A little over a decade ago, Travis Sullivan wrote eight bars of a jazz arrangement that he worried would never go anywhere. His material was the music of Icelandic songstress Bjork. As for his instincts about the arrangement – well, luckily for him, they ended up being pretty far off the mark.
Today Sullivan fronts Bjorkestra, which is exactly what it sounds like: a jazz orchestra that recreates the work of Bjork, one of the most distinctive and often perplexing singer-songwriters of the past 20 years. At the end of the this month, Bjorkestra will launch an East Coast mini-tour, playing two shows in Maryland and one in Philadelphia all within a four-day span. Their first stop is a free outdoor concert at the Strathmore in Bethesda on June 23, then a June 24 performance in Easton’s NightCat before heading up to Philadelphia’s World Café Live the very next night on June 25. Sullivan said that the group also has a live album in the works, their first release since their full-length January 2008 debut, Enjoy.
