songblog

Slavic Soul Party! Live in Seattle 2/27/08

Leave it to me to fall in love with a kind of music that over here in the states is practially unknown - Balkan brass bands. Living in Portland doesn't help much either, although in the last decade more and more eastern Europian immigrants have started to arrive. Now there are a few bands here in the area that fall into this category, and good too, but one of my favorites hail from NYC - naturally.
When my good friend Tim Olsen who runs the magazine for the Guild of American Luthiers wrote to me that Slavic Soul Party was going to play a gig in Seatlle, I became really excited - I didn't think these guys would ever play a gig out on the west coast. I was hoping they would play in Portland, since they were going to play in Eugene south of here and also in San Franciso, but it was not to be. I wrote them an email from their web site and they said - "get in the car and drive to Seatlle". So I did.
Of course it was a Wednesday night gig, so I decided to take a couple of days off from work and Barbara and I headed up Tueday night so we could wake up in Seattle ready for some fun and such.
We spent the day having some fun in the Pike Place Market, always good for some food, some street musicians, and just a lot of hustle and bustle. I used to live in Seatlle back in the late 70s-early 80's, and it has really changed a lot now, much more built up most every place we went.
Still the market is always the market, no matter what, and if you know anything at all about me, I'm all about eating. Here we are, check out the colorful display:

Of course, not everyone likes their vegetables:

So we play around for some hours before making it back to the hotel. Next up. we meet Tim, his wife Deb, one of his sons issak and a couple of other folks for some Pho dinner. How many bowls of soup can anyone eat? We all just settle for one, thats Tim on the left, Issak next to him and the rest of the crew, with my ugly mug on the right:

Now fully stocked we head over to the Ballard neighborhood. SSP are playing at this total dump of a club named the Tracktor Taveren. What is it with these clubs? There are exactly two tiny tables for the whole club, and what happens if you don't want to stand the whole evening? I played in places like this for years in rock bands, and somehow overlooked just how crappy they were, or tried to anyway; skanky, dirty little dives with bathrooms like the gates of hell. Maybe with enough drugs you don't notice, but that can't help me anymore......
The first band is weird and forgettable, once they finally get on an hour late, with odd little bits of rock/jazz melodies underneath a trumpet player that was good but all over the place. Plus all the songs had these weird chopped off endings. Tim said it was like the opposite of a jam band - this stuff just stopped at some point for what seemed to be no good reason at all.
Finally we get to the meat of the evening, and I am not disappoinited. Here they are, 10 person strong, less than what they would play with back on their home turf, cause touring is expensive, especially for an indepented band like this.
I wander over to get a beer, and run into the clarinet player. I compliment heim, cause he is really good, and say I play clarinet myself. He says, without any hesitation, come up and play with us then! OK, this is out of my comfort zone, so I say to him, no, I came to see you and so begged off. I asked him what brand of clarinet he was playing, and he told me a Selmer. I told him I had an old pre-R13 Buffet, and he said, thats the Cadillac of horns.

The kilt wearing tuba player was there at the bar too. I told him I was looking forward to hearing Jelim Jelim, and he went off on a little tirade about having to play that old tirled song. He said he had played a million bar mitzvahs and wedddings, and being asked to play Jelim Jelim was like being asked to play Hava Naglia - nobody ever asks for an over played song like that.
Wow, I felt dumb there, I had only recently even become familar with this song, from a SSP record no less, but now I realize it must be one of the standards of standards. Still a great song I think.
After the break, just the singer and the accordionist came on stage and yes, we were treated to Jelim, Jeilim, and the crowed loved it.

Even better, as the song ended, the rest of the band had formed up behind the audience at the far end of the hall and started to play a song. They stared to march around and play in a circle within the crowd, and at long last I could hear everything clearly. Why does sound have to suck so bad in clubs? On stage, even though the accordion was amplified wirelessly, I couldn't really hear him above the band. Away from the stage, he was quite loud and clear. Bad, bad sound mixer dude!
Of course, the other thing that was hard to hear on stage was, you guessed it, the clarinet. He didn't have a pickup on the horn, but was forced to try and get some volume from maybe two mics at once. It didn't work all that well unforuntately. He probably needs to buy a PT100 pickup, eh?

These quibbles aside, this was a great night, The band just kept playing and playing, since as they said they had come a long way. Everyone in this band was really top rate: I could not imagine seeing better musicians than this, and I was struck many times on how the trombones were in large part the center of the band, the glue that held it all together.
They want back out in the crowd a few times, and again that was the best for me; if I can't be in the band, having them right in front of me, and sometimes in back of me at the same time, thats the best.
Live music - no substitue!