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Written in fRoots issue 223/224, 2002

BORIS KOVAĆ & LADAABA ORCHEST
The Last Balkan Tango
Piranha CD-PIR1573 (2001)

A luscious, surging central European sound of clarinets, accordions and violin, the keening, witty bitter-sweet of klezmer and Viennese cafés, hints of the music that crossed the Atlantic in the heads of Jewish songwriters, but deeply European, lurching into a shuffling, voluptuous, deep-sweeping dance rhythm. The master of ceremonies’ echoing declaiming voice in accented English, while the orchestra continues to play sotto voce in the background. That’s just the opener, the title track.
      LaDaABa stands for “La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica”. Saxist Boris Kovać is from Novi Sad in the Pannonian region of Yugoslavia. His compositions, played with six musicians, draw on the musics of the sixteen or so ethnic groups in the region, including Gypsy, Serbian, Hungarian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Bulgarian and Turkish, but what emerges on this album is none of them alone, it’s a unified music that probably strikes images simultaneously exotic and yearningly familiar in the mind of any European, or American with European family roots, or indeed anyone who’s ever watched a central-European located film. Misty, rich-coloured pictures, oblique humour, sadness, a pervading sense of end-of-an-era loss, “an invitation to dance on the extreme edge of that abyss known as Yugoslavia”.
      I had been looking forward to seeing the band live before finishing this review - but visa problems meant the cancellation of their scheduled showcase at Rotterdam Womex. Lines on the map...



© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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