For the Family: Classically trained EDLOS are all over the musical map

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For the Family: Classically trained EDLOS are all over the musical map

Friday, September 24, 1999

By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette

The EDLOS are one group never in need of a session musician. Whether they require a bongo, a banjo or an electric guitar, the EDLOS can find it somewhere among their four stretchable voices.

Cultural District Family Street Fair
Where: Cultural District, Downtown.
When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. tomorrow.
Admission: Free.

Certainly, imitating musical instruments is not part of the curriculum at a classical academy, but the chops you come away with are multifunctional.

Not to mention multicultural.

This a cappella quartet from San Francisco has a repertoire that ranges from 12th-century chants to country yodeling songs to modern jazz to Jethro Tull's "Aqualung."

In fact, after the all-classical set they're working on is refined, they'll be just as likely to guest on a chamber group season as they would play a county fair.

The EDLOS -- an acronym for Excessive Decibel Levels from Outer Space (they have a whole mythology about coming from another planet) -- currently tour in three different formats: the Variety Show, which they'll perform tomorrow at the Cultural District Street Fair, the Holiday Show and the Country Western Show.

You have to wonder: How do four operatic singers from the Bay Area pull off a country show?

"With the country show," says founding member Eric Morris, "we have fun with a lot of tunes, but we like to feel that we do the music a real service. We do parody in many different forms but always like to feel that we respect the music that we are parodying even as we are parodying it. I think the audience at the Grand Ole Opry loved us, and if you're not approaching it with reverence and respect at that establishment, the mecca of country, they'll know it, they'll sense it."

The EDLOS formed 10 years ago almost on a whim while members of the San Francisco-based Pocket Opera.

"I was at a cast party," Morris explains, "and I had some music for men, and I just arbitrarily picked three guys that I thought would sound good together and pulled them into another room and we rehearsed them together and performed them at the party, and people loved it. After being together for a month, we had four songs down. I put us into this competition called the Harmony Sweepstakes and we won Audience Favorite."

Among them they boasted experience with the Santa Fe Grand Opera, the Marin Symphony, the Long Beach Grand Opera, the William Hall Chorale of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Ballet. But when the quartet started to take off, they walked away from their more conventional career paths.

Says Morris, "We've had a number of our own colleagues tell us that they're jealous that we embarked on something different, and we're making a go of it and doing quite well."

The EDLOS have issued seven CDs, including the newly released "Just Us," their first record of all-original songs. Next time around, it will likely be the classical repertoire the EDLOS are preparing to take on tour.

Although the group's Variety show is acclaimed for its visual appeal -- there are costume changes, wigs, smoke and lights -- don't think you have to get a seat right up front to hear them above the street noise.

"It's a tubby sound. It's a big healthy male sound," Morris says. "We're a little louder than most groups in that we're all trained to reach the back row. If you put a voice like that on a mike, it's going to make a pretty big noise."