, Judith-Kate Friedman, Fran Avni, Jennifer Karno, Alison Lewis, Felicia Sloin, and Julia Bordenaro.
Although Vocolot performs mostly a cappella, in the early 1990s they began incorporating percussion into some of their songs, with Helen Cohen, Gale Kissin, Ellen Robinson and Liz Stuart on doumbek and frame drums, and their song, "These Hands", integrates body percussion.
They were the only American group to make it to the finals at the 2008 International Jewish Music Competition in Amsterdam.
The group performs original compositions and arrangements of traditional Jewish, folk, and world-music songs in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic. Mixing folk, classical, cantorial and Jazz idioms in a polyphonic style of intricately interwoven voices, the women perform a cappella blended with hand drums and Body percussion. The ensemble has been compared to the group Sweet Honey in the Rock,
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