Album Notes

Gypsy music goes downtown. Balkanarama performs modern and retro Balkan songs in a style influenced by jazz, Motown, blues and a touch of hip-hop – a mix of high-octane dance music and soulful ballads, with a healthy dose of improvisation. This is how Rom and Slavic musicians in Southeastern Europe play this music today, and it definitely isn’t your father’s Gypsy jazz. Once banned in communist Bulgaria, it blends Slavic melodies, Middle Eastern scales and Latin-sounding dance rhythms.

We’re an independent band from Seattle, with two earlier recordings also available on CD Baby. Responding to fans’ demands for a live album, we invited an audience into the studio late one night in 2005 and recorded a dozen of our favorite songs in one take. We cut applause to tighten the CD, but didn’t add or replace a note afterwards. The result is Balkanarama Live -- as close as you can get to one of our live shows without actually being there.