Slavic Soul Party has a gig that's hard to beat. The raucous brass band, which features nine members — give or take a belly dancer — holds forth every Tuesday night at Barbès, a compact bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that has cultivated a lively scene around the group's marathon performances.
The venue's intimate back room gets cozier than a phone booth when the rumpus starts. Fans, most of them female, come to dance, and those reluctant to join the fray will likely find themselves exiled to a barstool.
"It's terrifying, exhausting, and way more aggressive than a lot of the punk music I've seen," Sufjan Stevens, the Brooklyn singer-songwriter who caught the show one night, told Rolling Stone. It's a quote that Slavic Soul Party's leader, Matt Moran, loves to cite.
"What could be more punk-rock than a bunch of grown men playing loud, fast, and furous brass instruments in peoples faces?" Mr. Moran asked. The slender percussionist and Connecticut native already had a reputation as an imaginative vibraphonist when he launched his Balkan project several years ago. And he wasn't even the first musician on the downtown New York jazz and improv scene to do so. Groups such as Pachora and Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio were plumbing similar material in the early 1990s.
But Mr. Moran's ensemble has taken on a life of its own. The melodies are strongly rooted in the tradition of Serbian Gypsy brass bands, with their mysterious "snake time" — weird, undulating meters — and violent exuberance, often juxtaposed with a keening melancholy. The players, who include several gifted jazz improvisers, bring their own voices to this style, taking songs far beyond the written page.
What's surprising, for an unschooled listener, is to discover that the folk themes that inspired the group are not very old. Balkan brass bands only became mainstream in the 1960s, Mr. Moran said, and currently are enjoying a boom. He credits Emir Kusturica's 1995 film "Underground" with exposing their sound to American audiences, thanks to bandleader Goran Bregovic's score.
"There was a young, artsy crowd that had never known this stuff was out there before," Mr. Moran said. "The music provides a propelling and cathartic aspect to the film. Also, there were a lot of postwar expatriate Yugoslavs living in the U.S., looking for something to be proud of in their culture, which had been demonized here."
"Teknochek Collision," Slavic Soul Party's new album, argues for an even broader creative template. Released by Barbes Records, their home club's signature label, the disc shows how the group is also connected to brass traditions in New Orleans and Mexico. Especially on the delirious title track, with its randy sousaphone eruptions and slinky clarinet cries, the sound suggests the kind of marching band exotica that might be sampled for a Missy Elliott dance track.
"We hear all different kinds of music, and we think about the possibilities," Mr. Moran said. "For instance, there's a similarity between New Orleans second-line parade music and the type of swing in south Serbian Gypsy music. Even if they are playing in odd meters, you have to go ‘Wow, listen to that mid-horn swing!' There's a meeting point."
The album was inspired by a friend of the band named Gus Dejan, who ran a body shop in Woodside, Queens, called Teknochek Collision. "He was really into Serbian music and Gypsy music and American music. His father was a Gypsy, his mom was American, and he came from southern Louisiana. There's a lot of mix in there. When we started writing the music, we thought it was a great analogy for us. Two streams going along together."
As Ron Caswell, the sousaphonist who also engineered the recording, observed, the title also is literal. The "chek" comes from "chochek," the Romany word for music and dance. Instead of taping the musicians live in one room, each instrument was recorded in isolation, which ironically results in a more "live" sound, thanks to improved clarity, and also makes the pieces easier for DJs to remix for dance club tracks — hence, the "tekno."
Authenticity, then, becomes more a matter of personal attitude than cultural correctness. Olivier Conan, who co-owns Barbés and runs its label, recalled how he idolized Willie Colón, the Bronx-born king of salsa.
"When I moved to New York from France, I was shocked to discover that he didn't speak Spanish very well," Mr. Conan said. Slavic Soul Party, which includes musicians of Japanese, Mexican, and Jewish heritage, simply relfects the New York melting pot. Much the same can be said for the other acts on the Barbès label, which emulate everything from 1970s Peruvian disco to norteño folk ballads. (The club will celebrate its fifth anniversary with a label showcase on Saturday).
Slavic Soul Party embraces the notion of creative appropriation that has always made popular music fun. "We're synthesizing American roots with other kinds of brass band music," Mr. Moran said, "making a New York brass band culture. We just happen to be heavy on the Eastern European side of it."
Aside from that, though, there's something more primal going on. Mr. Caswell remembered what it was like in high school to tote around his brass. "People used to throw apples in my sousaphone," he said. "Now we get to see them get up and shake their a----."
Mr. Moran concurred. "Brass subverts the hegemony of rock. The electric guitar became the school uniform for so many people. It's great for cats like us. We're all band nerds, man! We love getting a chance to get in there and mess people up."
Slavic Soul Party performs tonight and most Tuesdays at Barbès (376 9th St. at Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-965-9177).
05/08/07 >> 
