Angel Band

It’s less startling to discover that Angel Band founder and leader Nancy Josephson is a student, practitioner, and chronicler of Haitian Vodou (voodoo) if you consider that she’s been involved in two resurrections and a creation in the past few years.

The creation was Angel Band, which coalesced from a series of jam sessions led by Nancy’s husband, the renowned roots musician and vocalist David Bromberg, after the couple had been lured to Wilmington, Del., in 2002 to serve as the town’s “artists-in-residence.” Bromberg had virtually retired from recording and toured only occasionally in the preceding 20+ years, burned out by the tour-record-tour cycle of his solo career in the ’70s; he spent the ’80s and ’90s in Chicago learning how to make violins. When David and Nancy moved to Wilmington, he initiated regular weekly blues and bluegrass jam session nights at the 4W5 Club as a low-key return to making music. While David picked at the club with local musicians, Nancy stayed home to work on her mixed media sculptures until David persuaded her to drop in at on bluegrass night. A family of musicians she met and sang with that night became her first line-up of Angel Band.

Josephson was no musical rookie. Born in New York City, “I don’t ever remember not singing,” she says, and was “thumping” on an acoustic guitar at six. With musical influences ranging from The Monkees and The Supremes to bluegrass and country, she sang her way through school, forming garage bands and girl groups “with anyone who was cool.” She eventually learned to play stand-up bass and helped form the all-girl bluegrass group, the Buffalo Gals, in upstate New York, staying with them from 1972 to 1976. Her next stop was California, to live with Bromberg, whom she’d met in 1970. For the next several years, she performed with a number of well-known bluegrass and “new grass” performers, including Peter Rowan and the Free Mexican Airforce, Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick (of the Good Ol’ Persons), and even The David Bromberg Big Band. “I had a knack of getting fired from every incarnation of David’s band due to my unique inability to take direction from my partner, who was also my boss,” she confesses.

After David and Nancy moved to Chicago in 1980, David studied violin making while Nancy started singing commercial jingles and, with some of her fellow jingle-singers, formed The Annettes, with Nancy the sole white, Jewish female in the otherwise African-American women’s choir. After a couple of years, during which Nancy also toured with Arlo Guthrie, the choir disbanded and Nancy switched her attention to visual arts and to raising two young children.

Here’s where those resurrections started happening. The Brombergs moved to Wilmington, David opened a violin retail and repair shop, and both “retired” musicians started to play music again. Nancy and an earlier Angel Band configuration recorded a self-released CD of country/bluegrass-flavored songs written by others, 2004’s Beautiful Noise with Chum (Bromberg on guitars, Bobby Tangrea on mandolin and guitar, Bob Taylor on bass, and Jeff Wisor as fiddle; Nate Grower currently tours as the group’s fiddler) settling in as their backing band. David casually started cutting solo acoustic blues tracks at the local Grand Opera House venue and studio. Those recordings, produced by Nancy, became Try Me One More Time (Appleseed), a hugely praised Grammy finalist for “Best Traditional Folk Recording of 2007.” (Nancy had previously co-produced Beautiful Noise with Chum soundman and honorary member Marc Moss; Nancy co-produced three tracks on With Roots & Wings with Lloyd Maines, and Moss served as engineer.) So the violin maker and the sculptress returned to their lives in music.

With David’s appetite for touring rewhetted, the current Angel Band line-up, together for the last year and a half, became his opening act and backing singers. The Angels now take their next step with a captivating and widely distributed new CD and an expanding schedule of upcoming shows on their own.

Meet the members of Angel Band

There’s the Vodou princess, Nancy, who sings high harmonies and lead vocals. She not only authored a recent book, Spirits in Sequins: Vodou Flags of Haiti (Schiffer, 2007) but has blossomed as a songwriter, with full or shared writing credits on ten of the songs on With Roots & Wings. As she modestly told Sing Out! magazine last summer, “Way stupider people than me have written really good songs, so I figured, ‘Why not?’”
 
Jen Schonwald, who sings low harmonies as well as lead vocals, was raised in a musical family in which her parents and step-father sang traditional folk songs, and she’s been performing since the age of 12. Jen spent six years in the Philadelphia-based Full Frontal Folk group as vocalist and guitarist and also sang on recordings by singer-guitarist Pat Wictor. She co-wrote the spunky “Patron Saint of Opportunity” with Nancy on the new Angel Band CD.  

The newest and youngest Angel is Kathleen Weber (middle harmonies, lead vocals), who has performed for more than 20 years in numerous choirs and bands, including the Moravian Women’s Choir and, most recently, as a member of the reggae/rock Los Manatees in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.