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Balkan Beat Box
Boom Pam
Binder Krieglstein
Vesna A New One
Amsterdam Klezmer Band
Balkan Beat Box
Catalogue no.: AY CD 08
Balkan Beat Box are an intoxicating combination of performance, Dance- and World-infused electronic Music with live musicians from Israel, Morocco, and even Iran with DJ's, Flamenco dancers, Belly dancers, and a VJ, mixing the ecstatic sounds and sights of the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Have a look at their 11-minute video which is included on CD: the Balkan Beat Box first show.
The Balkan Beat Box views music with fresh eyes: as a continuing cultural dialogue. It can take the form of a clash of cultures, and sometimes it is Diasporic in nature. At other times it is Israeli with all the music that lives there - Arabic, Sephardic, Hassidic – a true melting pot with never-ending sources of inspiration. The Balkan Beat Box performs regularly in Israel, where it receives rave reviews and a tremendous audience reaction. This summer BBB presented their music in some of the biggest Festivals in EU and N. America and received a wild reaction and standing ovations.
Balkan Beat Box is best explained as a performance-meets-dance party that generates ecstatic energy by blending electronic music with hard-edged folk music from North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Their festive evenings also feature colourful costumes and bedecked performers dancing and performing throughout the party. The musical crew which is led by Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat also includes MC, vocalist and percussionist Tomer Yosef, Uri Kinrot on guitar, Itamar Ziegler on bass and special guests the Bulgarian Chicks, Hassan Ben Jaffar, Victoria Hanna, belly dancers, flamenco dancers and more!
"Balkan Beat Box came to us as a natural reaction to our surroundings. As musicians - Ori on the horns and Tamir on the drums - we always try to reach the extreme ends of our instruments. As DJs, we crave the same balance. The hard core, the revolutionary on the one hand and the deeply rooted traditional, the ancient voice on the other - the one that took a thousand years to brew. We dig to our ancestral roots often, but we also pursue dialog and new ways to define our music, whether it’s infused with a Jewish, Mediterranean, Balkan, or New York City influence." Ori Kaplan, Tamir Muskat
Balkan Beat Box was formed in 2003 and is spearheaded by Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat. Tamir and Ori have been active for a decade in NYC's premier underground bands like Firewater, Gogol Bordello, Big Lazy, Shot'nez and DJing around the world and touring with the Balkan Beat Box extravaganza. Tamir Muskat grew up with Romanian and African music in the house. Ori Kaplan grew up playing Klezmer clarinet in Jaffa. Both were playing in the NY scene with various downtown bands for more then a decade. Ori studied with Yuri Yunakov - the king of Bulgarian gypsy sax player and played and toured with Gogol Bordello, Firewater, Shot'nez extensively around the globe. Tamir produced some of Gogol Bordello's, Firewater, JUF, and Big Lazy most memorable music and toured the world extensively. The Balkan Beat Box is a natural progression of their Diaspora experience. Keeping the spirit of extremes and juxtapositions, BBB is coming back to draw from the source.
The tracks
01. Cha Cha
02. Bulgarian Chicks*
featuring the "Bulgarian Chicks" Vlada Tomova and Kristin Espeland on vocals
03. Adir Adirim
featuring Victoria Hanna on vocals
04. 9/4 the Ladies
05. Shushan
featuring Shushan on vocals
06. Ya Man
Music: Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat
07. Gross
featuring Boom Pam
08. Sunday Arak
featuring Dana Leong on trombone
09. Hassan’s Mimuna
featuring Hassan Ben Jaffar on vocals and Har’el Shachal on zurna
10. Meboli
featuring Vlada Tomova on vocals
11. La Bush Resistance
featuring Tomer Yosef on vocals and Amir Shahasar on ney
Video Bonus: The Balkan Beat Box first show from the memory clips book of VJ Alma Har'el www.almaharel.com
* The track "Bulgarian Chicks" by Balkan Beat Box is also available on Vinyl on Essay Recordings (AY 05)
The press on Balkan Beat Box
"The dialogue can take the form of a clash of cultures, and sometimes it is the natural progression of many young artists' Diaspora experience. At other times it is Israeli with all the music that lives there - Arabic, Sephardic, Hassidic a true melting pot with never-ending sources of inspiration. Balkan Beat Box brings a modular audio-visual show, incorporating electronic aesthetics with Balkan music... Things broke into a wild party that was more of a dialogue between the audience and performers, feet were stomping, arak was flowing..."
Habama -Israel's culture portal
Israeli musicians Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan want you to get up, walk over to your CD rack, pull out the world-music samplers — yes, that "Putumayo Presents: Music From the Chocolate Lands" — and pitch them into the trash. Don't sit just yet. They have a replacement suggestion: Balkan Beat Box, their New York-based brass-band/hip-hop/electronica-fusion ensemble, whose self-titled debut album will be released in autumn. World music began to coalesce into a genre, centered primarily on Third World artists, after a group of British music executives and aficionados contrived the term during a meeting in 1987. In succeeding years, however, overly polished Western-style production blunted the distinctiveness of some performers, which provoked its own roots-reviving backlash. Balkan Beat Box's album blends music from Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel, Spain and Morocco less as a seamless blend than as a head-banging, sweaty brawl — to kinetic effect.
"People are tired of the bland chill-out beat with an Arabic singer in the background," said 33-year-old Muskat, who programs BBB's tracks. "That music didn't emanate a real need to come together as a community and rejoice," added Kaplan, 35, who plays saxophone. "There's always this self-consciousness to club music. So there's a general movement to touch some humanity, a livelier spirit."
"In Israel, if you did anything other than Hebrew, you were trimming your crowds," Muskat said. "If someone there was in their 20s or 30s, there was a 90% chance their people came from somewhere in Europe, and dressed funny, and spoke funny. So the kids were trying hard to be Israelis." That meant music in Hebrew or derivative Western-style pop rock. Kaplan, who grew up on an "all-Bulgarian" street in Jaffa, played avant-garde jazz; Muskat, whose family came from Romania, preferred "klezmer gone wrong on punk rock." Neither style was exceedingly welcome.
"I came to New York mainly to get out of Israel," said Muskat, who left in 1995. "The political situation really affected the music. When people are busy not getting blown up every morning, they don't really have time." America had its own hang-ups. "America has a geographic problem — a closed-minded approach to things," he continued. "Most Americans don't leave the States, so how can they accept Moroccan music? Israel is amazing — it's so close to everything. But you can't go anywhere! It's depressing for artists." Muskat had to leave Israel to make quintessentially Israeli — that is, ethnically eclectic — music. "We got so much better in New York — it really opened our minds," he said.
The BBB album features finesse without a touch of self-consciousness: The instruments include laptops as well as kitchen utensils; ancient Saharan dialects share the stage with neologisms. "Yaman," for instance, is a hard-driving spat between French heavy-metal samples; a Yemenite sentir (acoustic bass); "tin metal scraps, pots and pans"; Kaplan's horns, and sinewy, supplicating vocals in Arabic. In "Bulgarian Chicks," the eponymous guest duo emotes in Bulgarian to a brass-band arrangement. "Adir Adirim," a remix of a prayer for Shavuot, and "Meboli," which coins a new language entirely, features equally venturesome instrumental melees. The album contains no English lyrics, except for some possibly lewd references to "Bush belly-dancing with Afghanistan" in "La Bush Resistance."
Living up to their sound's global pretensions, Muskat and Kaplan harvest their tour bands — which swell to as many as 15 performers — from local musicians scattered strategically around the world. As the band gains renown, especially in Europe, the performers are abroad more and more often. Ironically, Israel, where nationalist identity politics is giving way to a renewed interest in ethnic heritage and non-Western culture, is a frequent destination. Even though Muskat says he isn't ready to return — "These days, we travel like Gypsies" — the duo hardly minds looking in on home. "Our heart is in the Middle East," Kaplan said.The Forward, Boris Fishman, York City.
