Slavic Soul Party!

Another one of my favorite bands in this style is New York based Slavic Soul Party! They've played Carnegie and have toured the world's stages and bars, performing with their stylistic, virtuosic playing.

Their most recent album is Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite, and it is a wild ride. It's an incredibly stylistic interpretation of Duke's well-known suite. My personal favorite is their schmaltzy interpretation of the sensual Isfahan.
Singing multiple songs in Roma, my first introduction to their playing was Opa Cupa, one of the few songs I know all the lyrics to (including those in English).

Their instrumentation is 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, saxophone, drum battery of 3, and tuba. This also occasionally includes accordion, such as in their song Teknochek Collision.
Their music sits well within the characteristic altered scales of Eastern Europe, including flat seconds, 6ths, and 7ths, with a major third and the occasional major 7, and the virtuosic scalar and ornamental passages.

Comments

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...

High-Energy Nonsense and Reflection

This post is a little more emotional than any of my other blogs. As I finish this semester, the last bits of coursework of my Master's degree stretching out before me, I've got a lot of feelings going around. Putting it frankly, 2019 and 2020 have been ridiculous years. My dad was suffering all of Spring 2019 and died last April, and this March we saw the beginning of the US wave of a global pandemic. I know we all have our struggles and face hardships, but sometimes I don't know how I've been able to do it. I'm just glad that I have. I was diagnosed with depression in 2014, and correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2 sometime in 2016. Getting my undergrad and first grad degrees have without a doubt been the toughest years of my life, and it's hard not to reflect on all that as this degree is coming to a close. I've learned a lot about being a musician, being a decent human, and just kind of life over the past 5 years at Iowa. It's bee...

Twentieth Century Brass Works

Schoenberg's string quartets are some of my favorite 'crunchy listening', so discovering his works for brass was one of my favorite parts of this class. Twentieth-century 'classical' brass writing, with its various influences, and coupled with the developments made in both brass manufacturing and performance, make it some of the most interesting listening out there. Today's post will reflect on various major brass compositions from 20th-century avant-garde composers. One of the pieces that we listened to ages ago in ABEL that I fell in love with was the Lutoslawski Mini Overture. Another that I've performed before, which isn't specifically for brass ensemble, but has massive brass parts, is Hindemith's Symphony in B flat for Wind Ensemble. While at the Atlantic Brass Quintet Seminar, I performed Plog's Four Sketches for Brass Quintet. The performance experience is just as energized as the listening experience is - the chromaticism and ti...

Balkan Brass and Brass the World Over

Search This Blog