Orpheum Bell

Lights illuminate the faces, the stage, and the building behind the stage in new colors. Music hums in the airspace between one body and the next. The crowd shifts constantly, people catching up against each other, their words flowing above and below the music coming from the stage. Children wobble and dance through the crowd, with parents following after. This is Orpheum Bell’s night to play at Top of the Park, part of Ann Arbor’s Summer Festival.

They’re introducing a new voice tonight, a young woman by the name of Katie Lee, but not with the first song. I am standing close to the stage with a friend, and we are left waiting to hear how she compares to Orpheum Bell’s recently retired female singer, Merrill Hodnefield, a woman with a distinctively lilting voice. The first song is all about the smoky, rumpled voice of Aaron Klein, sung through a horn that may have been borrowed from an old gramophone. The sound is rhythmic, rich, almost primeval. Katie Lee is drawing out the haunting sounds of the musical saw; it is not until the second and third tunes that we are given a taste of her voice. Even then, she is harmonizing with Klein, veiling herself within his darker tone.



She doesn’t hide forever—Klein takes a step back and she sings the next tune on her own. Her voice is ranged differently than Hodnefield’s, with a sharp tang in the lower range and a breathy, sweet quality when her voice winds its way higher. She sings tunes from Orpheum Bell’s previously released albums. There’s a sliding twang that slips in, catching up against the ends of phrases. She sings new tunes, too, one in French that showcases the gentle airiness off her higher register. Singing isn’t her only purpose, though, and she plays a number of instruments, from singing saw to violin, with aplomb.

There’s a throwback quality brought on by the variety of instrumentation: this isn’t a six-person group with six kinds of guitars, it’s a six-person group with one guitar-player. From the other five members, we are confronted with the resonance of the double bass and the violin, the musical saw, ukuleles, strange horned violins, the banjo, and more. A red-headed young man spends the entire set hunched over a microphone, switching between two mallet percussion instruments, the accordion, a very small trombone, and a trumpet. This he plunges into a bowl of water on one tune for that bubbly, underwater sound. These are unfamiliar instruments, each of them pulling a new thread of sound into this night, binding together tunes that carry a glorious, multi-layered sound.

The lyrics too, are overflowing with images and words that go flowingly—if unexpectedly—together. There’s nothing easy about Orpheum Bell. The words pull me in as much as the music makes me listen, trying to separate out the individual sounds that twine around each other. The music never gets in the way of the words. It intensifies, it focuses, and it builds a textured picture.

Merrill Hodnefield makes an appearance with the third and last tune of ‘Hard Money Suite’, staying onstage for nearly half an hour, through the three-part female harmonies of ‘Local Boy’ and a pretty cover of the topical ‘Burn On, Big River.’ She’s a woman whose voice hangs forward in her nose—nasal, but it catches the ear and is well-fitted to the varied sounds of the group. Listening to her voice against Katie Lee’s is a sort of passing on into new places, a handing off of a relay baton. I think I’ll like these new places Orpheum Bell is headed to.