BRASS BANDS - That special spirit
LAST December, the veteran Mexican-American rock band Los Lobos dusted off its 1992 album "Kiko" and performed it live, start to finish, at the House of Blues in West Hollywood. For most of the night it was a standard rock setup, but when it came time for the album closer, a woozy Mexican folk swoon called "Rio de Tenampa," Los Lobos brought out Los Cenzontles, a Northern California banda troupe. While Mexican bandas (brass bands) can have as many as 20 members, Los Cenzontles didn't need much more than a tuba, a trumpet, a thudding bass drum and a pair of clarinets to turn the club into a raucous cantina.
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Audio: "Caravan" by Fanfare Ciocarlia | "Meboli" by Balkan Beat Box featuring Vlada Tomova | "Out of What?" by Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars | "Te Doy las Gracias" by Banda el Recodo | "Voz" by Boban Markovic Orkestar feat. Marko Markovic
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Forum: Popular Music
Alan Roche
Frank London whose Klezmer Brass All-Stars are rooted in klezmer and Balkan brass.
Brass band music can have this effect. The stammering pepper-spray of horns, the crisp snaps of snare rolls: it's precise and excessive at once, a joyous emotional tornado awash in spit, sweat and celebration. No wonder it's one of the world's most-spoken musical languages — from Serbian villages to Manhattan's bustling "gypsy punk scene" to this year's Grammy Awards, where Kanye West reinvented "Gold Digger" by having a marching band play, running through the aisles. Awareness of international brass styles has blossomed in recent years in the United States, thanks in large part to an increase in domestic album distribution deals and more frequent international concert tours.
"You would think that a brass band, which has no strings at all, would be limited in its sound," said Tamir Muskat, the Israeli-born co-founder of Balkan Beat Box, a new-school crew in New York known for wild live shows that mix Balkan horn blasts with electronic beats. "But it's unbelievable what people manage to do with it. There is a whole world of brass out there."
Listen to enough brass band music — whether a slice of Mexican banda or the Romanian group Fanfare Ciocarlia pulling the trigger on a dizzying blast of high-velocity trumpets — and you start to hear the history of the world handed back to you in a horn section. Suddenly, Serbia and Romania could be the alternative birthplace of Brazilian frevo; brass flurries from Gypsy bands in Macedonia and Bulgaria could be lost cousins of the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band from India, the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin or any New Orleans jazz troupe.
The connections are more than theoretical. In the 1860's, thousands of former Gypsy slaves fled Romania for the American South, landing in mostly black neighborhoods. The brass music they brought with them, like that of all Balkan countries, can be traced to the Turks, the original band geeks. Last year's "Blowers From the Balkans" compilation (Topic), which unearthed a trove of early 20th-century Balkan brass recordings, spelled it out loud and clear: it was the Ottoman Empire's janissary bands that turned brass into the lingua franca of Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria.
"The Ottoman empire used brass bands to impress the enemy, walking and playing in front of the first line of soldiers," explained Oprica Ivancea, the lead clarinetist for Fanfare Ciocarlia, a 12-piece band of Romany Gypsies who work out of the remote mountain town of Zece Prajini (population 400) in eastern Romania. "But in the early 19th century, brass got popular in Germany and Austria and because Romanians always want to be like the Germans we began to adapt to their sound as well."
Long before Kelly Clarkson and Jay-Z (and for that matter, long before rock 'n' roll), European military and church bands were the world's top global musical exports. Locals throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas were trained in the ways of the marching band as part of colonialism. As empires dissolved, official bands soon became voluntary village bands, and by the turn of the 20th century most of the world shared an ingrained knowledge of all things brass.
"All brass bands have a link somewhere," Mr. Muskat said. "Ninety percent of all brass bands are based on the same elements. It's all rhythm and horns."
Mr. Muskat's Balkan Beat Box partner Ori Kaplan grew up in Jaffa, Israel, where he watched Egyptian orchestras on television and learned to play Eastern European klezmer clarinet from a Bulgarian trained by Gypsy brass musicians. When Mr. Kaplan moved to New York 15 years ago, though, he wanted nothing of his klezmer past, choosing instead to play in industrial punk bands. That all changed when he heard a CD from Macedonia's top brass band, Kocani Orkestar, and learned about the Gypsy-Turkish fusions of the Bulgarian horn stalwart Yuri Yunakov, another New York City transplant). "I started to listen to Balkan music constantly," Mr. Kaplan said, "I became a brass band freak."
Posted by iras-israel
at 5:12 PM EDT
Updated: Monday, 19 June 2006 5:14 PM EDT
Bolshoi ballet dancer Dmitri Gudanov (C) dances in the dress rehearsal of 'Swan Lake' at the Royal Opera House in London on August 3, 2006. The ballet runs until August 16. REUTERS/Stephen Hird (BRITAIN)