Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music (2005)
8 tracks, 53 minutes
Spotify • iTunes
There’s been a few examples of wedding music on this blog so far, and they all make for a much better party than Wagner on the organ and Abba in the disco. Although Together Again credits Ivo Papasov and Yuri Yunakov as the main artists, the core group at play is actually a quartet: Papasov on clarinet, Yunakov on alto sax, Salif Ali on drums and Neshko Neshev on accordion. They are all members of the Turkish Romani population in Bulgaria, and masters of the wedding music and dance styles of ruchenica, horo and stambolovo. As befitting their heritage, their music has all manner of Balkan, Middle Eastern and Romani influences, as well as taking cues from jazz, rock and funk in little pieces here and there.
The album gets off to an incredible start with the piece ‘Oriental’. It begins with a fill between the darbuka and drum kit, and then it’s off at a million miles an hour – I calculate it at about 332 beats per minute. Papasov, Yunakov and Neshev play the main melody in heterophony; that is, they are all playing the same tune, but all improvising minute ornaments and embellishments along the way. Given that the melody is already quite intricate and then factoring in the pace of the whole thing, the effect is astounding. It slows down a little bit for the beginning of the sax solo, but it’s back up to speed before long, and the way that the guitar (from Kalin Kirilov) and drums work together towards the end even resembles some sort of speed-funk.
What is striking all the way through is the simply stunning virtuosity. It doesn’t matter who is soloing, the level is the same: the notes flow thick and fast and chords and scales change so rapidly, but it’s never devoid of emotion, even if that emotion is usually to do with partying. Despite me saying that I don’t know much about the region’s music, I do seem to have featured quite a bit of Eastern European music on here, and I think this is one of the reasons why. To even be able to perform the styles on display on this album even competently, you already need to be a top-class musician. To be able to imbue each lightning-fast note with feeling, then, and to create exciting, dynamic and inventive solos on top of it all shows some serious genius at work.
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