National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

While the raucous brass bands of Serbia and the Balkans may have been a major inspiration for Brooklyn-based drummer Matt Moran when forming Slavic Soul Party!, the ten-or-so members of this collective refuse to be pigeonholed by the folk traditions of Eastern Europe.

With members of Asian, Mexican, and American heritages, not to mention a Gypsy accordionist, this outfit is so much more than that. The group is equally comfortable playing weddings as they are international arts centers, and wherever they turn up, they refuse to be ignored.

With their fourth album, Taketron, recently released on the Barbès label, SSP! has made its most personal album to date, turning to their own members for most of the songwriting and ideas, rather than looking outwards to various folk sounds for guidance. It's all part of what Moran titles their "brass branding" - reconfiguring common motifs in brass music into a completely new paradigm.

Nat Geo Music met up with Moran on a beautiful late summer day at Korzo, a Slavic restaurant in South Slope, Brooklyn where two vegetarians were somehow able to find something to eat.

Nat Geo Music: You've previously stated that playing brass music is not choosing "the easy path."

Matt Moran: There are a lot of instruments that are a lot easier to play and to make a chord with, like a piano, for example. We have a tuba player, a trombone player, another trombone player-from a very practical standpoint, it's inconvenient. This is part of its value.

Choosing inconvenience is inherently subversive in America. That's part of the reason brass bands are attracting young fans today. It's like growing your own vegetables and living off the grid. You're saying 'I'm going to do it my way, and it has meaning to me this way.' It's a totally unmitigated experience. When I'm playing, I'm in your face. There does not need to be a microphone, there doesn't need to be a stage, there doesn't even need to be a club. There's an immediacy between us that you get from choosing this harder path.

This morning I was listening to the new Boban Markovic record, Devla. I have long been amazed by how diverse so seemingly few instruments can be.

People ask me what my influences are right now for this record, and I realize they were expectedly an outward looking answer, and I realized during this record we really looked inward. There's a lot more influence from everyone involved. It's come out less Balkan, and more us. We've been building a community in Brooklyn for over five years. Even when you're very excited about other musics, you start to look around your own community and become yourself more and more. The concept of this band from the origin was to get to that point. We had to respect tradition to get here-there's a lot of this over that in New York creative downtown concepts-but I never wanted to be this or that. I never wanted to be on it, I wanted to be in it.

When did you first come across Balkan music?

About fifteen years ago, I started really getting into Bulgarian vocal music. Then I slowly connected with other musicians who would pass along cassettes of other musicians and so on. I learned about Bulgarian traditions, then Macedonian traditions, and got into Serbian brass bands, went to Serbia and bought cassettes. This is before everyone was putting everything online. Fifteen years ago when you were trying to find Serbian brass band recordings, there were maybe two commercially released recordings, and the rest were passed around on cassettes.

Sometimes quick musical referencing can lead to appropriation. Rather than understanding where the music came from and the tradition that created it, people steal a snippet and use it without proper reference points.

I feel that people are a lot more glib with their musical referencing. I guess that's the culture we live in. They can grab little bits of things much easier. Whereas before if you were trying to grab a bit of Balkan brass influence, you'd have to spend a year tracking it down.

Have you found a big difference in the reactions of Eastern European audiences and American audiences?

There's a quantitative difference in reaction, but not a qualitative one. We bring about just enough unfamiliarity and foreignness to each scene to keep it interesting. We bring our Americanness to them, and here of course we're playing something foreign to many ears. Yet there's always something familiar to everyone, kind of unmistakable in the energy and the intent. So the reactions are fairly consistent. People get excited.

It's a very primal sound. There are subtleties to the music, for sure. But if you think about, say, Kayhan Kalhor and Persian classical music, you don't have the same peaks and valleys.

It's easy to miss the subtlety in brass band music, because of the volume and the energy. I'm not a brass player, but I have developed the utmost respect for brass players. After sitting in with them for six years, you learn there is so much going on that you're unaware of, in terms of how their tonguing and articulating and breathing and phrasing. You realize there actually is a lot of subtlety that we're not picking up on because we're dancing.

It's interesting that the way brass music is presented today is celebratory and unifying, yet much of its background is in military marches.

This is another aspect of the brass band's subversiveness. They take what is a colonizing militaristic concept-loud music that you can bring into battle-and it takes the form and subverts it to make local music for our tradition, the whole range of ritual and social music. That's one of the interesting aspects of how people say music is so much more eclectic now, and I would say, no, we like to think that, but we aren't aware of all the influences and mash-ups that have come before us. Inherent in every brass band is that. The tools of the oppressor become life affirming.

American are transient. We don't always do much searching for origins.

I think about the origins of this music often, and what it means. People we often say 'Oh, you guys march,' and I reply 'No, we do not march. We parade, but we do not march. You guys have forgotten.' I appreciate some of the sounds of marching bands, but I'm not really into the power structure and rigor of marching music. That's one of the things that's so cool about New Orleans, and how they subverted it and made it their own.

When I asked Boban Markovic the same questions, he said gypsies don't like the military much.

I don't know who does.

In our culture, there is the recognition of high school bands that people remember. That could be where we get that picture of marching.

I feel more connected to the tradition of Duke Ellington than to that. There have always been massive horn bands in America.

Speaking of performance and presentation, is there a qualitative difference between playing a wedding and Lincoln center?

That's an interesting question. It's a little different, because I know if someone has asked us to come play their wedding, I don't have to go in and convince them to have a good time. They know what we do, and they've brought us to do it. Often in Centers for the Performing Arts, you have to reach in and smack them in the butts before they let some of the boundaries down. It's a difference of whether it takes us five minutes or twenty minutes. We'll get them there. That's our job, and we're good at it.

Do you run into any problems at larger venues?

There are some institutions that are a little uptight about it. They say 'Oh, you want to get off the stage?' or 'You want people to get out of their seat? How is that going to work?' But they're really just practical differences. People are people. You give them something joyous, and they're going to get there.

Do they ever not get there?

Hands down, the hardest audience that we ever played for was a bunch of cultural elite in Turkey at a private party at a posh palace that had been converted into a hotel. It took us over an hour of playing before people danced. Afterwards, the organizers told us, 'We cannot believe you got these people to dance!' I said, 'Why didn't you warn me?' We're out there working our butts off wondering what we're doing wrong.

Barbès is certainly no posh hotel, great as it is. The space is tiny.

That's what I wanted. I remember in 2002 seeing Pina Bausch performances at BAM. There's this part of the piece where dancers bring out these pieces of wood and make this tiny shack in the middle of the stage, and start dancing in it and around it. I said, yeah, that's what I want. I want to do a regular gig in a shack. I dig small, intimate exchanges. I'd rather be in a small space than on a stage with a twenty-foot security buffer. That's great and we'll do it, but it's less of an experience. It's more like going to work and less like sharing.

Interestingly, with all this talk about live performance, there is an electronic component on the new record.

What we're talking about is expressing electronic influences acoustically. I mean, look, it's a CD. Show me a CD that does not have electronic influence. Our title track is a feature for Take Toriyama, because he's a bad ass making acoustic drum 'n bass. It's not about laying a patina on the Balkan brass, but putting it inside. Get in it, and then be it, and see what the hell comes out. It's not going to be electronic.

You also have an interesting addition to the band by way of an accordionist, Peter Stan.

It's weird. He's a virtuoso of Balkan music and gypsy accordion wizard. But the accordion doesn't naturally fit into a brass band, which is cool. It's like the sand and the oyster. It forces us to play differently at certain times. It makes everything shuffle around a little bit. Sometimes we just steamroll, and sometimes we just get out of the way and let him do his thing. He is endlessly inspiring to us. That cat has always gotten something up his sleeve. He keeps us on our toes. We make new Balkan brass band sounds because of him, because he comes from a lineage of accordion players. He'll have an accordion way of ornamenting it, and usually brass bands have not been very ornate or elaborate in their harmonic concepts. We're brass branding these accordion sounds in a cool way. That's part of what make us interesting to brass bands in Eastern Europe. On the flip side, I love his accent on American music. Hearing him find his place in this totally other style is really cool.