One of these names is not like the others: Ivo Papasov, Yuri Yunakov, Neshko Neshev, Salif Ali, Kalin Kirilov, Carol Silverman. Yet these six musicians—five native Bulgarians and one Oregonian—make up the current incarnation of the Yuri Yunakov Ensemble, whose founding members burst onto the world music scene with the Bulgarian “wedding music” they created in the 1970s. On Saturday night, a parent-heavy crowd at Crowell Hall got a chance to see the group reunited for the first time in a decade, performing their new show, “Bulgarian Bebop.”
Combining elements of Balkan, Turkish, and Romani (Gypsy) folk music with jazz and rock, wedding music (so named for its resemblance to the raucous tunes played for hours at Balkan weddings) became popular in Bulgaria in the 70s and 80s, only to be forced underground by Bulgaria’s then-socialist government. Members of the ensemble were jailed for a time, but wedding music lived on as a powerful countercultural force. Today the musicians play, together or alone, around the world.
After an introduction by Wesleyan Professor of Music Mark Slobin, vocalist Carol Silverman took the stage. Silverman, a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon, tours with the group and serves as its liaison to English-speaking audiences. She introduced the rest of the artists: a clarinetist, a saxophonist, an accordion player, a guitarist/vocalist and a drummer. The band’s fashion sense ranged from large black t-shirts over beer bellies to well-pressed ensembles that would not have looked out of place on the American version of a wedding band. They saluted the audience with hearty greetings in Bulgarian or with the universal language of a wave, and got down to the business of playing.
Combining the improvisational structure of jazz with set folk melodies, the band managed to make the most intricate patterns of solo and group performance appear organic, as though they were just fooling around on their instruments and incredible music happened to come out. Often two musicians would approach each other to play a duet that looked more like a playful duel, the saxophonist blaring in the accordion player’s face, or vice versa.
Silverman introduced some of the band’s numbers as deriving primarily from one tradition: a song from Turkey, two Romani songs. She explained the lyrics of a Romani song, which told of a man dreaming of beautiful Lena, her red slippers and white pantaloons.
“I don’t have any money,” Silverman said, speaking for the song’s wistful narrator. “But there’s so much goodness in life, let’s get married anyway.”
The band invited audience members to dance from the outset, provided they didn’t block the aisles and break fire regulations. Only a small group of students did at first—but after the intermission, dozens ran to the side of the stage, dancing ecstatically. Yuri Yunakov himself delivered a saxophone solo that could have been the wedding music equivalent of crowd surfing, making his way to the center of the group to play as the dancers swarmed around him.
“Those dudes were so punk rock,” said Jean Pockrus ’09, who was among the first out of their seats. “I wanted to start a mosh pit after the first song. Did you see the Bulgarian in black almost bash the saxophonist with his clarinet?”
Finally Silverman put her arm around one student and began to do a grapevine, indicating the chain she wanted the rest to form. Forty students or so, and an adult or two as well, danced all the way across the stage in front of the band, circling over and over.
“I joined some kids who were dancing in the aisles,” said Quinn Hechtkopf ’06. “We recruited parents during intermission, and brought the show down in front of the stage where we performed the Bulgarian ‘special dance,’ which was really just the Horah. I’m stumped why more people didn’t dance with us, especially the grandparents. Didn’t their generation grow up in dancehalls?”
Tristan Chirico ’06 had never heard of Bulgarian wedding music before, but he couldn’t stop dancing.
“When we walked home, panting and sweating like racehorses, I don’t think one of us doubted it had been an amazing evening,” Chirico said.
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