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Electro-Acoustic, Urban Wedding Collective Besh o droM Creates 1000 MPH Musical Mayhem
It has been said that Hungary has two languages: its ancient spoken language and its ancient folk music. Probably due to the fact that Bela Bartók and Zoltán Kodály vigorously promoted Hungarian folk music during the inter-war period, it is intricately woven through the country’s national identity.
So when an electro-acoustic, urban wedding collective like Besh o droM rises to the forefront of Hungarian music, it is bound to be a sensation. The band’s way of fusing deep ethnic folk roots with wild jazz improvisation and Albanian, Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, and Turkish music (not to mention an interlude with the most popular DJ in the country) has placed it far at odds with traditional folk purists, while creating immense popularity among young, loyal followers.
The band’s twelve musicians seem virtually incapable of doing anything but interpreting and recreating traditional music in their own, unique style. The line-up centers around two self-taught musicians, Gergõ Barcza and Ádám Pettik. In an interview for the Pepsi Sziget Festival, Pettik describes how the spirit is the most important thing in the music. He says, “I watch how Gypsy musicians learn. For example, I give Robi a cassette, he listens, he tries to play it. He wants to play it the same but he cannot because here in his heart is the musician. The musician in him will not allow him to copy. This is the way we try to play music.”
The inability to photocopy traditional music reflects itself in the band’s name. Although its literal meaning is ‘to ride the road,’ Besh o droM (that's right -- small d, capital M) also means to follow your own path and not be held back. The Gypsy idiom connotes controlling something stronger than you. Like a person riding a horse. When that person takes charge, he or she can go anywhere they desire.
With the April 8, 2003 release of Can’t Make Me! on Asphalt Tango, a sub-label of Berlin’s Piranha Musik (distributed in the USA by Harmonia Mundi), Besh o droM will ride its driving beats and furious harmonies across the Atlantic, while blasting its frenetic energy into the souls of American dancing shoes.
“…ethnic tradition with the unique sound of the cimbalom with jazz improvisation, a fantastic Balkan brass section with locked-down funk grooves. A 1000 mph musical mayhem, a real audience pleaser with very strong musicianship. World music at its best. An absolute must. Dance shoes recommended.” –András Barabás
“a splendid flight of wildness and joyous exuberance that rarely pauses for breath… The band, plays music that excites them, not learnt at their father’s knee but picked up here and there and from records. It is yet further proof of the power of middle and eastern European and Gypsy music to spread and metamorphose, gathering up whatever sticks to it to make modern wide-audience music of dazzling drive and colour.” –Andrew Cronshaw, fRoots
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