Seattle band Balkanarama plays mostly Rom or Gypsy music, largely dance music of the type you’d hear at wedding celebrations in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Greece. In addition to traditional instruments like violin (Matty Noble), saxophone (Ferko Saxmanov) and Gordon’s clarinet, they add Moon’s keyboards, Amir Arslanagic’s electric guitar, Kevin Stevens’ fretless bass guitar and Suzana Niemann on a full trap set. Lead vocals are provided by Gordon and Moon for the most part, with Amir and Ferko also singing occasional lead and frequent harmonies.
Balkanarama Live contains a dozen tracks of tunes, songs and sets from all over southeastern Europe, recorded in the best possible setting for this band: live, in one take, with no overdubs. It raises the bar from their only studio CD I have, their self-titled effort from few years back.
The album kicks off in high gear with Moon singing Semo Ibrahimi’s “Kerta Mange Daje,” with a moaning call-and-response chorus, paired with the jazzy tune “Belmont” by Yuri Yunakov, which features a sweet and hot sax-clarinet showdown. Oh, and it’s driven by a martial drumbeat and propulsive wah-wah guitar.
All of the instrumental solos on the album were improvised on the spot, something that this band can handle at will, as I can attest from seeing them at Seattle’s Northwest Folklife Festival more than once. Though recorded live, it has very little in the way of crowd noise, that bugbear of concert recordings.
There’s not a weak track. From slow, free-meter songs to bittersweet ballads, to whirling dance tunes in 9/8 or 7/8 meter, to the Bulgarian pop hit Karavana Cajka, with soulful organ, jazz-rock violin and a rock beat and a “Shaft”-inspired middle section complete with rapped vocals — it’s a fine display of loosely Balkan music turned loose in the world. It ends on perhaps the strongest note with “Ramo Ramo,” which was a hit in the old Yugoslavia and reportedly was inspired by a Bollywood film score, paired with a killer Macedonian Rom instrumental that they call “Sami Malik’s Tune.”
Balkanarama truly shine in performance, and all that energy comes through on this live disc. Here’s an audience video from Northwest Folklife that shows them in their natural habitat.
(self-released, 2006)
