Skip to main content

Trubatalk - Festivals and Bands!

Like the Guca festival, there are numerous other Balkan brass festivals around the world.

The Roma Truba Fest, usually in September, features Roma brass bands playing in their style in Kumanovo, North Macedonia.
The video above features the band Uska Kan, one of the prominent Balkan brass bands in Macedonia.
There are multiple other videos of the Roma Truba Fest online as well, but this recording features a particularly popular band.
They have numerous recordings up on YouTube, performing in various venues and locations, including Turkey, and at the Guca festival in 2013, which they won.
Their performances include arrangements of popular tunes as well as their own music.


For New Yorkers, another famous Balkan brass ensemble hosts the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival every year in Brooklyn. The 2020 festival (before the Coronavirus) was their 35th anniversary, and was lead by the band Zlatne Uste. While it's a little difficult to find great recordings of them online, their Spotify albums show their style quite well - from their bio, "Zlatne Uste's repertoire spans the most important stops in the traditional music of the Balkans -- Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Gypsy traditions."

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