Slavic Soul party 

About slavic soul party

The past 50 years have seen a lot of borders come down: the Iron Curtain, the European Union, the Cuban embargo, apartheid in the USA and South Africa all come to mind. But lately we’ve heard talk of reinforcing borders and building walls, watched as refugees from the Middle East pile up on newly reinforced European borders. Many of these borders – between Macedonia and Serbia, Turkey and Europe, “the east” and “the west”, host culture and “other” – are the very same borders that Slavic Soul Party! has crossed for years. They’re also many of the same borders crossed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1963, when the US State Department sent the band on a “jazz diplomacy” mission to the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. 50 years ago Ellington recorded his brilliant collaboration with Billy Strayhorn, the Far East Suite in New York City masterfully integrating the sounds they heard into the Ellington band, itself one of the defining sounds of jazz.

Slavic Soul Party! celebrates 50 years of the Far East Suite with a new record that re-imagines the iconic suite as an Eastern European brass band discovering an exotic American sound, reversing the "exotic tinge" and reveling in this subtle, funky, and brilliant music. The essence of Ellington and Strayhorn’s collaboration is apparent from the first notes – the pulsing, harmonically rich chords of Tourist Point of View – but there’s something clearly different here. The slight of hand that SSP! has achieved with deft arrangements and strong Balkan playing is wonderfully disorienting. This is music that has taken several trips across the Atlantic, in both directions. It’s obviously a brass band that has fallen in love with the sound of jazz, but where is this music from?

Slavic Soul Party! has always had a complex answer to that question, tangling issues of authenticity, originality, expression, and identity. The name itself has confused many, and rightly so; inspired in part by Yugoslav brass bands (Yugoslav means “southern Slav”) Slavic Soul Party! has never had much of a connection to the larger Slavic cultures of Russia or Poland. When percussionist Matt Moran (Claudia Quintet, Joe Maneri, Sufjan Stevens) started the band in the late 1990s, listening to unlabeled cassettes passed among folk music aficionados, he didn’t know that much of what inspired him was Roma music – yet another tangled web of identity and geography. SSP!’s music is ultimately New York music: a strong Balkan brass sound pumped through the filter of life in New York's outer boroughs, making new music out of the unplanned results of immigration, proximity, and globalization.

It turns out that Duke and colleagues didn’t know what they were hearing either, because the Far East Suite was named for a tour that never brought the band to the so-called Far East. Ellington’s tour started in Syria, hopscotched across the Middle East and ventured into South Asia, often crossing tense borders (Syria and Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, India and Pakistan). The Ellington band never made it to planned stops in Istanbul, Greece, and the Balkans: the State Department cut the tour short in Turkey on November 22, 1963, the day after the assassination of JFK. Maybe Slavic Soul Party! is bringing us sounds that would have become part of Ellington’s world if certain civil boundaries hadn’t been crossed.