Veveritse Plays Titanic Balkan Grooves at Barbes

Thursday night at Barbes, Veveritse Brass Band played a characteristically intense, irresistibly careening show. Like Slavic Soul Party, who have weekly Tuesday residency here when they’re not on the road, Veveritse are a ten-piece outfit. Unlike their funkier, more hip-hop oriented counterparts, Veveritse are more of a jamband, sharing a semi-revolving cast of A-list horn players with other elite East Coast groups including Romashka, Zlatne Uste, Ansambl Mastika, Raya Brass Band, Hungry March Band and country outfit the Woes. This time out they had a frontline of clarinet, alto sax and trumpet sailing over the suspenseful hot-lava bubbling of the horns and trubas, propelled by the rat-tat-tat of the two drummers. It took about twenty minutes before people started to filter in from the bar in front, but once they did, they started to clap along and move their feet: what this band plays is dance music, after all. While these days it’s a stretch to assume that any well-dressed young Brooklyn crowd knows anything more sophisticated than, say, the Alabama Shakes, it’s testament to the universal power of Eastern European music. Who says everybody has to dance in 4/4 time?

A couple of Veveritse’s long, ten-minute-plus jams were pretty straight up rhythmically, but much of the show wasn’t, and that didn’t seem to phase anybody. The most spine-tingling solo of the night came from the clarinetist, who fired off what seemed to be an effortlessly supersonic chain of eerie chromatics. Alto saxophonist Greg Squared (frontman of Ansambl Mastika and Raya Brass Band) blasted through one shivery microtonal blitz after another…and who knew that Patrick Farrell, first-call accordionist for umpteen gypsy bands ,was also a more than competent horn player? Emily Geller took aim with a machine-gun precision from behind her big bubanj drum while snare drummer Luke Schneiders slammed out the occasional evil clash from his cymbals. Matter-of-factly but mysteriously, they made their way out of a cauldron of chromatics to a surprisingly chilly, low-key trumpet solo, a galloping triplet beat that swung back and forth between there and four-on-the-floor, and finally left the gleeful minor-key menace behind in exchange for a more lighthearted, blippy, Greek-flavored tune. Then they returned to the biting gypsy tonalities with a long, warm but wary solo intro from one of truba players, then the twin drums kicked in and they were off on another long vamp, this one with an especially anthemic, cinematic sweep. Then they took a break, something they deserved considering how hard everybody had been working. Which made it easier to make a graceful exit and get to the train in time before everything went haywire.

Because they share members with so many other bands, Veveritse don’t play a ton of shows, although they’ve been doing one at the Jalopy pretty much every month. And tomorrow, July 2, they’re at Littlefield at 9 opening for another excellent party band, Very Be Careful.

Raya Brass Band Kicks Off 2012 With an Explosive New Album

Stars of the Brooklyn Balkan underground, Raya Brass Band have an exhilarating, eclectic new album, Dancing on Roses, Dancing on Cinders just out. They’re playing the album release show this Saturday night, January 7 at Drom on what might be the year’s best bill with No BS Brass, Malian griot Cheick Hamala Diabate, Smokey Hormel’s soulful western swing band, and Chicha Libre, the Peruvian-style surf band who might be the only act in town who rival Raya Brass Band for sheer fun factor. If you’re here, you should go to this, it’s only ten bucks (they’re also at Golden Fest for considerably more on the 13th and 14th).

The album transcends both the Balkan and brass labels: what they play is otherworldly jams for people who like to dance. The tracks are programmed much like a typical Raya concert: a big, blazing, funky chromatic two-chord vamp to get the dancers spinning, a bunch of even more intense numbers, a little comic relief and finally another long, only slightly less blistering, more spacious theme to send everybody home in a good mood. Typically saxophonist/clarinetist Greg Squared and trumpeter Ben Syversen will blast through a song’s hook in tandem before taking off on a long solo or two while accordionist Matthew Fass adds texture and ambience, Don Godwin’s tuba lays down a fat, pulsing groove (no cheesy “blat” sounds here) and drummer EJ Fry rattles and booms and clicks, making it seem like 10/4 or 21/8 are the most effortlessly natural dance rhythms ever invented.

As you would expect from a gypsy band, the tunes are bracing and biting, ominous and sometimes verging on the macabre with the sax or trumpet blasting through long chromatic runs over wary minor chord changes. But not all the album is that scary. There’s the Cellphone Song, which seems to be an Eastern European-style parody of the singsongey quality of your typical factory ringtone; a bouncy, circuslike, buffoonish number; Sufijski Cocek, a spot-on, tongue-in-cheek side trip to Bollywood; and a happy, upbeat Greek dance that morphs into a trippy one-chord vamp that they take their time building, hypnotically.

But the best tracks here are the minor-key scorchers. The big crowd-pleaser is Hasapikos, a somewhat defiantly blithe march that they eventually take doublespeed, and then even faster. A smoldering anthem, Arkabarka has the closest thing to a rock melody here, Syversen following an offhandedly chilling, microtonal sax solo by bringing it a little lower and then adding wry textures with a mute before sprinting back to the stratosphere. The album’s lone quiet number, Melochrino, begins with a brooding sax taqsim and works its way to a memorably bitter crescendo. Tavernitsa, a tricky Greek-flavored dance by Syversen, sets Greg Squared’s effortlessly fluid, lighting-fast volleys against the trumpeter’s more deliberate, then counterintuitively explosive firepower. And some of the album’s most intense moments come during the Middle Eastern-tinged Cucek Na Sudahan, tense sustained passages alternating with unhinged ferocity. Greg Squared is a disciple of Ivo Papasov and deserves mention alongside the Bulgarian icon: his speed and command are so strong that he makes his solos look easy. Syversen has speed to match, and an eclectic style that draws on his experience playing noiserock (in his own group Cracked Vessel) and jazz improvisation. Only a week into the new year, and we already have a great album: if the rest of this year is only half as good as this, 2012 will still be amazing.