My World Music Blog : September 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 which is not too bad for a premiere gig.

We buffered out the time with a few solo pieces, but as it turned out, people really appreciated the change of pace and texture.

Everyone also loved Teal's "box" drum and someone even said "wow, I've got to get me a box!!!".

Before playing the Romanian tune Itele, I did a poem about being drunk and then we took a shot of Slibovich (Plum Brandy). The very "out of time" opening to Itele had everyone laughing at the joke.

If you'd like to see some photos of Bizerka's Premiere Gig, check them out on our official website.

We now just need to organise ourselves some more gigs and get our name out there!!!

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 turned from a slow "nice" piece into Oompah meets Tango.

We were also offered another gig, for next Saturday night.

Apparently the Polish guy who lives above our Cellist's flat has enjoyed hearing us rehearse and has asked us to play at his 30th birthday party!

It's nice to know that people are enjoying the music (we'd been worried we were annoying the crap out of the neighbours with our weekly rehearsal).

I was doing some Google searches to see what other sites are linking to me and found a comment along the lines of "World Music World is pretty diverse, but there's not enough Polka music."

So I promise to track down some Polka music as soon as I get some free time and add it to the site.

Thanks also to Mike who's sending me his Polka CD to review - can't wait to have a listen. As an Accordionist myself, it's always good to hear what other people are playing on the instrument.

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 poster.

A couple of weeks ago we finally had our first set of tunes ready to rock and then I dobbed us in for a gig where we're expected to do at least 2 sets of music i.e 2 * 45 minutes. This has meant that we've had to really kick things up a notch and learn an extra 30+ minutes of music - the rest of the time will be taken up with me blabbing on, making up stories and a couple of solos pieces.

Learning all this new music had to happen sometime, so it may as well happen now (and once it's done we need to learn yet another 45 minutes worth to be able to do a proper 3 hour gig).

Among the new pieces are some cheesy things like Miserlou and Hava Nagila which are good crowd pleasers (hey, we have to play something they actually recognise) as well as the beautiful song, Ederlezi written by Goran Bregovic.

Ederlezi is actually the Romani translation of the Serbian word Durdevdan which is the feast of St George celebrated on April 23rd.

We also added another 4 Greek pieces and an Armenian piece to repertoire last Saturday, so there's a lot to memorise before September 21st!

We're looking forward to finally getting out there and doing a gig after all these months - it's about time!!!