Kafana Balkan October 6, 2012

KAFANA BALKAN is the Bay Area’s biggest Balkan music party masterminded by DJ Zeljko (Zeljko Petkovic)

Featuring Brass Menazeri + Jill Parker & The Foxglove Sweethearts + DJ Zeljko.

Saturday October 6th
At the Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell at Van Ness
9 PM $13.-

Wild brass and shaking floors at the Kafana Balkan party.
Combining exuberance with melancholy, abandonment with abandon, musical traditions as far-flung as Spanish Flamenco, Romanian Manele, Gypsy jazz, and even the youthful strains of modern-day Gypsy punk, have a way of getting under the skin right on down to the toes-which will almost assuredly be tapping. Label it folk music if you must, but don't expect a lot of polite purists holding forth while holding back. Balkan (Gypsy) music is party music, and Zeljko Petkovic aka DJ Zeljko's (in)famous Kafana Balkan evenings are always one of the consistently best parties in town.

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BRASS MENAZERI (pronounced "Menagerie") is the San Francisco Bay Area's Balkan Romani ("Gypsy") powerhouse Brass Band. We cascade through the music of the Serbian, Macedonian, Greek & Rajasthani Roma with wild rhythms, soulful vocals & hot improvisations. The energy is infectious-toes tap, bodies slam, sweat flies as vital energy radiates from the dance floor. The Brass Menazeri is a shining example of traditional Balkan repertoire combined with new sensibilities, innovative arrangements & original compositions at the hands & lips of American devotees. "Warning: listening to the Brass Menazeri is addictive-once they start, you can't stop." -SF Bay Gaurdian

JILL PARKER is an international, award winning belly dancer. She is an instructor, choreographer, and founder of the modern tribal fusion belly dance movement.

She's an exceptional belly dance teacher with a gift for demystifying this sensuous form, making its techniques accessible to new dancers, while offering tremendous insight for refinement to advanced dancers. With over two decades of experience, she has trained many of the top dancers in the genre.

Jill is an original member of Fat Chance Belly Dance, founder of Ultra Gypsy, and director of the Foxglove Sweethearts. She teaches weekly classes at ODC Commons (SF) and Spring Fall Dance Studio (Berkeley).

http://www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision/2012/07/06/performant-when-roma :
Last Saturday night at the Kafana Balkan party, after a DJ set of Balkan standards which buzzed boisterously through the hushed Baroque atmosphere of the Great American Music Hall,
If plenty of personal space is your "thing," then an evening spent with follow-up act the ferociously talented Brass Menažeri will perhaps not appeal. But for the rest of us, the combination of brass band dynamics infused with an imitable Balkan spirit (no, not rakia), can't fail to inspire. An oddience that can stand still during the aural onslaught of seven horns, a snare drum, and the mellifluous vocals of Briget Boyle is not an oddience that typically shows up to Kafana Balkan, the respectable camouflage of button-down shirts and nice shoes notwithstanding. At one point during a raucous, elongated version of Šaban Bajramović's "Opa Cupa" my companion J. pointed out that the floor was actually shaking beneath the bouncing weight of so many dancing feet. Though itself highly orchestrated under the musical direction of clarinetist Peter Jaques, the Menažeri inspired the celebratory spontaneity and cathartic release of a pagan solstice.
So much so that afterwards, tumbling back onto the street, sweaty and euphoric, even the heavy drizzling fog felt like a gift.

Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell St, San Francisco, California 94102
View Map · Get Directions

Official Website: http://www.facebook.com/kafana.balkan