Middle East Meets West “Balkan Beat Box defies traditional political and musical boundaries by giving Middle Eastern folk and klezmer music a Brooklyn beat.”

-By Nathan Stubbs

Growing up in the 1980s in Tel Aviv, Tamir Muskat wanted little to do with the traditional folk and classical music that permeated his Israeli upbringing. Klezmer and Yiddish music was inescapable, and on Friday afternoons his father — a classically trained organist — would gather the family to watch broadcasts of the Egyptian Orchestra on the sole channel picked up on their TV.

“Obviously, there was a time of resistance,” he says in a telephone interview from his new hometown of Brooklyn, New York. “These melodies came from my grandma’s house. It wasn’t really cool to like it at some point.” Muskat typically found more inspiration from Western rock music, and, as a teenager, played drums in a punk band and produced Israeli metal bands in a basement studio.

These days, he’s teamed up with fellow Israeli native Ori Kaplan in the band Balkan Beat Box, a New York ensemble that lists influences ranging from Yuri Yunakov, a stalwart of Bulgarian wedding music, to jazz legend Ornette Coleman and early ’90s Chicago hardcore rock group The Jesus Lizard.

Muskat and Kaplan formed Balkan Beat Box in 2004, after almost a decade of collaborations that included a Kaplan solo album and the band J.U.F. (Jewish Ukrainian Freundschaft). In all of these groups, Muskat has helped lay down reggae-inspired rhythms and electronic dance beats, while Kaplan, whose childhood saxophone teacher hailed from a Bulgarian gypsy village, has added a more traditional Middle Eastern sound.

“If you look back on Ori and my projects,” Muskat says, “all of them were kind of dealing with the same elements. It’s the music that we were growing up with but somehow we really felt the urge and the need to twist it and make it our own.”

Muskat, whose family is originally from Romania, notes the Balkan element comes from the fact that Israel is a melting pot of culture from across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, from where many Jewish families immigrated after World War II.

Balkan Beat Box is comprised of six core members, half Israeli and half New Yorkers. But with a revolving door of collaborators from all around the world always sitting in, the group has never been a band in the traditional sense.

Muskat and Kaplan keep the band’s structure loose on purpose. Recently, the duo has focused on creating musical collaborations that previously seemed impossible.

“We’ve been living in New York for many, many years,” Muskat says, “and in a way zoomed out on the whole political situation in Israel and just really started to feel the urge to do something about it.” They began cultivating some of the relationships they had developed in New York with musicians from throughout the Middle East, many from countries that, as Israelis, he and Kaplan are prohibited from even visiting.

“We cannot go into Syria,” Muskat says. “We cannot go into Iran. We cannot go into Lebanon. We cannot go into Egypt almost these days. We never had the chance to meet these people that are our neighbors. And so the only way to collaborate with these artists was here in New York, and we did that out of just curiosity and the love for this music. In the last three or four years, we’ve been constantly collaborating with artists from countries that basically our governments are at war. Some of them can’t even mention their name on our titles.”

Gratification from these collaborations inspired the name of the band’s new album, Nu Med, set for release on May 15.

“It stands for New Mediterranean,” Muskat explains. “For us, this is it. It’s the possibility of a new Mediterranean, one that has a place for a dialogue. It’s almost a fantasy world that gives this possibility of collaborations and dialogue in some way because Israel is not doing anything about it, and we’re very much not into it.”

While the band does play shows in Israel, as well as Mediterranean countries like Turkey and Greece, Muskat says he dreams of the day when the band will be able to do a full mid-East tour. “To really go into the Middle East and play a show in Lebanon would be amazing, and we can’t wait for this to happen,” he says.

Meanwhile, the group’s current tours are bringing its unique brand of funky electronic Balkan music to a whole new audience, winning over crowds from major rock festivals like Bonnaroo and Roskilde.

Known for its high-energy live performances, with band members marching in and out of the crowd, Muskat says the band makes a conscious effort to keep its show fresh each night. On some of the group’s European tours, the atmosphere can resemble a carnival, with the touring members swelling to more than 20, including a troupe of belly dancers, multiple percussionists and a full horn section.

On the current U.S. tour, Muskat says they are sticking to their six-member base, featuring Muskat programming drums on a laptop alongside two saxophone players, a guitarist and a bassist. MC Tomer Yosef, a former Israeli stand-up comedian, fronts the band. Sporting a Mohawk and singing in a mishmash of English and Hebrew, his lyrics are alternately political and blithe. On the song “La Bush Resistance,” Yosef raps, “Bring the dance and leave the guns, push the brains to positance. Drums of the resistance, we’re making Bush bellydance with Afghanistans.”

The word positance, Muskat explains, means “positive” and comes from the multi-lingual bandmembers’ tendency to mix up languages in writing lyrics. “It’s BBB language,” he says. “If you speak a little Latin or a little French and not pure Americana, you’ll probably kind of understand what we’re saying a bit more.”

As for the music, Muskat says it even speaks to his parents.

“They love it,” he says. “In Israel, we get an amazing response because I think we kept a lot of what was important. The movement of the beats is very similar to the original in some way. We just totally painted it in completely different colors but still kept a lot of the essence of the music. So when you come to our show and want to dance to a good old Balkan beat, you’ll get it ­— it’s just gonna be full of crazy bass and distorted drums.”