The Boban Markovic Orkestar is many things, perhaps most proudly one of the world's killer wedding bands.
Long revered as the greatest Balkan gypsy brass orchestra, the combo, featuring the third-generation trumpeter from the Serbian countryside and a dozen or so musicians, is touring California for the first time. It plays four dates in Northern California, including Saturday in Monterey.
The orchestra's sound is rooted in the military band music of the Ottoman Empire, circa 1500, branching back in history to the melodies of North India and forward to Western forms such as rock and jazz.
Spinning out from its old-world brass heart are flavors as varied as flamenco, klezmer, Latin, rock and the music of James Bond movies and spaghetti Westerns. And soul. Listen to the short, repeating, driving bass figures and wonder who paged James Brown.
Markovic is firmly based in indigenous music. But what makes him and his players a force to be reckoned with is their modern virtuosity. "The writing, the soloing, the unison lines -- it's world music at its best," said Larry Ochs, a member of the Bay Area's Rova Saxophone Quartet.
Hear solos with the emotional control of great jazz, razor-cut harmonies and combo work reminiscent of the high-wire polyrhythms of the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra of Depression-era America. But take away the preciousness of concert jazz and substitute something like a Mardi Gras spirit: live for today, for tomorrow we die.
It's notable that one event in Markovic's Northern California tour is literally a wedding. Instead of a concert, Markovic will play a Balkan/Romany wedding at the Slavonic Cultural Center in San Francisco on Monday. The bride and groom will walk down the aisle to the accompaniment of what could be the world's best brass band.
Markovic's band plays five to 10 weddings a year, for the rich and for the poor. Weddings are harder work than concerts, he said in an e-mail interview from his ancestral hometown of Vladicin Han, Serbia (population 8, 000.) "But you are happy when you see people happy anyway," he said.
The San Francisco event is a fund-raiser for Voice of Roma, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the welfare of the people known formally as Romany.
"Gypsy" is the old, and now considered rude and offensive, term for the Roma people, who emerged from the Punjab in India between A.D. 800 and 950 and migrated through the Persian Gulf to Europe. They have experienced misunderstanding, discrimination and even slavery throughout their history and are currently facing difficulties in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and a Balkan region emerging from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's defeat under NATO bombardment in 1998.
"In America we have a very romantic and fictionalized side," said Sani Rifrati, president of Voice of Roma. "In Europe, it's completely different. It's very negative. Roma are going through like African Americans in the '50s and '60s. On a daily basis you have in the Czech Republic skinhead attacks on the Roma people."
The band's music isn't overtly topical, yet its sad undercurrents tell an old story and its slam-bang drive amounts to a demand to be heard. No bandanas, hoop earrings, colorful skirts and other such faux gypsy elements here.
"I'm going to make sure you understand who we are, because if you don't understand it you're going to fear me the rest of your life," Sani said by way of describing his vision for the performance.
"We want to represent the culture as it is, not gypsy queens this and gypsy kings that," he said. "I don't want to play that game. Enough is enough."
Some say the Romany in the Middle Ages were pressed into service as musicians for their Ottoman overlords. But later, they began to define the music as their own. Emerging some 200 years ago in the Dragacevo district of Serbia was a cult of the trumpet, according to www.guca.co.yu, a Web site about the tradition and the annual brass festival in the city of Guca.
Markovic can't read or write music. "But I prepare some original pieces and then we rehearse it, before I forget them," he said by e-mail. "But mostly I arrange."
The live band includes four flugelhorns, four tenor horns, one helicon and four percussionists. On record, Markovic sometimes uses violin, accordion, clarinet and sax.
A master trumpeter like his father and grandfather, Markovic is considered the Balkan brass tradition's leading representative. With a trumpet as a favorite toy, he grew up in a village that was a main source of musicians for the brass bands of Serbia. He was playing from the age of 7.
His son, Marko, 15, is touring with the band on flugelhorn. Reportedly, he's even more of a brass maniac than his dad. Markovic, who repeatedly walked away with the top prizes at the Guca festival until he stopped competing in 2001, chooses musicians from his area who are ready to work hard. They must enjoy the music enough to play with spirit 100 times a year.
Markovic plans to record a new CD next year and is collaborating with his son and other Balkan musicians on the music for a new film called "Usti Opre."
His greatest joy in life? "Being with family," he said, "seeing my son, Marko, becoming a great musician and nice person and also seeing people enjoying our concerts everywhere."
09/17/04 >> 
