Meet daring culture-clash instigators Balkan Beat Box

BY CHRIS BILTON   September 01, 2010 17:09

Who are they?

At its core, Balkan Beat Box is Tomer Yosef on vocals and percussion, Tamir Muskat on drums and programming, and Ori Kaplan on saxophone, though the collectively minded trio almost always surround themselves with an eclectic mix of musicians from around the world. The founding members met when Kaplan was playing sax with hyperactive Gypsy punks Gogol Bordello; and that band collaborated with Muskat on a one-off album. 

This sounds like the perfect soundtrack for New York City.

Kaplan has said before that Balkan Beat Box could only happen in New York. And although he is now based in Vienna, and the band works mostly out of Tel Aviv, NYC is where BBB got its start, and where it maintains its most hardcore following. In fact, Kaplan and Muskat had actually been playing the band’s music at their respective DJ nights well before the live incarnation had taken to the stage.

Kaplan explains on the line from his home in Vienna: “We’d been paying our dues in New York for more than a decade playing in different bands, so with Balkan Beat Box there was a connection to what we did before with [Muskat’s old band] Firewater and all kinds of bands that I led and [now-closed downtown NYC venues like] Tonic and Knitting Factory. And it all just came together with the DJ tracks buzzing around and getting into different collages, starting to make some noise. Our first show was at CBGB’s; it was a Halloween party and there were 300 people outside who couldn’t get in.”

Don’t you dare call it “world music.”

“You have this whole trend of world music, which we never really recognized,” says Kaplan when I bring up the difficulties of modernizing traditional music. “There is this trend of ambient, deep house, trip-hop, down-tempo artists taking these ethnic elements and making them really diluted and putting it on this world-music shelf. There are some dreadful things there.”

Consequently, Balkan Beat Box aims for an aesthetic that is anything but diluted, stemming instead from a pursuit of ancient sounds that the band has described in previous interviews as “extreme instrumentalism taught on the mountain, not in the conservatory.”

So are these guys musico-cultural explorers or sonic anthropologists? 

Well, they’re definitely fearless when it comes to adding players, even if it’s just for the sake of trying something new or challenging their own musical assumptions. “We like to find people who are kind of behind [the scene], not even in the music scene. Like to discover something; some unpolished diamond,” Kaplan says. “Usually [new players come] from around the Mediterranean lake — around the pond — it tends to be because that’s the cultural/geographical connection we have. It could be Morocco, Spain, the Balkans, Iran — everything to fit what we like to hear. It could be Mexican mariachi; there are no limits.”

Towards a global melting pot

“Part of the excitement of having this band is that finally we have a vehicle through which to express our political humanistic onions without being serious or needing to write big manifestos or anything,” says Kaplan. Though the band’s lyrics make convincing arguments about equality (“Blue Eyed Black Boy,” the title track from their most recent release) and the pointlessness of war (“War Again”), the simple fact of their multi-culti makeup is how they try to lead by example. 

“In a way, the music speaks for itself,” says Kaplan. “When we play in France or somewhere and people come up to us saying, ‘We’re Palestinians and we never thought there’d be any Israelis like you.’ And we’re, like, ‘No, there’s a whole left camp that believes in dialogue and communicating and collaborating and making something good out of this mess.’ And we kind of get to the fans one by one. If we get to one person who was completely closed-minded and they talk to other people, then we’ve done good.”