Harpist found fans among bikers
by Rick de Yampert, Entertainment Writer

Deland - When Lisa Lynne was a bass player in a rock band that had a standing gig at a "notorious" biker bar in California, she would sneak out to her van at breaks. There the beefy bikers would gather and seh'd enthrall them with... a flaming skull tattoo on her thigh? A double secret Hell's Angeles amulet? Popping wheelies on her Harley hog?

"I would pull out my harp," Lynne says by phone from her native Los Angeles. "And it would just blow their minds." IN fact, she would cajole the leather-clad road warriors into joining her for a duet on her harp. The instrument, she says, is quite easy for a beginner to play simply.

"I do that with everybody, but it was particularly fun, and funny, to see these big burly bikers with the beards just totally mesmerized by their playing of the harp," Lynne says.

Seems William Congreve, the 18th-century English dramatist, was right. Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.

Lynne and her partner, flute player George Tortorelli, will bring their soothing music to the Deland Fall Festival of the Arts on Saturday and Sunday in downtown DeLand. They will be one of the more than 20 musical acts performing as part of the festival.

As a youngster, Lisa taught herself guitar, bass and mandolin, and, in her teenage years, she joined heavy metal garage bands because "thats what was happening in Southern California at the time. Just to be cool and one of the group, and I was into that music."

But Lynne also loved the Renaissance era, and one day she took her mandolin and sneaked into a Renaissance fair. As a 21-year-old, she new songs only by Iron Maiden and other heavy metal and hard rock bands, but she had adapted those for her mandolin. "It worked!" she says. She had a grand time being a metal mandolin troubadour. Then she saw harps for sale at a booth.

"I jumped on one, and it was like I had been playing forever," Lynne says. "I was playing music, and people assumed I was a professional already. I just couldn't believe it. It just rocked my world." Heavy metal was out, heavenly harp was in. Lynne went on to release several albums of her harp music on her own label, then signed with the renowned Windham Hill label, where she released two albums and participated in four "Winter Solstice" tours. Her latest album, "Hopes & Dreams," is on the New Earth Records label. It reached the No. 6 position on Billboard's New Age albums chart last summer.

Still, Lynne credits her rock'n'roll youth with some of the diverse appeal of her harp.

"The harp is the purest music of all," she says. "I think why my music works, why it speaks to all groups, why my listeners are of every age, is that I'm drawing from the kind of chord progressions that we might have heard Led Zeppelin choose, or Yes or Genesis. All those groups I love are somehow coming through my Renaissance, kind of Celtic music. It's not too classical, its not too strict Renaissance, - its like a culmination of all the music I love."

Lynne is "not a hard-core traditionalist. In fact, I'm probably frowned on by some because I take it to the edges of folk music," She and Tortorelli use electronic gadgetry to "loop" and layer their sound during performances, and "Hopes & Dreams" also includes keyboards, guitars and cello in its instrumental palate.

Neither does Lynne consider her music "New Age." "I think I'm coming from an older time than that really," she says. "I fancy myself more like a modern troubadour of the old times. The New Age term is kind of limiting."

After performing for a survivor of the Columbine shootings, Lynne realized the healing power of harp music. After helping the survivor, a girl paralyzed from the waist down, to play the harp, Lynne realized the healing power of perorming on the instrument. As a result, Lynne because musician in residence at the City of Hope National Cancer Center near Los Angeles. She not only performs there but also guides it patients to their own impromptu harp playing.

Whether biker or grandmother, rocker or patient on the mend, the harp "appeals to people," Lynne says. "They love it and it soothes people - that's the bottom line,"

Lynne and Tortorelli will be playing throughout the Deland Fall Festival of the Arts, but don't look for the duo on one of the two stages. "We'll walk the festival and find a magical spot," Lynne says. "We just create a scene where anyone can sit around us all day long."