Eastern Bloc Party

Onstage at a packed club, Ori Kaplan peers over his saxophone into the audience. Middle-aged orthodox-Jewish men, women in Stevie Nicks-style gypsy blouses, crusty punks and college hipsters all dance side by side. It’s the kind of diversity that takes Kaplan’s band, Balkan Beat Box, closer to its goal—a goal even more elusive than the band’s fusion of Jewish klezmer melodies, Balkan brass-band stomp and frenetic gypsy rhythms with hip-hop, reggae and electro production. “We want to create utopia,” says Kaplan. “And music is a blank page on which to do it.”

Kaplan and drummer Tamir Muskat, Israeli transplants to New York City, aren’t alone in their belief that music can change the world. By the time Kaplan departed his previous band (gypsy-punkers Gogol Bordello) to found Balkan Beat Box with Muskat, he’d seen what a rock band could do for an oft-derided culture. Today, groups influenced by Eastern European music—the so-called “Balkan beat” from which Kaplan’s band gets its name—can be heard at rock shows and in dance clubs across America and Europe. And with artists like Devotchka, Beirut, Gogol Bordello and Balkan Beat Box making an impact beyond the “world music” bins, the idea of changing the world’s perceptions no longer seems far-fetched.

DOWN, SET, HUTZ!
As ambassadors for downtrodden cultures go, the Roma—commonly referred to as gypsies—could do a lot worse than Eugene Hutz. Since emigrating to New York City from Ukraine, Hutz has taken his gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello from punk bars to headlining national tours, and garnered critical acclaim starring alongside Elijah Wood in Everything Is Illuminated. He’s gregarious, hard-working and unfailingly self-confident. In other words, according to Hutz, he’s simply a gypsy musician. “Music was always the gypsy’s sure way to make a living,” says Hutz. “So how do you ensure you make a living? You have to kick everybody’s ass! You have to make everyone know that you’re the best, to get paid. You have to be mobile, loud, and have to blow everybody the f— away.”

For Gogol Bordello, this attitude translates into the band’s elaborate, often chaotic stage show—frenetic punk energy with gypsy instrumentation and theatricality. The result in the U.S. has been Gogol’s rise to the big leagues—the band’s last album, Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike, was equally lauded by rawk ’zines and NPR, and they now regularly sell out venues from New York to L.A. to Paris. But when Gogol began its endless touring five years ago, gypsy music was—like most folk-influenced Eastern European sounds—relegated to world-music mags.

“Our band was determined to get out of what we all call the ‘world music ghetto,’” says Hutz. “It’s a very nasty marketing trap that many musicians can’t get out of. However, our band is essentially a cruising rock ’n’ roll machine, and soon proved that our place is not only in the cultural centers and the biennials. And that turned around a lot of thinking about this kind of music.”

BAND OF GYPSIES
While Gogol Bordello was spouting punk rock with heavy accents in New York City, a quieter, second-generation gypsy revolution was occurring in Denver. Devotchka—a quartet of musicians from diverse rock, ethnic and classical backgrounds—has described itself as “Eastern Bloc indie rock.” On more recent albums, like How it Ends, Devotchka incorporates spaghetti-western and Tex-Mex sounds into its Tom Waitsian stagger. But founder and frontman Nick Urata says Balkan beat will always be there.

“My grandmother is from Italy and always told us we had gypsy blood,” Urata says. “I heard all that great accordion music as a young kid and it stuck with me when I was trying to find my own musical voice.”

With a violin and tuba in Devotchka, it’s hard not to stray into gypsy-string, Balkan-brass and polka territory. But the important thing is to incorporate it all into a new setting. “We found very early on that when you went for the fully traditional stuff, it was not as liberating,” he says. “A lot of the frustration with the musicians in my band was that they’d hook up with tango or Balkan or polka bands, and it was too traditional—they wanted to step outside and bring it into today. That was our philosophy.”

It’s a philosophy shared by bands like the Santa Fe, N.M. (via Brooklyn), Beirut—essentially songwriter Zach Condon—whose Gulag Orkestar showcases a love for brass bands learned during European pilgrimages. Beirut’s fiery instrumentation and somber indie-pop songwriting take Balkan beat in an entirely different direction from both its strings-and-brass roots and its contemporary punk-and-beats sound. As Balkan Beat Box’s Ori Kaplan says, that’s the whole idea.

“There needs to be [both] kinds of bands,” he says. “The revival bands interested in maintaining tradition, and those interested in revolutionizing it—bands not just playing a repertoire, but creating a new breed.”