Hal Aqua
I’ve been beguiled by and obsessed with playing music since I first picked up a guitar (a cheap Stella Harmony acoustic) as a teenager in small-town Pennsylvania, smitten with the Beatles and British Invasion rock n’ roll. I already had an eclectic listening background — during my childhood, my parents’ record collection ran an amazing gamut from Harry Belafonte, Allen Sherman, and Johnny Cash to Mickey Katz, the Don Cossack Choir, and the Boston Pops — but it was the folk-rock explosion of the Sixties that really called to me.
In college at Carnegie Mellon University I pursued a career in graphic design and played coffeehouses and jam sessions at night. After graduation I moved to Boston, found a job in a design studio, and developed an interest in traditional rootsy music, especially Celtic and old-timey, and joined a folk-rock band called Water (I think they took me in because of my last name) and started messing around with mandolin and electric bass. I listened to a lot of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and busked on weekends on the Boston Commons.
In the early Seventies I drifted on down to Denver, where I happened to
be employed as a graphic designer, and discovered kindred soulmates at
the Denver Folklore Center, Denver Free University (where I helped start
a drop-in Sunday night coffeehouse called Sweet Loretta’s), and eventually
the Swallow Hill Music Association. I played in a bunch of groups over
the next few years — a
ragtag ensemble called the Swallow Hill String Band; Wind in the Barley,
a folkie trio; the Aqua-Romero Folk Band; and the Buttered Dragon, an ensemble
that introduced me to various world music genres like Andean, Gypsy, and
Caribbean. That got me listening to reggae, and in the 1980s I started
and played with a couple of reggae bands, Cat Ragu and Mumbo Jumbo, rocking
the house at clubs like the Mercury Cafe in its Capitol Hill incarnation.
Love hit me upside the head in the late 80s — I married a nice Jewish girl from Denver and into a warm loving extended family who got me interested in exploring my Judaic roots, which had been simmering quietly on a back burner of my life for a long time. Having kids (two daughters) opened the door to living a life that integrated my Jewishness, and discovering Jewish music blew that door off its hinges. I found, hidden in plain sight, a wide world of Jewish ethnic music that had never been on my radar — klezmer (especially the genre-bending Klezmatics), Middle Eastern, Sephardi (Judeo-Spanish) and Mediterranean — and started a band to channel what I was learning. That band, Los Lantzmun (“the homies” in Yiddish, more or less), has been plugging along for more than a decade and has grown to an 8-piece ensemble that includes (drum roll!) both Miriam Rosenblum and Carla Sciaky (www.hotjewishmusic.com). We’ve recorded two albums of eclectic Jewish music and perform frequently at concerts, festivals, weddings and bar mitzvahs. Along the way I’ve begun to play some other world string instruments — oud, saz, cumbus, and Irish bouzouki.
In many ways playing with the Folkaltones is a way of gathering the diverse threads of my musical life. I’ve known Carla for many years, both as a friend and professionally (I designed many of her album covers back in her recording and touring days). Miriam and I met through our congregation, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Denver, where I now serve as part-time musical director and do a lot of songleading with Carla. Our lives are intertwined musically and socially, and it seemed natural that our next project together would be a small ensemble to explore songs and genres we’ve always loved and experiment with intricate textures. My old attraction to Celtic and traditional music has resurfaced, and it’s such a joy to put our spin on the work of songwriters we’ve long admired. Playing Carla’s original material is a pleasure and an honor. And what could be better in this world than singing Beatles songs?
