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The Nightingale Trio:
borne on wings of song

By day, they are a California public defender, a Texas-based documentary filmmaker, and an outreach director at a Somali museum in Minnesota. By night, they are The Nightingale Trio, an a cappella group singing folk music of the Balkans. And last Saturday night, they were guests of Garrison Keillor on public radio's "A Prairie Home Companion."

Nila Bala ’12JD, Rachel LaViola ’12, and Sarah Larsson ’12, ’12MA, met as members of the Yale Slavic Chorus. A year after graduating, "the three couldn't help but reunite," their website says. They describe their music as "village harmonies, birdsong lullabies, and moonlit round dances" (although they admit to Keillor that the village of Struga, of which they sing in "Shto Mi E Milo," is actually "a mid-size city in Macedonia").

The trio's first album, Letya, includes "Shto Mi E Milo" but not the Slavic Chorus's standby "Dragana I Slavei," in which young Dragana wins a singing contest with a nightingale. Whatever. Our money is on the human Nightingales.

Filed under Nightingale Trio, Prairie Home Companion, music, Rachel LaViola, Sarah Larsson, Nila Bala
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