What does it mean to be Slavic? That's a loaded question, one that the world is probably still not ready to answer. What happens, then, when Balkan rhythms and melodies reminiscent of Eastern Europe are blended with elements of New Orleans street music and tempered with an agitated set of sensibilities right up out of Brooklyn? This is
Slavic Soul Party!, a feisty response to a relentlessly mutating global reality taking place here in the stressful glare of the future, where multiple traditions and rigorous revisions mingle like mad. There are funk marches with low brass punctuation that momentarily bring to mind the
Dirty Dozen and
ReBirth Brass Bands and the Sun Messengers but are gleefully subverted by the accordion, rotary valve flügelhorns called trubas, and various other jostling instruments plying hyperkinetic Eurasian riffs. Punchy Serbian dervish structures are suffused with klezmer but also tap into polka and mariachi. Imaginative digressions of surrealistic free jazz and wild whimsy sail through dark passages of fascinating depth and ruminative reverie. Somewhere outside of time, Pietro Deiro and
Willem Breuker are lunching with Alfred Jarry, Federico Fellini, and the Budapest Ragtime Band.
Slavic Soul Party! make wonderful and exciting music, exuding a thrilling and unpasteurized blend of traditional forms cheerfully reconsidered and reconstituted by a restlessly rolling creative collective. ~ arwulf arwulf