Bajanski Bal love to dig through the treasure chest of
eastern european folk songs, select the
odd forgotten jewel,
put it through the crusher, pick out a couple of the key
ingredients, throw them
into the turbo-shaker with a big
portion of their own home-made spicy sauce and serve it up
as a
gourmet delicacy.
A favourite raw material are the old„street songs“ from Odessa, the original melting pot of
ukrainian,
russian and jewish cultures.
Mix in a few original compositions and you get a coctail
made up of
Folk, Gypsy jazz, Klezmer, Retropop and old
soviet film-music. It reeks of tacky port bars, stale
beer,
crude tobacco and petty criminal whores. And it sounds full
of an exuberant energy for
partying and dancing, unaffected
virtuosity, and honest vocal craft, all drenched in the
traditional
slavic melancholy.
The band members are all experienced musicians, with decades
of stage-exposure in a variety
of musical genres to their
credit, but the band itself only exists since four years. It
arose, of all
places, in Switzerland, where a singer out of
the russian Red Army Choir met up with a russian-
ukrainian
accordion virtuoso and a polish-ukrainian guitarrist. After
a few small concerts at various
slavic parties they soon
find a swedish tuba-torturer and a local drummer of badly
definable eastern
roots and test them for tonal and rhythmic performance under difficult conditions (i.e. steamy dance
floors and low blood levels in the vodka system).
Since 2006 they tour through Switzerland and Germany and
make it a point of honour to turn every
club floor into a throbbing mass of happy faces, bouncing bodies and kicking knees. |
