Frank London
Biography
The Glass House Orchestra is a supergroup of radical - traditional musicians from Budapest and New York who came together to explore the rich multi-cultural music of Hungary, ancient to the future. Astro-Hungarian folk punk; contemporary, at times postmodern and deconstructivist, at times archeological-conservationist.
The Glass House Orchestra: 8 established musicians with various backgrounds and countries who take on the wonderfully complex Jewish musical tradition of Hungary. The outcome is astral, stellar Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and artistic director Frank London is joined on stage by four New Yorkers: Aram Bajakian, the lead guitarist for the late Lou Reed's band, Pablo Aslan a giant of Argentinian jazz, Yonadav Halevy one of Israel's best known jazz drummers, and Jake Shulman-Ment a Brooklynite ethnomusicologist and world class klezmer fiddler; and three of the foremost Hungarian artists: Miklós Lukács, the most important innovator of the cimbalom/tsimbl of the past years, world music phenomenon singer/violinist Edina Szirtes Mókus and one of the most multi-faceted performers on the jazz-ethno-experimental scene, Béla Ágoston.
The Glass House Orchestra grew out of a project initiated by the Balassi Institute - Hungarian Cultural Center in New York to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary. Since their inception in 2014, the group has performed concerts in New York, Washington, Ottawa, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Milan. The band presents the incredibly complex legacy of Jewish Hungarian culture, marking out a space for this legacy in the present, both in Hungary and the world over. The ensemble is named after the Glass House or Üvegház, the famous building, one among 76, designated as a safehouse by Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz during the Holocaust in Hungary, which sheltered and saved the lives of thousands of persecuted Jewish Hungarians.
