17.2.06
Balkan Beat Box - concert review
The time has come, once again, to squash a few of us in the smallest car available and take that arduous trip down to that quite insignificant city that goes under the name Vienna or Wien „auf Ostereichische“. This time the lure to get out of Brno and head south of the border, was the unique experience of seeing the Izraeli-New York collective Balkan Beat Box play at the Wuk, an old faktory space converted into an impressive art centre slap bang in the middle of Vienna. We’re supposed to get an interview, but as has become tradition with us over the years we turn up fashionably late,and miss out on this Czech exclusive.
Pretty much as we enter the club the whole place starts jumping to the beat of a drum and a parade of musicians in pig masks forces its way to the stage through the audience. Camera flashes go off in an instant and a cameraman from some Austrian TV smacks me in the face as he walks backwards, in the attempt to capture the mayhem created by the masked BBB.
Once on stage and after a few get to know you comments, the band rips into action with samples, percussion, 2x saxes, a Dick Dale guitar sound, what seems to be a hefty bass, oh and of course with some added spice of sweat, energy and an arsenal of cockerel sounds.
Not what was expected at all. The now well-accustomed Viennese audience got it straight away, Vienna has a plethora of club nights dedicated to Balkan and Gypsy music mashed and mixed with bags of electronica (De-La Dap, Wuk being just the tip of the iceberg) but our crew seemed a little perplexed. This aint Boban Markovic? This is Boban fully versed in MPC and big fat bass language.
The musicians led by drummer and computer geek, Tamir Muskat, who conducts the proceedings from his command centre at the front left of the stage, dance and conga themselves into a frenzy of banging beats, blaring horns and the crazy rapping antics of Tomer Yosef. The energy is fantastic and the crowd is loving it.
What I love about this band is not that they are great musicians, they’re not! With the exception of Ori Kaplan on Sax – who is a very special musician – they come across as a bunch of guys having fun. When a band relies heavily on a computer for backing tracks, there is always the problem of how to organise improvisation and keep it all in time. Balkan Beat Box have the best solution to this problem. Keep in time? Us? With our reputation? NO WAY! They just jam and groove and when the computer comes in and they are all out of time – they fumble around for a bar until it all syncs back in. This might sound amateur and silly but it works, it really does. The energy comes not from musical precision but from the party spirit and the love of the groove.
Balkan Beat Box as the name might suggest are more than just a crazed bunch of lunatics, dancing feverishly into the night. They have a message. Normally we’d hide under the table at the thought of a message in music, but this one’s got a new flavour to it. They contest that there is a unique Mediterranean rhythm that can unite the countries around this sea rather than divide them, that the Turks, the Greeks, the Southern Slavs, the Israelis, the Arabs, the Spanish, the Italian, the Muslim, the Christian and the Jewish all share a beat and a rhythm and a common culture, One which could unite them.
Well call me crazy if I think that’s a bit idealistic, but it’s got to start somewhere and it might as well start with a banging bass-line and some funky drums. - mind you, having someone of arabic descent in the band might have helped.
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