Musical Discovery
One of the cool things about living in Seattle, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, is having KEXP to listen to. It started life as a step-child “college” station at the University of Washington with the call letters KCMU. However, when the UW NPR station, KUOW, started getting pissy about sharing funding with it, its days on the UW campus were numbered.
Enter Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project to offer studio space and funding independent of the UW. Those of us who loved KCMU’s independence and insouciance feared that Allen’s fixation with Jimy Hendrix would change the flavor and attitude, but that hasn’t happened, and we’re blessed for now with something like a college graduate station with a trust fund.
Anyway, we listen a lot to Derek Mazzone’s Wo’Pop (World Pop) show on Tuesday nights. One night a couple weeks ago, he played a cut from a Serbian brass band called the Boban Markovic Orkestar. As a devotee of brass instruments (you’re already sick of my references to the Ohio State Marching Band and their all-brass makeup), I was immediately enthralled, and ordered their “Live In Belgrade” album.
From the first cut to the last, it’s a full-on gypsy brass band festival. They have somehow managed to convey the quarter-tone Arabic/gypsy scaling into Sousa-band instrumentation. I’m just lovin’ it.
