Balkanized

Brass band with a vengeance

By Sam Hurwitt

            For a Serbian superstar who attracts rapt crowds throughout Europe, trumpeter Boban Markovic is hardly known in the United States.  Tours over here are far too few, and his CDs on the Hungarian X-Produkcio label are entirely unavailable stateside.  Only recently has Harmonia Mundi US started distributing Live in Belgrade and Boban i Marko; Balkan Brass Fest on the German Piranha label, following the popularity of similar Piranha recordings by Romanian Romany combo Fanfare Ciocarlia.  If you’ve ever seen Emir Kusturica’s 1995 film Underground, you may recognize the Boban Markovic Orkestar as the brass band that’s always chasing the protagonists, or you may have heard them in Kusturica’s bizarre Johnny Depp vehicle Arizona Dream.  But it’s far more likely that you didn’t, and have no idea how incredibly unfortunate that is. 

            A Balkan Gypsy brass band is a hell of a thing, and the Boban Markovic Orkestar is a hell of a Balkan Gypsy brass band.  (“Roma” is the preferred term, but “Gypsy” is still standard in discussing the music.)  Hailing from Vladicin Han is southern Serbia, Markovic’s eleven-piece combo with three trumpets, five tubas, a saxophone, and two drummers has won awards time and time again at the annual Guca Brass Band Festival in central Serbia, “the Woodstock of brass music,” where Miles Davis is said to have once marveled, “I didn’t know you could play the trumpet that way.”

            Just as the music of the Roma developed around the fiddle in Hungary and the guitar in Spain, in Serbia it grew up around brass, originally inspired by the trumpets of occupying Turkish soldiers fighting to quell the Karageorge uprising in 1804.  The resultant fast-paced, jubilant, and dizzyingly complex dance music sounds to Western ears like a marching band gone berserk, heady concoctions by turns manic and melancholy, with echoes of funk, klezmer, spaghetti Westerners, Dixieland, and any popular tunes that might strike their fancy.  A Balkan wedding without a Gypsy brass band would be a somber affair indeed, and when a preeminent combo like the Boban Markovic Orkestar tours Eastern Europe, it’s not uncommon to see a mob of Hungarian teens jumping around as if they were in a mosh pit, singing along in a language entirely unrelated to their own.

            Whether a similar crowd shows up for Boban’s ultrarare appearance at Ashkenaz Sunday (8:30 p.m., $15) depends entirely on whether they know who they’re dealing with.  One thing’s certain:  If they’ve heard him, they will come.  Ashkenaz.com