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Friday, April 9, 1999
Celtic band bridges old music with rock energy
 By KAREN FEEGE
The Express-Times
              
The California Celtic rock band Tempest, with its eclectic combination of music that bridges 200-year-old traditional music with a driving rock force, is blowing into town.
                    
The band, no stranger to the area, will play Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem for two shows tonight.  
                     
"The music is old traditional music and we keep the energy going with rock arrangements," says band founder Lief Sorbye,who described the band's sound as "one foot in folk and one foot in rock. It's a combination of two worlds." 
               
"The source material may be over two hundred years old- all of our music is based and steeped in tradition," Sorbye says. We want to keep that feel."

The last time that Tempest played at the Southside Bethlehem coffeehouse was in 1996, but they were also in Bethlehem for a lively performance at the 1997 Celtic Classic. The band has been performing and recording their unique brand of traditional
music with rock intensity since 1988, with over one thousand performances and seven CD's to their credit.
                  
While the band is "steeped" the traditional music - playing Irish, Scottish and Scandinavian music and ballads, Irish jigs and reels and folk music - the Norwegian-born Sorbye says the band's members make it much more than a traditional Celtic band.
Sorbye is the vocalist, mandolin and mandola player for the band. The rhythm section, comprised of Adolfo Lazo on drums and John Land on bass, is rock oriented, Sorbye says, while he and fiddle player, Michael Mullen are "folkies". The guitar
players, Dave Parnall and Todd Evans have backgrounds in both folk and rock. Joining Tempest on this tour is guitarist Todd Evans.

"He knows how to play all the notes," quips Sorbye about Evans. "We keep both elements of rock and folk music present in the band."

Early in his musical career in the 1970's, Sorbye was a devotee of rock music. But he maintained an undaunting interest in    his own Scandinavian music and it's potential to be played within a rock setting.
  
In the late 1970's, Sorbye spent time in Ireland and played acoustic music. He arrived in the United States in 1978 and settled in the San Francisco Bay area for good in 1979, where he met up with two musicians, forming the band Golden Bough. The trio performed a mellow style of Celtic music with some success, he says. Still, the burning desire to form a rock
band featuring traditional music haunted Sorbye. In 1988, after the band members of the Golden Bough displayed little interest in his idea on merging the two musical genres, Sorbye formed Tempest. He went on a shopping spree for musicians
which he thought might have an interest in the musical style with the prerequisite being that they had to be rock musicians.
           
"When you only get folk musicians to plug in, you don't necessarily get the energy I was looking for," Sorbye says. "I was after an energy in traditional music that I was hungry for and didn't see anyone else projecting it."
     
Early influences for Sorbye and his music included the Beatles, Bob Dylan and "The Incredible String Band," which was a  psychedelic band out of Scotland. "They displayed the mixing of different ethnic instruments to create different sound sculptures."

The name "Tempest" incorporates three distinct meanings for Sorbye. The first meaning is a "Tempest Reel" song style; the second meaning is that the word connotes a Shakespearean old world, British Isles feel; and the third meaning is that of a
personal nature for Sorbye, reminding him of performing in front of a rock band as an acoustic musician - "which was a bit of a tempest."

For the Godfrey's show tonight, Tempest will begin with an acoustic set, gradually adding more instruments as the show progresses.
 
"It's all part of the challenge to play both large and small venues," Sorbye says."We're able to sweat on people in the front row and see the crowd in large settings."
 
Sorbye describes the stage show as a "mock rock show" with a bit of a Spinal Tap routine. "We dance around and make fools of ourselves. We take our music seriously but we don't take ourselves seriously. We have a lot of fun. Each show is different - it's the whole experience."

While the band has performed both nationally and internationally over the past ten years, Sorbye says that the band's music inspires the same response in audiences throughout the world - with a few exceptions.
  
The overseas audiences "intellectualize and analyze more so than national audiences, and California audiences are energetic."
  
The band's latest CD, "The 10th Anniversary Compilation" is a recording of audience favorite tunes.