"I wonder what Duke Ellington would think,'' Sundaralingam mused one recent November evening, curled up at the end of a green couch in the living room of the Castro home she has shared with � Riain for six years.

"He'd love it,'' said � Riain, who was sitting on the beige carpet, stroking the fur of their calico cat, who had wandered into the living room and settled on the floor next to him.

Most of the nearly two dozen poets, singers and musicians who contributed poems, voices and music to the CD, will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Noe Valley Ministry.

The album features a variety of musical styles, including Native American chanting, vocal beat boxing, Flamenco rhythms, Irish ballads, Indian melodies, jazz and blues.

Sundaralingam (pronounced SundaraLINGam) said the album was born of the couple's desire to bridge the gaps that have arisen between ethnic communities in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, by asking poets and musicians to exchange their immigrant stories.

"We wanted to see what would happen if people worked together, heading in one direction, instead of retreating within themselves,'' she said.

The couple -- she was born in Sri Lanka, he was born in Ireland -- are themselves examples of what can happen when artists from different cultures begin sharing their legends and languages, histories and metaphors, instruments and musical scales.

At a concert at an Irish American festival earlier this year, Sundaralingam recited her five-stanza poem, "Celtic Raag," while � Riain (pronounced OhREEan) played an original composition on the viola.

The couple performs the same duet on the new album, "Bridge Across the Blue."

Sundaralingam wrote -- and recited -- the first stanza of "Celtic Raag" in Tamil, an ancient language whose speakers were ostracized in Sri Lanka in the 1950s.

She wrote the next three stanzas in English, the language she shares with her husband.

The final stanza is in Irish, an ancient language that endured hundreds of years of assault under British laws and policies designed to undermine Irish culture.

"But we lost our words/when we left our land/when we crossed over that ocean/that tastes of tears,'' she wrote. "We swallowed our songs/and buried our speech/trading our tongues/for a handful of beads."

Colm � Riain laughs with his wife, Pireeni Sundaralingam

Sundaralingam, now 36, moved to London as a child with her parents, who were fleeing ethnic lynchings in Sri Lanka.

� Riain, now 34, grew up in Limerick City, along the River Shannon in southwest Ireland.

They met at the University of Oxford in England in 1993, when Sundaralingam, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, gave him a tour of the psychology department.

At the time, � Riain, an accomplished violinist, was considering joining the university's doctoral program in artificial intelligence.

But he chose the University of Rochester in New York, and the pair began a trans-Atlantic romance that would last four years.

When they married in 1998, the couple invited friends and family from around the world to three ceremonies: a traditional Hindu wedding in London, a Celtic "hand fasting'' ceremony on the cliffs of Galway on the rugged Atlantic coast of Ireland, and a Christian service in a tiny church in the nearby village of Ballyvaughan. They settled in San Francisco that year, at a time when housing was scarce. But they were immediately chosen for an empty, second-story flat in a pistachio Victorian when the landlady -- a poet -- and her writer husband found out the prospective tenants were a poet and a musician.

They hold day jobs -- Sundaralingam teaches cognitive science at Cal State Los Angeles, � Riain designs computer games for Electronic Arts in Redwood City.

Sundaralingam continued writing, and her work has been featured in several anthologies, including "So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets.'' She won a prestigious writer's fellowship from PEN Center USA in 2003. She was recently named one of America's "Emerging Writers" by the literary journal Ploughshares, published by Emerson University.

� Riain continued performing, playing from time to time with the jazz band Hot Club of San Francisco, joining the city's Irish music scene, and forming his own band, Hy Brassyl, which explores the connections between Celtic music and jazz, Brazilian, Cuban, Gypsy and other musical genres.

In 2003, the couple won the Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize, a grant of $12,500, after submitting a proposal to create a CD that would bring together poets and musicians from different cultures to collaborate on new material.

"Had it been simply a compilation, I would have been much less interested in the project,'' said William Laven, co-director of the Potrero Nuevo Fund, a San Francisco foundation that awards grants to artistic projects that use literary, media, performing, or visual art in the service of social or environmental awareness.

"I don't mean to denigrate those people who produce compilations, but those are a dime a dozen," Laven said. "To pair world musicians from very different cultures to work together -- that made their proposal unique.''

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