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Here is a nice review of the Boston-based Bulgarian band Zdravets that was published in my local paper. As a member of the "younger generation" that the author alludes to (and a pretty recent fan of this kind of music), I was happy to see the positive, albeit lugubrious, coverage!
Hartford Advocate
Local Motion: Wascally Zdravets
A Regional Bulgarian Folk Dance Band Keeps A West Hartford Group On Their Tippy Toes
May 3, 2007
By Dan Barry
Bulgaria and Macedonia do not come to mind when one thinks of regions producing hot new jams.
Actually, you could probably lop off everything after the word “mind” and the previous sentence would still hold true. There’s this prevalent sense that if regions like the aforementioned are even producing music — traditional music — it needs to be dolled up in some sort of globalizing electronic backbeat before it can be relevant to first-worlders. If there’s no Deep Forest-esque thump to ameliorate all that ancient instrumentation, will we instantly abandon our computers for milk buckets and scythes?
Of course not, and Zdravets knows this. The band, whose many members hail from the Boston suburbs, visited West Hartford’s Always on Sunday folk dance group this past weekend. They play a dazzling number of instruments, many of which I’d never seen before: a wind instrument something like a bagpipe, a stringed instrument like a little bouzouki played with a bow, tons of flutes and whistles, a huge drum and a doumbek ... Damn! Not only were they excellent multi-instrumentalists, they’re also well-versed in the many songs from Bulgaria and Macedonia. Singer Martha Forsyth has traveled there, and she records and studies the region’s music with an ethnomusicologist’s passion.
Having never been exposed to Bulgarian/Macedonian music before, I was surprised to find how familiar I was with a lot of its characteristics. The songs are very angular, and are often in time signatures with emphatic beats like 3/4 and 7/4. The vocals are marked by call-and-response between two female pairs. When everything locks in, there’s this wonderful slippery unraveling, similar to the feeling evoked by the spitfire melodies of Irish jigs and reels.
But there were precious few young folk in attendance. Other than a few youngish fellows in the band, I was a solid two or three decades younger than the average attendee. I joined a kind of beginner’s dance called a Lesnoto, which I think translates to “impossible to fuck up.” It was fun, but I couldn’t help feeling sad that these songs and dances made it all the way to America intact, only to be ignored by entire generations. What’s not being presented is a way for young people to take traditional music with them into the first world, without having to slavishly defend it against outside influence — or over-argue for its worth. But that will never be easy here in the crucible — I mean melting pot.
Hartford Advocate
Local Motion: Wascally Zdravets
A Regional Bulgarian Folk Dance Band Keeps A West Hartford Group On Their Tippy Toes
May 3, 2007
By Dan Barry
Bulgaria and Macedonia do not come to mind when one thinks of regions producing hot new jams.
Actually, you could probably lop off everything after the word “mind” and the previous sentence would still hold true. There’s this prevalent sense that if regions like the aforementioned are even producing music — traditional music — it needs to be dolled up in some sort of globalizing electronic backbeat before it can be relevant to first-worlders. If there’s no Deep Forest-esque thump to ameliorate all that ancient instrumentation, will we instantly abandon our computers for milk buckets and scythes?
Of course not, and Zdravets knows this. The band, whose many members hail from the Boston suburbs, visited West Hartford’s Always on Sunday folk dance group this past weekend. They play a dazzling number of instruments, many of which I’d never seen before: a wind instrument something like a bagpipe, a stringed instrument like a little bouzouki played with a bow, tons of flutes and whistles, a huge drum and a doumbek ... Damn! Not only were they excellent multi-instrumentalists, they’re also well-versed in the many songs from Bulgaria and Macedonia. Singer Martha Forsyth has traveled there, and she records and studies the region’s music with an ethnomusicologist’s passion.
Having never been exposed to Bulgarian/Macedonian music before, I was surprised to find how familiar I was with a lot of its characteristics. The songs are very angular, and are often in time signatures with emphatic beats like 3/4 and 7/4. The vocals are marked by call-and-response between two female pairs. When everything locks in, there’s this wonderful slippery unraveling, similar to the feeling evoked by the spitfire melodies of Irish jigs and reels.
But there were precious few young folk in attendance. Other than a few youngish fellows in the band, I was a solid two or three decades younger than the average attendee. I joined a kind of beginner’s dance called a Lesnoto, which I think translates to “impossible to fuck up.” It was fun, but I couldn’t help feeling sad that these songs and dances made it all the way to America intact, only to be ignored by entire generations. What’s not being presented is a way for young people to take traditional music with them into the first world, without having to slavishly defend it against outside influence — or over-argue for its worth. But that will never be easy here in the crucible — I mean melting pot.
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