Skip to main content

The Beginning

To start off this blog, I figure it's best to start where my fascination with Balkan music did: the poppin' Balkan Brass Band. A friend introduced me to them in high school, and I've been in love ever since. Their charts range from traditional Balkan brass music to arrangements of pop tunes like Mission Impossible, and their playing is bombastic and soulful. Being in high school, the concept of mixed meter blew my budding 16-year-old musician mind. Thus we find Kerta Mangae Dae.

The non-Western scales of Slavic countries also caught my young ear. Slavic Soul Party's Opa Cupa combines an insistent beat with entrancing vocals to produce on of my favorite tracks to this date. Not to mention the dirty triple tonguing in the trumpets and the fat oom-pah laid down by that raunchy low brass section. Finish it all off with an accordion solo and you've got yourself a certified bop.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Subway Gawdz

This post reflects on Too Many Zooz, Moon Hooch, Youngblood Brass Band, and other various nonsense popular brass ensembles. I've loved Youngblood Brass Band since my freshman year of high school, when a trumpet player in the band started blasting it in his car when we were driving around. Nat Mcintosh's playing, and the bombastic nature of the band (with its New Orleans influences) kept me dancing around the basement like a good high school kid should. I tried transcribing and imitating Nat's playing, got a couple right notes down for the trumpet and trombone parts in a few songs, and was eventually invited to play sousaphone on Brooklyn with my high school's jazz band. I remember being terrified, but I did alright for a high-energy high school kid looking at a wall of unfamiliar ink and chord changes on the solo section. My hype song in Junior year was YBB's Under Your Influence. I still haven't figured out the lyrics entirely. Since then, I've joine...
Post a Comment
Read more

Balkan Brass Discography

This embedded video is the entirety of my Balkan Brass playlist on YouTube. It's a continuously updated playlist of absolutely everything I can find Balkan Brass related! After all is said and done, I won't be surprised if this playlist has hundreds of videos. !
Post a Comment
Read more

Guča Trumpet Festival

The Guča Trumpet Festival is a yearly Balkan Brass band festival which takes place in the provincial town of Guča, Serbia. It's entirely free to attend, and a festival promoter estimates that 900,000 people (more realistically 600,000) come to the town of 2000 every year to partake in one of the largest musical parties in Europe, and certainly the largest of its kind. Groups from all over Serbia, and from all over the world, travel to compete, with no monetary prize in sight - only the fame that comes with winning the Golden Trumpet. In the documentary above, it's asserted numerous times that winning at the festival (and even placing well) can make an entire band's career. The documentary follows the life of one trumpet player, then the entire band, as they make their way to the festival, rehearsing in an impoverished town. For a brass group at the festival, the documentary notes that this group is particularly inclusive - the tubist is blind, the group has the only wom...
Post a Comment
Read more