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Mountain Xpress, Concert Preview >>
-by Alli Marshall
They aren’t the world
Why Balkan Beat Box won't be dueting with Peter Gabriel or posing for Benetton
If you never “got” world music, don’t feel uncultured. Ori Kaplan, co-founder of the definitely-file-under-world-music band Balkan Beat Box, doesn’t like it either.
“When I hear [it], I cringe,” confesses Kaplan, whose band also eschews flags, nationalities and borders. “[It’s an] overly produced concept where you try to have some slick beat with some aboriginal vocals on top of it over this sweetened reverb. We really hate this stuff.”
He could be describing New Age-techno band Deep Forest. The dance-floor beats. The heart-achingly sweet African tribal chants. The easy accolades.
“It’s a small department of people who do it for some kind of a veneer,” Kaplan—an Israeli-born saxophonist—insists. “We don’t like that term [world music] at all—it’s invented by record companies, not people.”
He stresses, “There’s just good music or bad music.”
The irony is that BBB’s soon-to-be-released sophomore album, Nu Med (JDub), layers Eastern instrumentation, Arabic melodies and Gypsy-infused songs over techno: rougher than, but not completely departed from, Deep Forest’s 1995 release, Boheme (much of which seemed to have been sampled from the Latcho Drom soundtrack).
Perhaps this only attests to the not-so-underground listening audience’s continued infatuation with all things Gypsy. Since the days of Django Reinhardt, wayfaring sounds have worked their way into the mainstream consciousness like so many brightly-colored caravans.
Nu Med, however, is an edgier, far more hyper and less romantic foray into all things Romany. Omnipresent are the droning, oboe-esque melodies—simultaneously Moroccan marketplace and “Flight of the Bumblebee.” But the instrumentation is too skillful to dismiss as mere novelty, and the musicians boast genuine Eastern pedigrees, a claim few fusion bands (Luminescent Orchestrii, the Reptile Palace Orchestra, the Traveling Band of Gypsy Nomads, etc.) can make.
Kaplan immigrated to the U.S. a decade-and-a-half ago to attend Mannes College. Armed with a BFA, he immediately jumped into the New York underground-music scene, forgoing his classical training for roles in bands like gypsy-punk cabaret Gogol Bordello and rock group Firewater. A few years ago, he and Tamir Muskat, an Israeli-born percussionist and electronic musician, combined their interests to form Balkan Beat Box.
But, to the sax player, rock and punk aren’t such a far reach from classical and traditional music. “These are all sounds we grew up with,” he notes, recalling percussionist Muskat’s part-Romanian upbringing, and his own childhood clarinet lessons.
“Growing up in Israel you are subjected to very ancient folk in your right ear,” he says, “[and] in your left ear, you listen to anything pop, hip-hop and punk rock. We’re kind of the sum of our parts.”
Additionally, his part includes leading a one-band U.N. of sorts. “We do have strong Israeli roots,” he says. “We do speak the voice of the silenced Israeli peace-keeping camps.” Part of that manifests in on-stage collaborations with Palestinian artists. Much of it is evidenced in BBB’s hectic world-touring schedule. “Musical connections are made by BBB that politics often keep separate,” informs a press statement for the album.
Next stop for Kaplan: Japan and Mexico, two more countries with a growing Gypsy-fusion fan base.
“Sometimes,” he says, “a buzz becomes a tidal wave. And then we show up.”
Balkan Beat Box plays the Orange Peel (101 Biltmore Ave.) on Tuesday, April 24. Klezmer-punk band Golem! opens the 9 p.m. show. $10/$12. 225-5851. 04/18/07 >> go there
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