Conspirator
Leah Coloff
Leah Coloff is a cellist, singer and songwriter in Brooklyn. She played cello and sang in Number19 from 1999, and she fronts Lucibel Crater, the trio I started with her and drummer Paul Chuffo in 2005. She also tours and records on her own, cello and voice with no other musicians, and she has played cello on other people’s records for years.
She and I have made three things together: Number19, Lucibel Crater, and Book of Sarth.
Along his musical journeys, he met cellist and songwriter Leah Coloff, who convinced him to combine computers with music. The band they established, Number19, funded its first record with downloads from mp3.com in 2001.
The biography on Sarth Calhoun’s old WordPress site
Number19
Coloff, Tony Diodore, Mark Righter and I formed Number19 in 1999. I met her trying out for her band, when she was promoting Dark Sweet Heart, and she played in Gebbeth, my electronica-improv group, before Number19. The band put looped cello and voice over bass and drums, and paid for its first record, Suspension, out of mp3.com downloads.
Lucibel Crater
I started Lucibel Crater in 2005 with Coloff on cello and voice and Paul Chuffo on drums. The trio released an EP, Miracles, in 2007 and a full-length, The Family Album, in 2008. Lou Reed plays guitar on “Threadbare Funeral.” The live dates that survive in the record are on Sightings.
Book of Sarth
Coloff is one of the four people I named when Book of Sarth was finished. Leah Coloff is a force of nature.
She later released a gralbum of her own through the Gralbum Collective, the platform Book of Sarth was built to become.
The creditLeah Coloff and Sarth Calhoun have played together since Number19 in 1999: Number19 (Suspension, 2001), Lucibel Crater (Miracles, 2007, and The Family Album, 2008), and The Book of Sarth, 2012.
How I introduced her
Leah Coloff is a Brooklyn-based cellist/singer/songwriter whose first album “Dark Sweet Heart” was greeted with critical praise and college radio play in the US. She tours and records as a solo act, cello and voice unaccompanied by other musicians or fancy machinery. She recently co-starred as Emily Dickinson in Ridge Theater’s “Lighting at Our Feet,” playing and singing music composed by Michael Gordon. She’s contributed her cello to a long list of recording artists including Ziggy Marley, Rufus Wainwright, Dr. John, Nancy Sinatra, Joel Thome, and David Bowie. When performing with Lucibel Crater, Leah takes on many roles, one minute she’s a beat poet and her cello becomes an upright bass, the next she’s a cello playing hendrix, soul singing and feedback soloing.
I wrote that introduction, and the biography quoted above, for my old WordPress site, recovered from the Wayback Machine. How we met is from the band’s own site, numbernineteen.net, as captured in 2001, and so is the photograph.