Balkan Beat Box: collective experience
Balkan Beat Box a collective experience
In a quick post-concert-survey I collected words from various people to describe our collective experience at the Balkan Beat Box. Here are some of them: “new," "old," "fun," "unified," "rambunctious," "rowdy," "full," "light," and “bright.” My favorite was the wordless expletive “ghrrraaa” denoting an over-flowing of fun and excitement.
I concur with all of them.
By song two, the band had everyone clapping together, ready to participate in the call and response chorus. For Vancouver, this is rare!
The crowd was a full spectrum of skin tones. Hair ran the gamut from swan-white to raven-black with some purple and green tossed in for good measure.
At one point during the dancing, I looked over to one of the booths and saw a group of women in a circle, their bodies, which were conservatively dressed in black, bellydancing. Suddenly my attention was called to a much more urgent matter: someone crowd-surfing was heading in my direction.
Twice I saw a wrench come out to fix the drum kit…and the repair was done without missing a beat. There was an edgy fierceness to the drum cascades and at one point the image of hot streets littered with stones ready for throwing arose in my mind. One of the songs ended with the reminder that the game the musicians all refused to play was the game of war and I thought good -- these folks are my favorite kind of rabble-rousers -- thanks for that!
Balkan Beat Box’s goal is to take ancient and traditional musical traditions and fuse those with hip-hop thus bringing new relevance to these old traditional musical forms. They also encourage and foster peace between citizens around the world by combining traditional music from various areas in the world, hoping that by doing this they can create peace, and believe in the elimination of political borders.
If you want a good dance, a loud party and some community feel, make sure to check out their show next time they are in town.