My World Music Blog : May 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 keen to have her on board. Chess is a pretty talented musician and it's good to have a girl in the band to keep the gender balance a little more even.

Someone also sent me an email today seeing if we were interested in playing at a wedding in December. Seeing as we haven't even started gigging yet this bodes really well for the band once people actually get to know about us more!

The pressure is on now that we have a Cellist - no more slacking about waiting for a full band - I can organise a demo recording and begin looking for some gigs!

My friend's band, BabaGanoush are about to go on a tour of Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia & Bosnia) and need your support. They're looking for sponsorship and are offering the following goodies to those who can help them out:

• In return for a sponsorship of $10 or more, we will offer you a signed copy of the tour poster.
• In return for a sponsorship of $25 or more, we will offer you a BabaGanoush CD - you can choose either a copy of our first CD (Posthumous), or a copy of our next CD which will be in production in the second half of this year and due for release early 2008.
• In return for a sponsorship of $100 or more, we will offer you free entry to BabaGanoush concerts and events for one year (NB: excludes a small number of events organised by third parties who will not allow us complementary tickets).
• In return for a sponsorship of $500 or more, we will offer you a free BabaGanoush performance of up to 2 hours, at a time and place to be arranged, within the next two years. (NB: subject to availability of band members; where performance is to occur outside of Melbourne, travel costs will need to be covered).

So if you live in Australia, please help them out, and if you live in Melbourne, make sure you attend one of their final gigs before the tour.

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 (yes, we spell it differently as a band name).

Unfortunately we're having trouble finding someone to play the bass part - we've advertised for either Cello, Double Bass or Tuba, but no-one has seemed too interested as yet.

After rehearsal we all spent the evening having dinner with Nick our Guitarist and his wife Y. I often get teased by my workmates for my weird taste in music i.e folk music so it was great to have our host put on CD's like Balkan Beatbox and tracks from the 2007 Eurovision competition!

Nick and his wife have spent a lot of time in Romania and Y is actually Serbian, so we heard a good deal of stories about traditional culture -especially to do with eating and drinking traditions - and to emphasize the drinking part we finished the evening with nips of Slibovitz (plum based spirit) - though it was an import and only 42% as opposed to the 60-70% made in backyards all through Eastern Europe :-)

On Sunday while eating a late brunch with M, I got a call offering Bizerka a gig - one of the people who runs The Big, The Bad and The Balkan heard I had a new band going and was interested in having us play. Unfortunately, we're not quite at gigging stage yet and I had to turn it down as it was in a fortnight's time. Oh well - soon, soon...

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 Ciocarlia who are both from Romania. It also had Gypsy bands from Bulgaria - Esma Redzepova, India - Maharaja and Flamenco players from Spain - Antonio El Pipa.

Basically it drew different Romani traditions into one concert to show both the variety and similarities between the various Romani musics. Over the course of the six weeks touring, the musicians themselves learnt about each others' tradition and by the end had learnt some pieces that they could play as a big combined group.

If you get the chance, I suggest you check it out as it's a great little documentary full of some excellent Gypsy music! The official website is http://www.whentheroadbends.com

It was of course Eurovision week last week, so all the best in bad musical taste came out of the woodwork for the annual European musical night of nights. There was some complete and utter crap, but there were some good bits and pieces like the Bulgarian entry with their drumming, Finland's Mumi and the entry from Moldova who revealed just a little way too much of her underwear!

I don't have a lot more to say about Eurovision, but I did stumble across a YouTube video which I reckon should be Scotlands entry next year - it fits all the criteria i.e it's vaguely entertaining while not necessarily being particularly good musically, it features a woman in a costume (well, sort of in a costume - she seems to have lost most of her clothes) and it features Scotland's national instrument - the Bagpipes.

It has no redeeming features, but does answer the question of what's under a female pipers' kilt!

> Watch a woman playing Bagpipes in a bikini

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 links.

My friend D wants me to go and busk outside the Football this afternoon around the time the game's ending. She figures if we play the anthems of the teams plus some up-beat Gypsy music we can make a bit of money as everyone's leaving after the game. It's raining at the moment + I still have a bit of the flu (it's cold here in Melbourne Australia), so I don't think we'll be doing it! She wants to earn money to buy a few beers, though seeing as I have a 9-5 job, I'm pretty happy to shout her rather than deal with drunk idiots as they leave a football game!

I had one of our old 2002 Katyusha videos put onto DVD this week, so I've been going through and converting some of the files to Flash Video (Katyusha is our band in Canberra which only gigs once a year now as 2 of us live in Melbourne and only go back for St Pat's day).

It was recorded at one of our few conservative gigs we played i.e it was a sit-down gig at a big theatre - and we were all totally sober for it (a first for this band). We weren't sure how the audience would react to us as we're generally pretty loud and raucous - think The Pogues and then some - and we'd promised not to upstage the main act as we were just the support band.

It's fun to reminisce and there's 3 other tapes I want to convert to DVD while they're still playable. If you want to check out the clips, here's 5 that I've managed to convert so far. They require the Flash 8 player to view them.

> Little Liza Jane + 2 Irish Reels

> Jamais Jamais!

> Ash Plant/ Bank of Ireland / Slippery Bow / Coolies

> What if God was one of us (also featuring Ocean Moses)

> Manyana (featuring Ocean Moses & Katyusha)

On a slightly different note, I ran accross this site while searching out Klezmer bands this morning. It's a Flash animation called Poison Dart Frog Media's Flash Klezmer Band.

It's a cute little interactive Flash animation where you control a group of Klezmer playing frogs!!! As you move them around the stage their volume changes, so you can have one of them soloing on Clarinet or Cymbals. Good fun for a few minutes.

The main site also has some other fun interactive musical toys as part of their portfolio.

> Check out Poison Dart Frog Media's Flash Klezmer Band