Minneapolis, Minn. — The 20-year-old Boban Marcovic Orkestar (or orchestra) has earned its brass band credentials at countless weddings, funerals and parties. Its music can press any emotional button. Almost every tune the 13 members play makes listeners want to dance -- or can make every eye misty with sadness.

The group is one of Serbia's most famous musical exports. The founder and leader, Boban Marcovic, 40, doesn't speak English and is recovering from a grueling trans-Atlantic flight from Belgrade to Minneapolis.

Band manager Bojan Djordjevic is sipping an orange juice in the hotel lobby. He's a little stressed out because the band's luggage has been lost. The good news is the instruments survived the trip.

Djordjevic says the group is the top of the heap in Boban Marcovic's hometown -- which is something, because the heap is pretty high.

"(The town) is something like 10,000 people max, they have more than 150 orchestras," he says.

The Boban Marcovic Orchestra has won countless European competitions and fills concert halls. The music is a swirl of Roma -- or Gypsy -- folk tunes, infused with a bit of klezmer and spiced with strains of New Orleans jazz and mariachi.

Boban Marcovic is Roma. Roma musicians are favorites at parties and weddings, Boyan Djordjevic says, because they know all the old danceable tunes. Serbian weddings can be three-day affairs.

"This gets really heavy for the band, and especially for the family who are marrying the son because they are going to spend fortunes," he says.

Turns out this is not a totally foreign concept. There are northeastern Minnesota accounts of marathon Iron Range parties, where Serbian mine workers and their neighbors danced for days.

Americans know brass bands mainly through the music of John Philip Sousa. St. Paul resident Paul Maybery, a tuba player, brass band leader and one of this country's top historic music experts, says the pedigree of brass instruments is ancient and regal.

"There was a nice gold trumpet found in King Tut's tomb found in very early Egypt," he says.

Since then, Maybery says, brass bands have evolved mostly through military history. Trumpeters signaled battles and marching bands led troops into the fray.

Maybery doesn't know the Boban Marcovic Orchestra, but he's excited about hearing them and seeing instruments he says are older cousins of western versions.

"(The) circular tubas, referred to as helicons; cornets with all kinds of rotary valves on them; instruments shaped somewhat different than what we're used to seeing in this country," Maybery says.

There's a rollercoaster-like quality to the Boban Marcovic Orchestra's music. One minute, Boban and his flugel horn can lift riders into an ethereal landscape, and the next minute the band rushes ahead into a maze of musical twists and turns.

The 13-member Boban Markovic Orchestra, including drums and one saxophone, makes its first stop at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. Then it's on to a half dozen other U.S. cities on the West and East coasts, as part of its second American tour in as many years.