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Orilla takes St. Petersburg on a global holiday

Bill DeYoung

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Blending world music and jazz in an intimate, minimalistic style, Orilla (Alejandro Arenas and Ona Kirei) perform a holiday concert Wednesday at the Palladium Side Door. Photo provided.

Move over, Mariah Carey. Stand down, Mannheim Steamroller. The party platter to beat for this Christmas season is coming in from way out of left field, and it’s a musical mashup of sounds and styles the likes of which has (most likely) not been attempted previously.

Holidays Around the World, new from the St. Petersburg duo Orilla, is literally a world-music Christmas collection, in that the songs – both traditional and contemporary – come from Egypt, Spain, Poland, Colombia and other points around the globe, including the U.S. of A.

Vocalist Ona Kirei and bassist Alejandro Arenas are Orilla, have been for two years now, and Holidays Around the World follows by six months the astonishing Daring Flowers album, which blended jazz – in many permutations – with inventive, original music and lyrics from far-flung global ports-of-call.

The bay area has had no musical act as daring or unique as Orilla in many years. There is no one to compare them to.

Wednesday night at the Palladium Side Door comes the second annual “Holidays Around the World” concert, at which Kirei and Arenas will be accompanied by several of their jazz-stalwart friends.

Last year’s show, reports Arenas, “went over really well, and at the end we said ‘Man, we should record all this stuff.’ But then we got involved with Daring Flowers, which took longer to record than we expected.

“Creating Daring Flowers definitely helped us with this, because we already had a blueprint of how to create some of these arrangements.”

Kirei, a native of Spain (Arenas is from Colombia) says curating the songs for the album – and the concert – was a relatively straightforward affair.

“Everything started with me wanting to play all the Christmas songs I know from my hometown, Catalonia,” she explains. “I wanted to do all the Christmas carols that I liked. And also, he wanted to do Colombian songs, and he suggested a lot of great American carols.

“And in the process of expanding that, instead of just staying in our bubbles, we did our research and we found beautiful holiday music from around the world.”

She says they’re both very proud of Holidays Around the World, “because it’s not only about Christmas, it’s about a lot of different celebrations that happen around the world, with different styles of music.”

Adds Arenas: “A cool thing for us was figuring out how holidays are perceived differently in each culture. Even if it’s Christmas, so to speak, how different it is. There’s a song from Colombia which is like a party song. And there’s some stuff that’s a little more solemn.”

As with the Daring Flowers, the holiday songs are delicately-crafted studio concoctions, with Kirei’s voice overdubbed to create choirs, choruses and harmonies, and Arenas’ bass providing both bedrock and counterpoint. Much of it is alluringly minimalist.

Which, they both admit, doesn’t always translate well to a live-in-performance setting.

That’s why Wednesday’s guests include guitarist LaRue Nickelson, drummer Mike Feinman, clarinet/saxophonist Valerie Gillespie and others.

“We really want to play not only as a duo,” offers Kirei. “We are the core of the project, but we want to have different formats of that project. The recording is a completely different work than live music. We want to have the duo project, which is only the two of us, but we also want to have another way to express our arrangements and our music.”

What Orilla does defies a strict label – and, Arenas confirms, that’s the way they like it.

“Part of the reason we have this particular group of musicians, who are more known in the jazz world, is actually because they’re very versatile,” he says. “Mark is very good with different styles, LaRue is a master improviser. And we want a mix of that.”

Palladium tickets here

Orilla website

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