BWW Reviews: DÁLAVA Intrigues at The Ironworks

Over a hundred years ago, in the land now known as Czechoslovakia, a Moravian biologist named Dr. Vladimir Úlehla walked the cemeteries and fields of Strážnice. He composed folk songs, enchanted by a world between the wings of grey doves and the hooves of the hussar's horse.

His great-granddaughter stood proudly onstage at The Ironworks, along the downtown eastside waterfront of Vancouver to sing her ancestral heart out. Late 19th century vintage architecture comingled with a tasteful collection of ambient art.

Dálava, the recent, well-acclaimed collection of music arranged by Julia Úlehla and Aram Bajakian, is set to the haunting lyrics of Úlehla's esteemed forebear. Together, as a six-piece ensemble, their soundscapes intrigued the atavistic imagination.

Bajakian is a world-class powerhouse, absolutely smoking on three guitars, from the ultra-modern noise / experimental electric to the folkloric cool of acoustic fingerpicking. At center stage, the husband-and-wife duo stole the heart of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Úlehla began each song with a translation from the Czech--words written with the understanding that songs are intimately woven through the particular place on earth from which they emerge. Songs are just like organisms, Dr. Úlehla would determine with his ear for ethnomusicology. Songs are adaptable and living.

Dálava exudes a reverence for the creative potency of ecological awareness. From the western edge of the Carpathian mountains, where the lyrics were scratched out of the Central European landscape, to the gargantuan madhouse of New York City, where Bajakian and Úlehla source their musical rise, the Coast Salish territories of Canada received the performance of an animate song cycle that thrives, renewed in the lush Pacific air.

The harmonic charm of Úlehla's voice dazzled all present, in contradistinction with Bajakian's wild magnificence. Accompanying with an especially entrancing quality, Peggy Lee's cello breathed masterfully through her unique, often abstract, touches.

Dr. Úlehla inhabited a world rising from the black earth of mortality, where childhood is a feathery gift lost at a fair, and where love is "never stable, like water between the banks."