Brass band from Serbia transcends boundaries

By Rebecca Ostriker, Globe Staff  |  September 24, 2004

At a music festival in Berlin last year, an 11-piece brass band took the stage, forming a semicircle of trumpets, horns, and drums. As the applause died down, the black-clad Gypsy musicians launched into a familiar tune, but one a German audience might not have expected: "Hava Nagila," that staple of Jewish weddings, this time with a fluttery Balkan twist, whirling and accelerating into a final, emphatic flourish.

Well, nobody ever said Boban Markovic lacked nerve.

Markovic, who brings his Serbian Orkestar to the Somerville Theatre tomorrow night, is considered Serbia's best trumpeter, and one of its boldest. He and his band have won so many awards at the country's annual festival at Guca, a three-day bacchanal that regularly draws 300,000 fans and is known as the "Woodstock of brass music," that they don't compete anymore, but simply come to play. They've also attracted international attention for their music in Emir Kusturica's acclaimed films "Arizona Dream" and "Underground."

The most noticeable thing about Markovic's music is the energy. One of the funkiest marching-band beats east of the Orange Bowl might rumble under a high-stepping horn line and a keening, yelping vocal. Exhilarating melodies snap and twirl like skirts in a dance at a village square, while in another song the sound of orchestrated frenzy comes from drums pounding a weird Balkan time signature as extravagant solos dart like bees.

Markovic's music is rooted in the Roma tradition -- it has the zest, the sinuous twinning of merriment and melancholy, that can be found throughout the Gypsy diaspora. But the songs are also remarkably unconventional, nimbly borrowing ideas from a vast range of other countries and cultures. In a land with such a troubled history of nationalism, this gleefully mongrel music is the opposite of ethnic cleansing.

Listen to Markovic's latest CD, "Boban i Marko: Balkan Brass Fest," for example, and you'll catch a brass afrobeat fanfare that could have come straight from Fela Kuti's lips. There's a quote from "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" transformed in Adriatic style, and a clarinet solo that's like klezmer's country cousin kicking up its heels in the Serbian mountains.

In the jaunty "Sanja Samba," what sound like Mexican mariachi harmonies get chased with a cool "Pink Panther"-esque theme, while an irresistible groove rattles nonstop underneath. "Mere Yaara Dildara" is a slinky bop, with call-and-response jazz horns that recall Miles Davis -- and astoundingly, it's a Bollywood tune from India in disguise.

"I played traditional music for ages, and we still do it when it is appropriate," Markovic says through an interpreter. "But I want to develop, to expand the horizons, and introduce new elements to my music." If that means complaints from purists, he says, "I do not care much.  "I try to incorporate many different elements into my music," he continues. "No matter what country it comes from. If I like it, why not? Then I try to put it in the context of our traditional music."

Trumpeter Frank London, a longtime member of the Klezmatics who has led his own band and collaborated with artists as diverse as LL Cool J, John Zorn, and Itzhak Perlman, says Markovic's group is "among the world's best brass bands. The world, not just Serbia or the Balkans."

London first met Markovic at a music festival seven years ago, and though they couldn't speak each other's language, they liked each other's music, and exchanged CDs. Then in 2001, their groups met in Hungary for a project they'd decided to do together.

The Orkestar musicians were "looking at us kind of funny, with these big smiles on their faces, you know?" London recalls, laughing, on the phone from New York. "And their band starts playing, and it's sounding familiar. `What are they doing, what are they doing?' They'd learned about half a dozen tunes off of our CD and rearranged them."

Both bands play on London's 2002 album "Brotherhood of Brass," and London's Klezmer Brass Allstars appear on Markovic's new CD. "It's so exciting, it's so exuberant," he says of playing together. "It's this huge sound." But he also found it interesting to explore the links between the Jewish and Balkan Gypsy repertoires and styles.

"There is a real, organic similarity," London says. "We would start playing a song, and [Markovic's musicians] would know it, but they wouldn't know it exactly the same way. They would know one section of the song, but then their version went another way. Or they'd play a song . . . and I'd realize if you straightened it out into a 4/4 time signature, it was a song we knew."

The most prominent new musician on Markovic's tour is his 15-year-old son, Marko, who also shines on "Boban i Marko," named partly for him. The darkly handsome young man takes playing the trumpet just as seriously as his father did at his age, reportedly practicing 10 hours a day when he can.

On the CD's title tune, a bittersweet epic that could be the soundtrack for a Serbian film noir, the two trade flugelhorn solos, and they're so well-matched, it's impossible to tell which one is which.

"I am so happy he is with me," Markovic says. "I see him growing and improving day by day. His technique and breathing are already better than mine. He learns and understands faster than I do, but he still needs experience."

Apparently, reaching across both generations and national divisions is part of Markovic's mission. When asked what he likes best about performing, he says, "making the audience happy and proving there are no borders."