Top brass
North Adams Transcript

-By John E. Mitchell


NORTH ADAMS — As Balkan beats continue to mesmerize American audiences, the brass band Slavic Soul Party has made a reputation for mixing those sounds with those from the Gypsy, Asian and Latin backgrounds of its members — as well as the American jazz and soul backgrounds of bandleader and percussionist Matt Moran.

This mix of sounds shouldn't cause them to be labeled "world music," though — in Moran's mind, the band is part of the larger movement of musical history.

"We think of these genre mash-ups as a distinctly modern thing, but that's just a fallacy," said Moran. "Look at the very existence of brass bands, it's cultural intermingling. You've got colonial cultures bringing in the military bands and you've got local cultures using the instruments for their own purposes. Think of all the cultural interchange that's been going on since we could get around the world. We tend to forget about that stuff now. Music has always been about 'Let's take this sound from that place and move it in with our thing.'"

Bringing the ethnicity back to music has been one of the major progressions of the 20th Century; an important recovery of the sounds lost to European classical music, which often derided what were considered lower forms.

"All of a sudden in Europe they just said, 'Nope, no more Muslim or African influence, we're shutting the door on that, we're getting rid of those instruments,'" said Moran. "There can be periods of ethnic cleansing of sound and that's how you end up with what became European classical musical from the Renaissance on."

Such is the scope of Moran, who began his career as a vibraphonist in the New York City jazz scene, performing with a diverse array of musicians, from Lionel Hampton to Combustible Edison. His education is in that form as well, having earned his master's degree in jazz composition from the New England Conservatory. Moran's work takes his background and education and melds it with the sounds around him, dating back to his childhood growing up in an apartment house with a Serbian family.

"They were like a second set of parents to me," said Moran. "I was always sneaking up the back staircase just to hang out with them and eavesdrop on them. I took a lot of it in at an early age."

Some years later, a Greek friend handed him an unlabelled cassette with Balkan music on it and that cemented his musical path.

"That's where I heard some Macedonian brass that had some rhythmic things going on that I had never heard before," said Moran. "That's when I decided to start Slavic Soul Party in the late '90s. It was like, 'Oh, man, I want to figure out what this is and learn how to play it and do it my own way.'"

Doing it his own way involved finding the right people for the job, those who would not only do what Moran wanted to, but bring their own ideas to the table. To accomplish this, Moran was in the right place — the metropolis of immigrants that New York City most definitely is gave him the opportunity to band together such musicians.

"I can’t imagine finding a combination of players like this anywhere else, players who also bring their own thing to it, who enrich it as well," said Moran. "It's not just if I could have found players to do what I want, but found players who come in and say 'Check this out, I've been listening to this Mexican banda stuff, I brought in this arrangement of polka that came over to Mexico from somewhere in Poland, but let's put it back in and do it Serbian style.' It's so cool and such a distinctly New York thing."

Among the diverse players whom Moran met along the way are Peter Stan, known as "New York's best Romanian Serbian Gypsy Australian accordion player," Japanese snare drummer Take Toriyama, Mexican-American saxophonist Oscar Noriega and klezmer trumpeter Ben Holmes.

"I call what we do neighborhood music because it's not like we're trying to go out and create an identity in world music," said Moran. "We're just putting it all together, what we hear, and what seems exciting and relevant to our time and place."

More than world music, Moran considers Slavic Soul Party to be a brass band. Wind instruments in American music are traditionally used, if not in classical, then in jazz and rhythm and blues. Moran acknowledges that is part of where the band comes from, but it is also aligned with a much larger tradition in which they play with arrangements, fusing the Balkan styles with the American jazz ones and bringing forth something totally fresh to listeners.

"For us in particular, the fact that we are doing stuff that has never been done in the brass band world makes me feel exactly part of the brass band tradition because of, not despite, that stuff," said Moran. "We're just a brass band like any other brass band in the world and we're going to make the music that makes sense to us and the people around us in our neighborhood."

Given the mix that evokes the city they live and work in, the sounds they absorb on a daily basis and the paths of their lives, Moran thinks the band's appeal is its strength at imparting the real life behind the music and translating it into stage energy. In this day and age of "American Idol" and slick, generic production values, Slavic Soul Party brings the big wide world down to a human scale and beckons its audience to interact.

"The intensity of seeing nine people, the tremendously inefficient and off-the-grid approach to music making, nine people just pumping out whatever they can energetically, is just a trip for people," said Moran. "It's a new intense great experience that reaches into the past of being a human. It gets away from sub-woofers and Yamahas and Casios and all that stuff and shows the root of what the role of music is."

Slavic Soul Party will perform at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday, March 31, at 8 p.m. They can be found online at www.slavicsoulparty.com.