My Folk Music Blog
• Sat Aug 23 2008 : The other night we went and saw Tony Gatlif's newest movie - TranSylvania,
starring Asia Argento, Amira Casar and Birol Ünel.
As with many of Gatlif's other movies, it's a story of love, Gypsy style and
contains indiscriminate acts of singing,...
• Mon Aug 04 2008 : On the weekend three of us from Bizerka played at a private party in the Melbourne
suburb of Eltham. We'd been asked to come and play for Mandy's birthday, but
had no idea that the whole evening was going to be Gypsy themed!
When we got there,...
• Sat Jul 26 2008 : I thought I'd post a little bit of Balkan music humour today that I found
I YouTube. While trying to find recordings of a few new Kolos our band's playing,
I came across these two gems.
It turns out there's a whole bunch of these sorts of thin...
• Wed Jul 23 2008 : We've been lucky enough to score tickets to see Goran Bregovic in concert.
He's coming to Australia to perform at the Melbourne International Festival
and will have 37 piece orchestra and choir with him.
Some say he's the best male Gypsy singe...
• Sat Jul 12 2008 : M and I have heard some great music in the last few weeks!
We travelled from Melbourne to Sydney to watch Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking
Orchestra in their only Australian concert. The concert was pretty phenomenal
and more entertaining tha...
• Sat May 24 2008 : I've been a real slacker lately in terms of keeping this blog updated. I've
been pretty busy, but it's no real excuse I guess.
Bizerka have done a few gigs lately. We were support act for Melbourne
band, Babaganoush at Carni's Gypsy Bohemia ...
• Fri Apr 18 2008 : Last weekend Bizerka travelled 963km to play at a Maltese wedding! Thankfully
we flew there - but man, it was still pretty exhausting.
Although our flight left at 12:30, we had to be at the airport 90 minutes
early to sort out the logistical p...
• Sat Mar 29 2008 : I've been a bit slack keeping up with the blog lately but it's been pretty
hectic with the band doing lots of rehearsals leading up to Yackandandah festival
plus plenty of gigs in between.
Yackandandah is the first festival we've done with thi...
• Sat Feb 16 2008 : M and I went to the annual St Kilda Festival in Melbourne last Sunday
and spent most of the day at the World Music stage watching a variety
of bands. There was a good mixture of music, from Dallas Frasca's gutsy
distorted r...
• Mon Nov 26 2007 : It's been a very cultural couple of weeks!
A fortnight ago we saw The Spaghetti Western Orchestra (previously know
as The Ennio Morricone Experience) do some very cheesy versions of classic
Western tunes - all delivered ...
• Mon Nov 12 2007 : Wednesday night, M and I are off to see the Spaghetti Western Orchestra
perform cheesed up versions of Ennio Morricone movie
soundtracks. It's received good reviews and sounds lots of fun - and besides,
I love that sort ...
• Sat Nov 03 2007 : It's been a quiet couple of weeks musically for me. We've had a couple
of rehearsals but that's mainly been it. Rehearsals have been pretty intense
though as we're trying to put together another 45 minutes of music and
o...
• Mon Oct 15 2007 : It's been a busy week for me - last Tuesday night Bizerka finally went
into the recording studio and laid down some demo tracks.
Our aim was to get three sets of tunes recorded, but ended up having
time to do four sets in ...
• Sun Oct 07 2007 : Today M and I went off to Oktoberfest at the local German club! We figured
we'd have a better time at a real German social club than in the city
at an Australian-ised one full of drunk Aussies using it as an excuse
to ge...
• Mon Sep 24 2007 : Yay
- we've done our first gig with Bizerka! Three month's hard work paid off with
a fairly tight 2 sets.
There was only 1 major slipup and 1 minor one, so we're all pretty pleased
with ourselves. We even had about 50 people come along w...
• Fri Sep 14 2007 : Only a week to go until Bizerka does their premiere gig! Whoo hoo! We're squishing
in 2 more rehearsals before the gig to try and get it all as tight as possible.
The Greek 7/8 pieces are coming along well, and the Armenian piece has been
tu...
• Wed Sep 05 2007 : It's been quite a while since I've had a chance to update the website but things
have been pretty busy.
The
good news is that Bizerka has it's first gig coming up in three weeks! *yay*
You can click on the thumbnail to see our silly post...
• Thu Aug 02 2007 : It's been a while since I've written anything, but it's been a hectic couple
of weeks.
Bizerka are coming along well and our new drummer, Teal is fitting in really
well. It's amazing how much the energy lifts once you have percussion to kick...
• Wed Jul 18 2007 : On Sunday M and I went and saw The
Devil Goat Family String Band CD launch at the East Brunswick Club. We also
took along my son who hates Banjo and hasn't really heard any Bluegrass music
before, but he didn't seem to mind it too much in...
• Mon Jul 09 2007 : Bizerka
recorded again on Sunday. It's just another loungeroom recording, but we hired
a good quality, powered stereo mic which picked up the softer passages and gave
a lot better sound overall.
We also went down to St Kilda Beach and to...
• Tue Jul 03 2007 : Well, we finally have a demo tape of sorts for Bizerka! The sound quality is
pretty bad as it's a loungeroom recording with 1 mic suspended from a chandelier
of all places! But we figured it might work like a boom mic!
It was also recorded o...
• Mon Jun 25 2007 : Bizerka are, at long
last, getting pretty close to recording some demo tracks. It's been a couple
of months since we started rehearsing and there's been a few ups and downs,
but we're now at the stage where we feel we can put together a d...
• Sun Jun 17 2007 : Last
night M and I watched the
Serbian movie Underground which was written by Dusan Kovacevic,
directed by Emir Kusturica and using music composed by Goran Bregovic.
It's a pretty insane movie, featuring Gypsy Gangsters, love stories, bl...
• Fri Jun 08 2007 : Last night Bizerka had its first rehearsal with our new Cellist, Francesca.
Despite being classically trained and not having played world music before,
let alone "crazy gypsy circus music", she did really well!
She was a little qui...
• Mon Jun 04 2007 : It's been a quiet week for Bizerka with everyone being pretty busy, but we'll
be back rehearsing on Thursday night with our new Cellist! We're all looking
forward to having a jam with her and seeing how it all sounds.
On Saturday night, M ...
• Wed May 30 2007 : It looks like Bizerka have finally found
someone to fill in the bass-end for the band. A friend suggested that Chess
might be interested in playing for us. Seeing as both Josh and I know her from
Yackandandah
Folk Festival, we were ke...
• Tue May 22 2007 : Bizerka rehearsed again
on Saturday afternoon and we got another few sets a bit tighter - there's still
a way to go, but it's getting there. Most particularly, we got our "name
piece" up to speed i.e the Serbian tune Biserka (ye...
• Fri May 18 2007 : M and I went and saw When the Road Bends - Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
the other night - it's a documentary following 5 Gyspsy bands as they do a six
week tour of the USA.
Two
of my favorite bands were in it - Taraf De Haidouks and Fanfare ...
• Sat May 05 2007 : There's no rehearsal for Bizerka this week as everyone's pretty busy with other
commitments so I've spent this morning updating a whole lot of stuff on this
website - including adding another 30+ video
links and some free Klezmer MP3 link...
• Mon Apr 30 2007 : Week three with rehearsals for Bizerka were fun and the music has started
taking shape i.e the arrangements are starting to creep in. Our guitarist
even learnt to fingerpick Music for a Found Harmonium which sounds
reall...
• Sun Apr 22 2007 : Bizerka had it's second rehearsal yesterday and went through most of
the set - our aim is to get 45 minutes worth sorted out and ready to be
gigging with within 6 weeks - that leaves 5 weeks to go. It's a lot of
work - t...
• Tue Apr 17 2007 : The first rehearsal of our new band went really well! Although I've played
with the fiddle-player for nearly 10 years, we'd never met the Guitarist
so it was a bit of a wild-card. Fortunately he was really good and had
m...
• Thu Apr 12 2007 : After being lazy and complacent for a couple of years I've finally got
around to organising a new band of my own. Sure it's fun to play in other
people's projects, but starting your own band is very rewarding. It is
howe...
• Sat Mar 31 2007 : It's been a fairly quiet week musically this week as I've had the flu
which meant that we didn't go out last night to see a local Gypsy band
we'd heard about. Oh well, they'll be on again soon.
I
did however buy m...
• Fri Mar 23 2007 : Well, I'm back from my St Paddies Day fun and frivolity! It was heaps
of fun doing these gigs and catching up with my interstate friends. Overall
we held up pretty well considering we haven't played together for a year
(...
• Wed Mar 14 2007 : My Jews Brothers CD arrived today and I've been listening to it while
doing the dishes and writing this - it's pretty cool - very swung - and
they don't take themselves too seriously which is always a bonus in my
books! ...
• Wed Mar 07 2007 : I won a CD on Ebay today called "My Yiddish Swing" by The Jews
Brothers (a Klezma band from New Zealand). I hadn't heard of them before,
but after checking
out their website and listening to a few tracks, I had...
• Sun Feb 25 2007 : Most of my spare time this week has been spent writing the backing tracks
for my girlfriends
new play - Aladdin. It's lots of fun, albeit a little scary writing
music for someone close to you.
I only have to write...
• Mon Feb 19 2007 : Here in Melbourne (Australia) there seems to be some sort of free music
festival on almost every weekend. The weekend before we'd gone along to
the St Kilda Festival down by the beach along with around 400,000 other
peop...
• Thu Feb 15 2007 : I borrowed the soundtrack to Latcho
Drom today and listened to it at work. It's the soundtrack to one
of the many great Tony Gatlif movies. It's a movie well worth seeing,
as is his other famous one Gadjo Dilo (I recentl...
• Wed Jan 31 2007 : This week I've been listening to a whole lot of French music like the
amazing band Malicorne
and for some reason Amelie
(which found it's way back into rotation on my playlist).
I'm currently looking for new band ...
• Sun Jan 14 2007 : Well, I'm back from Woodford
Music Festival and it was great - 6 days of watching bands, playing
at music sessions and generally relaxing. Our band did 4 really great
gigs and even had several guest artists come up and p...
• Wed Dec 06 2006 : It's great to see a few more bands have added their profile's to the
site - this is the main purpose of the site i.e exposure for bands, so
the more the merrier.
There seems to have been a few problems with the "my acc...
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