Fanfara Tirana and Transglobal Underground

Fanfara Tirana and Transglobal Underground

Similar artists via Last.fm

E M E L Marc Loopuyt Badmarsh Shri Bonbon Vodou Kobo Town

About Fanfara Tirana and Transglobal Underground

The best known instrumental music of south Albania is “Kabà,” an ensemble led by a clarinet or violin alongside accordion and llahutë (oud). A legend tells that a clarinet player was crying at his wife's death bed. She asked him to cry on his clarinet instead and as he did so he created the first Kabà. Le genre de musique instrumentale le plus connu du sud de l'Albanie est le " Kabà ", où un ensemble est dirigé par une clarinette ou par un violon aux côtés de l'accordéon et du llahutë (oud). Une légende raconte qu'un joueur de clarinette pleurait près du lit de sa femme mourante. Elle lui a demandé de prendre sa clarinette pour pleurer et, ce faisant, il a créé le premier Kabà . The collective, or cluster, or constellation going by the name of Transglobal Underground, first coalesced early in the 1990s. It was a time when cheap travel, the embrace of multi-culturalism, new pathways of transmission and reproduction, a new confidence among the UK’s immigrant communities and the vibrant energy of the country’s dance scene provided fertile ground for trans-cultural collaborations, combinations and recombinations. Delighting in serendipity and chance meetings, combining bricolage and organic growth, TGU focused their initial explorations on the eastern and southern rim of the Mediterranean. As time passed, they gradually ranged further afield and lighted upon the then less-known musics of the vibrant heart of Europe, sometimes misapprehended as the fringe of Europe: Hungary, Romania, and the Balkan peninsula. With a fluid, constantly mutating membership driving an explosive collaboration between the descendants of those who once ruled an imperium and those whose ancestors were its subjects, by the second decade of the new millennium the grouping had become known not only as live and electronic performers, but also as highly capable technicians in maybe the newest of musical specialisms, the remix. Meanwhile in Tirana, Albania... At the start of the 21st Century the Military Band of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Albania was charged with a number of duties: to foster the martial spirit of officers and men, to mark solemn occasions with musical performance, and to represent the Albanian people. In addition to these worthy aims, some members felt that they could extend their talents in new directions. Like any working musicians, they played outside the framework of the band for their own pleasure and the pleasure of others, at weddings, parties, circumcisions and other festive occasions. But they were also eager to cross borders, to move away from the expected, and since brass bands had first flowered in Albania as a serious-minded cultural initiative tied to the Rilindja or Albanian Renaissance movement of the early Twentieth Century, the expected was anything but dance music. And here, being the heirs of the subjects of another imperium, in this case the Ottoman empire, they found inspiration in their neighbours, who had also won independence when that hegemony collapsed. As the 500 years of Osmanli rule have left a lasting mark on urban life throughout the area, on cuisine, language, way-of-life and music, and especially on that music’s scales, modes and inflections, there is a kind of musical commonality throughout the Balkans, a single speech with a myriad accents. Fluent in that speech, adopting the bright, taut, stuttering rhythms of South Serbia’s Romani brass bands and the swooning melodies of urban Macedonia or Greece, plus judicious re-arrangements of the classics of South Albania’s intricate and moving polyphonic songs and instrumentals, the Fanfara soon started to build a reputation on the European festival circuit as skilled, passionate and inventive music makers. And like any band in possession of a good reputation, they found themselves in need of a remix. And this is where the project began, with some rough ideas and few pointers. With the gradual work of refinement, the British team became increasingly captivated by the sounds, textures and colours of the originals. Unexpected vistas began to open up; places were discovered for drums, percussion, sitar; electronic treatments, samples, loops and re-configuration transformed the originals. The Fanfara, hearing the results, made their own changes, composed new pieces and sent them back. And so through this long-distance collaboration and through a process of gradual accretion and evolution, the originals became veiled, obscured, refracted. A clarinet-led meditation of mourning emerged as the relentless danse macabre of Kabatronics, the sly hunting metaphor of Three Beauties (“I picked up my shotgun and went out on the hunt – oh yes, I got three beauties, lads”) was recast with a prowling bassline, and TGU’s vocalist Tuup began to imagine narratives embedded in the music, points of contact between hemispheres, the shared experiences of birth, marriage, death, and resistance. Transglobal Underground and the Fanfara Tirana share many qualities. Both are rooted in a native popular culture, which serves them as a springboard to explore and deconstruct the cultures of others, approaching them with curiosity, fascination and wit, searching for common ground in an endless dialogue of possibilities. Being British, and being Albanian, means being part of a web of inheritance from a trans-national community and all the complexity, moral ambiguity and opportunity that this entails, all the boundaries and borders that must be negotiated, all the values that must be examined. Such collaborations as this are profoundly human and profoundly political, pitting a grass-roots creative solidarity against the machinery of globalism, building fellowships from below. It is surely not by chance that the song that first gripped the members of TGU is a song of emigration. Qaj Maro, qaj moj bijë, sings the wife left behind while her husband seeks work elsewhere in the Ottoman lands. “Weep, Maro, weep my daughter. He has taken the road for Egypt, left me with the children. Harsh is our life...” From the labour of those who went before us comes our strength. KIM BURTON

Taken from Last.fm

190 listeners  ·  2,651 plays via Last.fm