New Music From the Old World
Your grandparents' favorite music rarely sounded better than when three groups brought old Europe and the Ottoman Empire back to life under a nearly full moon last night in Central Park's Delacorte Theater. The show had an interesting back-story. Last year the New York State Music Fund was established to share the proceeds of a payola settlement with major record companies negotiated by New York's attorney general's office in 2005. The fund has dispersed $13 million to nonprofit groups for events such as this concert, part of the Joe's Pub In the Park series.
Sizzling Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovsk leads the New York Gypsy All-Stars Band, a quintet that plays traditional Roma music with classical finesse and a jazzy snap. Other members from Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia played traditional instruments such as the karun, a Turkish zither, and the darbula drum in addition to modern traps and electric bass. Unusual time signatures, happy-sad melodies, and top-notch academic chops brought the past into the present in sharp focus. The sextet of rowdies who followed them were a different carload of clowns entirely. Balkan Beat Box combines Middle Eastern- and Mediterranean-influenced tunes with Jamaican ska and dub, electronic beats, aggressing rapping, and as much attitude as you could stand. Unconcerned with musical niceties, MC Tomer Yosef and his cronies transformed the theater into a sweaty, anarchic dance club for an hour before order was restored.
The evening's de facto headliner was Beirut, an eight-piece group from Brooklyn that mixes Eastern European brass band music with the lambent French strings and accordion of Jacques Brel. Zach Condon, a precocious twenty-one-year-old with global musical aspirations and a limited warble of a voice reminiscent of equally ambitious Rufus Wainwright, leads the group. And while bandmembers switched around instruments (including a baritone saxophone, ukuleles, trumpets, a French horn, violin, and balalaika) between nearly every song, each waltz-tempo tune somehow conveyed pretty much the same endearing innocence as the next. As unlikely as it may seem, the band is better represented by the elaborate website devoted to its new album, The Flying Club Cup.