By Don Heckman
UCLA Live couldn’t have made a better choice to wrap its 2008-2009 concert series than Goran Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra. The large, celebratory ensemble of the Sarajevo-born Bregovic – a composer, guitarist, singer and actor – delivered a 2 ½ hour, non-stop collection of music from the Balkans and Eastern Europe that filled Royce Hall’s aisles Saturday night with wildly enthusiastic members of the audience, eager to express their familiarity with the dance steps of Serbia, Croatia, Romania and beyond.
Bregovic has been a prominent figure in European music for more than three decades, initially with the rock group White Button in the country once known as Yugoslavia, later as a film composer and leader of an immensely popular touring ensemble that has drawn huge crowds in Europe, the Middle East and South America. His successes – in other parts of the world as well as at Royce on Saturday – may well trace to the fact that his music represents a collective expression of the disparate cultural elements that fragmented in all directions with the demise of Yugoslavia.
For his debut appearance in Los Angeles, Bregovic arrived with a group consisting of a string quartet, a six piece Gypsy brass band (which made its entrance marching down Royce’s aisles), a male vocal sextet and a pair of female Bulgarian singers. And it was enough to cover all the high points in a collection of music reaching from passionately keening Romany gypsy sounds to utterly irresistible rhythmic party music. Selections – most composed by Bregovic – often began with something approaching Serbian blues, expressed in slowly unfolding legato fashion before erupting into pounding, propulsive rhythms. Satire occasionally surfaced in pieces such as “Kalashnikov” (with a chorus that said “Boom, boom, boom!”), occasional phrases recalled Bregovic’s rock ‘n’ roll background, and a song or two – rendered in his surprisingly sweet-toned voice – shifted gears into contemporary singer/songwriter style.
Along the way, each of the horn players had a chance to shine: Stojan Dimov with his fast-fingered alto saxophone and wailing, klezmer-like clarinet; Bokan Stankovic and Dalibor Lukic, playing rotary valve trumpets with heart-rending emotional cries; and the baritone horn pair of Milos Mihajlovic and Aleksandar Rajkovic alternating pumped out rhythmic figures with occasional martial blasts. The string quartet added fragments of sound tinctured with traces of Bartok, and the male vocal ensemble did everything from gentle harmonies to operatic dramatics.
Amid all this extraordinary array of music, the most remarkable stand-out was drummer/singer Alen Ademovic, playing a minimal set-up featuring the traditional goc drum. His percussion work was the driving heart beat of the music, his accordion playing added occasional atmospheric timbres. And, beyond that, his singing, clearly inspired by the microtonal melismas of Middle Eastern vocal styles, provided fascinating improvisational enhancements to many of the songs. At only 22, Ademovic is clearly a star in the making. .
By the time the program ended, Bregovic, Ademovic and company had transformed the venerable auditorium into an all-join in celebration. Only UCLA Live’s David Sefton, always eager to surprise his audiences, could have come up with the notion of winding up a season with a Serbo-Croatian dance party.
