Mozaik, Changing Trains (Compass Records, 2008)

Andy Irvine and Dónal Lunny first played together nearly forty years ago in the influential Irish folk band Planxty. They've both kept busy with all sorts of musical projects over the years; Irvine has a solo carer and is a member of Patrick Street, I've rattled off Lunny's resumé in a previous post so I won't repeat it here, and both have participated in the periodic Planxty reunions. They share a keen interest in music from other parts of the world, though, and they founded the band Mozaik several years ago to team up musicians from different folk traditions and explore their common musical ground. In addition to Irvine (bouzouki, mandolin, vocals) and Lunny (bouzouki, guitar, vocals), the quintet also includes the American Bruce Molsky (fiddle, banjo, vocals), plus Dutchman Rens van der Zalm and Bulgarian Nikola Parov (both play too many instruments to mention). Their 2004 debut CD Live from the Powerhouse focused on pieces already in the repertoires of the individual members, but on the new CD Changing Trains, Mozaik work with new compositions and new arrangements of traditional songs and tunes.

Irvine owes much of his long and productive career to being a master of the autobiographical song, particularly when he intertweaves details of his own life with the evolution of his musical tastes. Changing Trains has a couple of excellent examples of Irvine's narrative style. The first is the opening song "O'Donoghue's," which recalls many long nights spent in a pub in Dublin that played a pivotal role in the revival of traditional Irish music that started in the early 1960's. Irvine was part of that scene, and in the course of the song he drops the names of members of The Dubliners and also Johnny Moynihan, with whom Irvine later played in a band called Sweeney's Men. As Irvine recounts, it was Moynihan who first brought the bouzouki from Eastern Europe to Ireland. It took Irvine and Lunny to make the instrument popular, though. The second example is "The Wind Blows Over the Danube," a song about the summer in the late sixties that Irvine spent in the Balkans exploring the music there. By the end of the summer he had visited many places and fallen in and out of love, and was left wondering where the time went.

The rest of Changing Trains shifts styles according to the different band members' specialties. Molsky contributes a pair of old American folk songs, and Lunny gives a very rare lead vocal on a Gaelic waltz called "Siún Ní Dhuibir." The instrumentals frequently mix styles from one part of the tune to the next. The Lunny composition "The Humours of Parov," for example, combines an Irish slip jig with a Bulgarian horo, both in 9/8 time. "The Pigfarm Suite" combines several polyrhythmic tunes, the first of which is stately and the second of which is more aggressive. Other tracks, like Irivine's adaptation of "The Ballad of Rennardine" and Molsky's arrangement of the Appalachian pieces "Train on the Island/Big Hoedown" are simpler and more self-explanatory, but still quite effective.

Despite the individual reputations of the five members, Mozaik clearly sound like a fully cohesive band starting to hit its best stride. While I liked Live from the Powerhouse, I think Changing Trains represents a clear step forward for the band. The songs are very good, and the playing hits the very high standard you'd expect from the musicians involved. I hope the quintet can time to record and perform together more often in the future, because they have a good thing going.

Overall grade: A-

reviewed by Scott

17 Hippies, Heimlich (Buda Musique, 2007)

17 Hippies are not the kind of band that's easy to describe or explain. There aren't actually seventeen of them, and they don't really look like hippies either (although some of them look old enough that they could easily have been hippies back in the day). Still the band is quite large, with thirteen members coming from different countries and different musical backgrounds. A number of them, both male and female, take turns handling vocals sung in German, French, and English. You'll hear plenty of accordions and banjos on their latest album Heimlich, but you'll also hear winds, horns, a Jew's harp, an African thumb piano, and even a singing saw. To call the band eclectic would be a huge understatement, but if eclectic is what you want then you'll have a blast listening to this.

The album is bookended by a pair of frenetic Balkan pieces -- Golden Fest tunes, as I like to call them. I've actually heard part of the melody for the last tune, a Romanian instrumental called "Rustemul," on an album by the Brooklyn gypsy band Romashka. Most of Heimlich is more laid back than that, though, with styles ranging from Mariachi to tango to bluegrass to French cabaret and lots of other things in between. None of the tracks really have a big band sound, so I get the sense that the band members don't all play on each tune. 17 Hippies aim for simplicity and catchiness in their arrangements, and generally hit their mark. My favorite track is the irresistible "Tick Tack," which will have you singing along even if you don't know any German. The diversity of styles only added to the enjoyment; as you listen, you'll sit there wondering what they'll come up with next.

While 17 Hippies come across as more of a music co-op than a band, that does not diminish the quality of their work. Heimlich came at me in more directions than I could count, but it was all light and catchy, and a clear reflection of how much fun making music can be.

Overall grade: A-

reviewed by Scott

The 2008 Zlatne Uste Golden Festival, Good Shepherd School, Inwood NY, January 19, 2008

Once again, swarms of people converged on Good Shepherd School on the northern tip of Manhattan on a cold night in January to play, dance, and listen to many hours of music at the edition of the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival. The Festival has reached a level of popularity that required the organizers to limit the number of people who could be in the building at a given moment. Still, all three levels were quite packed. The music began at six and ended well after midnight. The audience consisted of a well-blended mixture of veteran participants in the local folk dancing scene and younger people eager some of the many exciting Balkan and Eastern-influenced bands populating the City today. And as usual, everybody appeared to get what they came for.

The Golden Room, on the middle floor, is reserved for the performers who required only a small amount of amplification. My group, the NY Spelmanslag, has made a habit of opening the show in this room. It's not a high-profile slot to say the least, but we can then relax and enjoy the whole rest of the evening without any worries. Our set appeared to go over well.


Shortly following us was a sister act. The Rosen Sisters are ace young fiddlers and dancers whose repertoire stretches from Balkan to Irish to Swedish to Glen Miller. They also wore tap shoes and did some synchronized choreography while fiddling. Their talent and charm made them a hit with the audience, which was still only a fraction of its eventual size at this point.


The Golden Room turned out to be the room to camp out in for the early hours of Golden Fest. Most of the focus at Golden Fest is on music from the Balkan region. Like most of the Balkan countries, Hungary has a distinctive tradition in instrumental folk music, complete with fiddles heavy on the vibrato and coarse, scraping bass lines. NA Folk are a Brooklyn trio who play Hungarian village music, featuring Jake Shulman-Ment of the mighty Romashka (they played later) on fiddle. They played a solid set in the Golden Room as well; fans of bands like Muzsikás would be impressed by them.

Besides the generally aggressive instrumental traditions instrumentals, there are plenty of singing traditions in the Balkans as well, most notably Bulgarian women's singing. Plenty of
women's vocal groups perform at Golden Fest each year, but Svitanya from Philadelphia have generally been the best of these groups, and were so again this year. While primarily a capella, this year the group branched out a bit and played instruments on one of the songs in their set.

The highlight of my many years of attending Golden Fest came two years ago when I discovered the amazing percussionist Raquy Danziger, so when I found out that her group Raquy and the Cavemen were playing a fairly early slot in the Golden Room, I made sure to secure a good seat ahead of time. Indeed, I've never seen that room as packed as it was for her performance. And the crowd loved every minute.

Whether all four musicians were drumming, or Raquy was playing a melody on an Arabic fiddle called a kemenche, the band had the audience mesmerized. Raquy would already be a major star in a better world, but she's definitely a performer to be reckoned with, and you have to go see her if she's playing nearby.

The main auditorium was tightly packed for most of the night. At least it was while I was there. But with the host band Zlatne Uste just starting as I left close to midnight, and Romashka and Slavic Soul Party! following, the crowd wasn't going to disperse too quickly. As always, the floor of the auditorium was filled with people dancing in concentric rings, and generally having a good time regardless of who was playing on stage. Merita Halili & the Raif Hyseni Band, shown here, specialize in Albanian folk music. Despite the language difference, plenty of people in the audience were singing along with them, including plenty of young people.

And I think the ability to lure in young people in addition to the veterans of the City's folk-dancing scene has kept the Golden Festival a massive success for twenty-three years running, and arguably the major musical gathering event on the calendar for those who know about it. Like I said last year, there is definitely a scene for Balkan-flavored music in the City, especially coming out of Brooklyn. The music is fun and creative, and even exciting in some cases, and the scene has more than enough going for it to start spreading. I was definitely encouraged to see the Luminescent Orchestrii become the first of the Brooklyn bands, at least that I'm aware of, to make it out to Long Island just this past weekend when they played at Huntington's Last Licks Café. They definitely shouldn't be the last.

reviewed by Scott

Stórsveit Nix Noltes, Orkídeur Hawaí (Bubblecore, 2005)

Scenes for Balkan folk music have developed in a lot of places well outside of the Balkan region. As I've mentioned before, the Balkan scene in New York City is particularly strong. The CD Orkídeur Hawaí, by the band Stórsveit Nix Noltes, indicates that a vibrant scene for Balkan music exists as well in the extraordinarily unlikely location of Reykjavik, Iceland. Despite their extreme northern location, the band plays mostly traditional Bulgarian instrumentals on the CD, throwing in one Greek tune and an Eastern European klezmer piece for good measure. Like Balkan instrumental tunes in general, the pieces on Orkídeur Hawaí are characterized by lively tempos, minor keys, and complex rhythms. While certainly not mellow by normal standards, Stórsveit Nix Noltes actually do sound a bit restrained in comparison to the Brooklyn-based Balkan bands like Romashka and Luminescent Orchestrii. Their sound is a bit more guitar-oriented than most of the Balkan music I've heard -- three of the band' nine members are guitarists -- but the style is immediately recognizable, and the accordion, violin, and trumpet all get a fair share of attention. On the whole, I found this CD to be a fun offering, comparing well with what I've heard locally. People who like the kind of music played at Golden Festival in Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan every January will find this worth their while.

Overall grade: B

Zlatne Uste Golden Festival, Good Shepherd School, Inwood NY, January 13 2007

For the seventh straight year, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival, held once again at the Good Shepherd School in Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan. I've already described the Festival in detail twice, first in 2003 and then again for this blog last year, so I'll refer you to those articles for a sense of what the show is like and what kind of performers play at it. The Festival has been and continues to be the best party in town, but most aspects of its presentation remain fairly constant year to year. Something was different about this year's Festival though, to a degree that was impossible for any regular attendee to overlook: it was really crowded. Granted, some of the increase in attendance may have resulted from the unusually warm January weather we've been experiencing in the New York area, but I get the feeling that there's a deeper explanation than that.

There's a real scene for Balkan folk music in New York City, and not just to listen to it. I go to the Nordic Roots Festival in Minneapolis every year because there are a lot of exciting young performers doing creative things with traditional Scandinavian music, but all those performers are based in Scandinavia. Golden Festival has largely become a showcase for a lot of exciting young performers doing creative things with traditional Balkan and Mediterranean music, but most of these performers live in the five boroughs and the surrounding area. Some of them, like the amazing percussionist Raquy Danziger and her band Raquy and the Cavemen, came to my attention specifically because of the festival. However, a lot of the local Balkan groups have steadily built a local base through word of mouth and making contacts. Romashka, a furiously upbeat party band specializing in gypsy music, first came to my attention when their singer Inna Barmash e-mailed me out of the blue because she had read my review of the sadly defunct club Satalla on Green Man Review and was looking for people to write about the band. I made a trek down to a bar in Brooklyn one night to see them play, and I was hooked. I found out about Luminescent Orchestrii (not present as a band at this year's festival, but represented by at least two of their members playing with other groups) because somebody at the Makor correctly thought they'd make a worthy opening act for the mighty Warsaw Village Band when they played there last year. Ljova's work has been heard by fans of performers as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma and Jay-Z. He's also very accessible personally. I saw him on the stairs heading up to the main floor, and he wished me a "Happy Golden Fest" like it was a major holiday. I hadn't realized, until speaking with him there, that I had written the first review of his debut CD for The Armchair Critic. I consider that an honor.

If the size and enthusiasm of the audience were any indication, the efforts of these performers to publicize their music are starting to pay dividends. As well as the Good Shepherd School has served as the host of the Golden Festival over the past few years, I'm a little bit concerned that it won't be big enough to handle further increases in attendance. Still, I can't imagine that host band Zlatne Uste are anything but thrilled at what the festival they started twenty-one years ago as a benefit for Balkan relief efforts has grown into. (By the way, you might have some trouble accessing the Zlatne Uste and Golden Festival websites for a while. They have exceeded their traffic allotment for the month.)

Golden Festival includes many non-Balkan styles as well, and here is the NY Spelmanslag playing Swedish music. (You only see half of me playing the 12-string guitar, but it was the best group shot I had.) We play Wednesday nights dowtown for Scandia NY. We're not quite at the same level of musicianship as a lot of the other Golden Fest bands, but we do more than all right for amateurs, and we generally please our target audience.


Inna Barmash fronts Romashka on the main stage.


The host band Zlatne Uste never fails to draw a large crowd to the main floor, but the crowd was especially large this year.

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Luminescent Orchestrii, Too Hot To Sleep

Take some traditional gypsy fiddling, soup it up with the energy of an aggressive rock band, throw in some hip hop rhythms and no small amount of general whackiness, and what you have is the Brooklyn-based Luminescent Orchestrii. This band puts on an impressively creative live show, featuring songs and tunes from their most recent CD Too Hot To Sleep. The focal point of Luminescent Orchestrii's sound is the fiddle and vocal interplay of Rima Fand and Sarah Alden, joined by Kaia Wong on most of the disc and Julianne Carney on the rest of it. Sxip Shirey hammers away on a guitar with a distinctively choppy sound that fits the band's anarchic arrangements remarkably well, and he also writes some really off-kilter songs. Aaron Goldsmith provides a solid bottom on his guitarron, the giant Mariachi equivalent of a bass guitar.

Too Hot To Sleep effectively captures the energy of a Luminescent Orchestrii live performance. They show off their instrumental chops in their frenzied arrangements of Balkan instrumental tunes like the medleys "Freilach/Rabbi in Palestine/Warsaw" and "Cohen Kolemeike." The band's silly side tends to be reflected more in their original compositions. The unsubtly suggestive "Knockin'", written by Shirey and sung by the women, gives a slightly different meaning to the phrase "show me the money." Fand's funky instrumental "She's A Brick" features a human beatbox and, in a performance that has to be heard to be believed, Shirey playing a harmonica through a bullhorn. The Luminescents can be melodic when they want to be as well; the opening song "Amaritsi" and the traditional (I'm guessing Hungarian) tune "Mahala" are my favorite tracks on the disc. My one real complaint is that a few of the tracks sound a bit messy to me, lacking the tightness and precision they displayed when I saw them perform. For that reason, while I like Too Hot To Sleep, I'd recommend checking them out live before getting the CD if you have the chance. (For those of you in the New York City area, the next chance will come on July 12 at Joe's Pub, in a double bill with Ljova and his newly-formed Vjola Contraband.)

Overall grade: B+

Ljova, Vjola: World on Four Strings (Kapustnik Records, 2006)

Ljova (Lev Zhurbin), a Moscow native currently living in New York City, plays his viola in a variety of styles. He first came to my attention through his involvement in the raucous gypsy party band Romashka, but he also does arrangements for acts like the Kronos Quartet and Yo-Yo Ma. On his solo disc Vjola: World on Four Strings he takes a step back from the frenzied sound of Romashka, instead composing Eastern European-style dances, some laid back blues, and a handful of impressionistic pieces. Ljova is essentially a one-man string quartet on this disc, playing all the melody and harmony lines himself and even plucking out the low notes on his viola like it was an upright bass.

Vjola succeeds not simply because of Ljova's technical mastery of his instrument, but also because he can compose and arrange in styles from very different parts of the globe and make the tunes sound like they belong together. His segue way from the sprightly tango "Ori's Fearful Symmetry" to the deliciously bluesy "Coffee +Rum" is especially effective. Other highlights include the cleverly titled "Bagel on the Malecon" and the waltz "Garmoshka," which features guest accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman.

I must confess, though, that my exposure to impressionism is far too limited to adequately evaluate the more challenging pieces on this CD. I was enchanted by the high, dissonant harmonics that accompany "O'er" and the radically re-interpreted cover of Björk's "Army of Me," but I'd expect that some people who are listening for the tangos and waltzes will not know what to make of these tunes. Likewise, the extended pieces "Collage" and "Spring Valley Sunset" require careful attention to small details over long stretches of time, and I'm still trying to digest these.

On Vjola: World on For Strings, Ljova demonstrates a superior command of his instrument in a multitude of styles. Fans of Romashka shouldn't expect this to sound very similar to their CD, but anybody in the mood for mellow tangos, waltzes, or front-porch blues played on viola will find a few tunes to their liking. Some of the tunes most definitely do not fall under the category of easy listening, though, but at the very least they help paint a fuller picture of Ljova's musical personality.

Overall Grade: B+

The 2006 Zlatne Uste Golden Festival

Once again a small army of amateur and semi-professional folk musicians, mostly from the New York City metropolitan area, converged for the 21st annual edition of Goldenfest in Manhattan this past weekend. Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band created this event, a two-day celebration of the music of the Balkans and beyond, to raise money for relief efforts in the Balkan region. As usual, this year's festival consisted of two events, with the smaller event taking place on Friday January 13 at Jan Hus Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the large event, involving over fifty different acts, taking place the following day at the Good Shepherd School in Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan. The Saturday event featured three floors of music starting at 6 pm and running several hours past midnight, with food and drink included in the price of admission. I attended the Saturday show; it has been the best party of the year for me for six years running, not just because it's great to be a spectator but because I've also had the pleasure to perform at it as well. This year's version featured the usual assortment of quality performances in a myriad of styles, but I was never truly blown away by anything I saw at Goldenfest until last Saturday.


The group I play with is called the NY Spelmanslag; spelmanslag is Swedish for "fiddler's group." My group is the house band for Scandia NY, an organization that promotes the traditional music and dance of Sweden and meets on Wednesdays in the East Village. I provide accompaniment on guitar and bouzouki. This year we were the first act in the "Golden Room" on the middle level, generally reserved for the quieter performances. We were worried that the early slot would kill our attendance, but happily we had a good-sized crowd and things went well. Naturally, the upside of performing early is that we had the rest of the night to enjoy all the other music going on.


Once I packed up the instruments after the set, I headed upstairs to the main floor and caught a fine set by the Bosco Stompers Cajun Band, from that region of the Balkans known as the Bayou. Goldenfest has always included several non-Balkan bands, actually, but this was the first time I had seen any American folk music performed at the festival. Judging by the number of attendees who were filing in and quickly taking to the dance floor, nobody had any complaints. Most of the rest of the music I caught originated in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Bogomila plays Balkan café music, Seido Salifoski's Romski Boji plays Macedonian and Turkish gypsy music, Hazmat plays Turkish classical music, and the Yasna Voices specialize in Bulgarian women's songs. Despite the close regional proximity, the styles differ significantly from each other, but each of them has something to recommend it.


The festival organizers have included an increasing amount of Middle Eastern performers over the years, and my girlfriend Donna's attention was drawn to a group listed in the program as playing "Middle Eastern Music heavy on the drumming." The band in question was Raquy and the Cavemen. Their 2:15 am time slot was prohibitive, but we noticed that Raquy would be performing twice with other groups. The first time was with the Dolomites, a cross-cultural group fronted by Romashka's half-Romanian, half-Japanese Brooklynite accordionist Stephen Iancu but also including Raquy and Aaron Goldsmith on guitarron (the giant mariachi bass guitar). I've seen Romashka on several occasions, but I had no idea that Iancu could "sing;" what his voice lacked in tonal quality, he made up for with personality and delivery. (Apparently Dolomites shows usually involve cooking and fire as well, but I guess I'll have to wait another day for that part of the Dolomites experience.)


Still, Iancu's performance was overshadowed by Raquy's innovative percussion, making Donna and I really look forward to her performance with the Messengers, consisting of Raquy and her drumming students. We weren't disappointed; in fact, they put on the most electric performance I've seen in my six years of going to Goldenfest. Few things can excite a crowd the way that great percussion can, and Raquy won over the festival crowd in a really big way. The response to Raquy's performance in the "quiet" Golden Room became steadily louder and more ecstatic as the set wore on, and people who had been on the other floors were lured in by the rapturous applause and increased the volume further. By the end of the set the Golden Room, normally a classroom in a Catholic elementary school, had taken on the atmosphere of a rock concert at a large arena.


Unfortunately, with so much going on, it was impossible to see everything. The Messengers' set overlapped with that of the host band Zlatne Uste (shown above from last year's festival), whose energetic Balkan brass music has always been a huge crowd pleaser. Romashka came on later than I could stay for, but they've been a great live band since their inception and I'm sure I'll catch them around town again pretty soon. Likewise, I won't have to wait long to catch Raquy and the Cavemen, who are playing this Saturday at something called the Jam4Peace, to be held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School on Amsterdam Ave. between 65th and 66th St. It's always good to have something new to look forward to.