03/04/08
Text: Dmitry Kiper
Listen—you’re probably right to have an aversion to music described as “fusion.” It’s like calling a meal “ingredients.” The obvious questions should be: What is being fused? How? And more importantly: is it any good? Last Thursday night at Brooklyn’s Masonic Temple—a venue about the size of Irving Plaza—the Balkan Beat Box fused, blended and mashed up in the best sense of those words. The sexual rhythms of funk-tinged hip-hip, dance, dub and techno took the audience on a genre-defying passage through Jewish, Arabic and Eastern European languages, melodies and tempos.
The group’s live shows are always a step up from its recorded material. Balkan Beat Box mostly played songs from its latest album, Nu Med. The album single, “Digital Monkey,” switched between Missy-Elliot-style beats and heavy tornados of Jewish-Arabic saxophones. On the record, the song has a funky, yet controlled, energy, but live it was more loose and wild—the brass sang, the drums danced and Yosef, switching not only between English and Hebrew but between lead vocals and percussion, ran around the stage with the vein on his neck about to burst, rapping lines like, “I come from Middle East but don’t belong to no country.” On “La Bush Resistance,” Yosef spun his lyrics over mellow, hypnotic beats and snaky, melancholy saxophones. “Bring the dance and leave the guns,” he intoned, and after a few quick switchbacks between English and Hebrew he delivered the last line of the chorus: “We’re making Bush belly dancing with Afghanistans.” During the pelvis-thrusting, dub-meets-Middle-East track “Quand est-ce qu’on arrive?” guitar and saxophones hypnotized the crowd and drums and bass punched, punched and counterpunched. On the bass-driven “Pachima,” guest singer Gilber Gilmore sang in a Moroccan dialect over a dance rhythm and quick guitar notes.
The three permanent members of the group—Tomer Yosef (vocals and percussion), Ori Kaplan (saxophones) and Tamir Muskat (drums and programming)—are Israeli Jews with roots in Europe and the Middle East. Growing up in Israel, they constantly heard jazz, Eastern European folk, klezmer and Arabic music. They say it’s all in their blood. “We have one leg in the past and two in the future,” said Kaplan in an interview. In 2004, when Kaplan was the saxophonist for “gypsy-punk” band Gogol Bordello, he, Muskat and Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz recorded Gogol Bordello vs. Tamir Muscat, which combined dance, dub and electronic sounds with ethnic Eastern European music. The sound of Balkan Beat Box was definitely shaped by that record, but the band has also grown beyond it—and they’re continuing to evolve, one party-filled set at a time.
Balkan Beat Box was going to be touring the West Coast in the coming weeks, from Portland to Los Angeles. They hit a snag at the Canadian border and have been forced to rethink. Stay tuned.
