Millennium Balkan
Turkish delight
What promptly happened was another digression, this time toward Turkish music, specifically that of Erkan Ogur, and with it the fretless guitar (well suited for generating notes familiar in the Orient but absent from Western scales). “I heard his tape in Bulgaria, five years ago. Within a year, I had taken up the fretless guitar, gone to Turkey and found his number—which was hard, because he’s actually really private and really famous there. I found him, we jammed and became sort of friends. Two years after, we played together here at the Festival du Monde Arabe.”
Add together the Balkan and Turkish music, and the Gypsy culture common to both, fatten things up with some funky jazz grooves (and a crack band featuring Emil Iliev, Georgi Stankov, Martin Auguste, Pascal Boudreault and Chet Doxas), and you’ve got Kaba Horo. “We’re trying to do a fusion of some kind, but really, where I want it to go is towards groove-oriented music, because the Balkan music that we love and that I’m coming from is music with a lot of rhythm, a lot of fire. We want to give people the energy that you could sense by going to a three-day Gypsy wedding in Bulgaria, that wild, sweaty energy, but yet make it somewhat current. To that end, Montreal’s Ramachandra Borcar, of Ramasutra fame, was enlisted as producer of Kaba Horo’s forthcoming eponymous CD. “He’s a very focused and professional person, so he helped us a lot in the direction of what songs to choose for the record, the studio and keeping an eye on everybody. Largely, the record sounds so good because he was involved with it.”
