Albanian wedding
My band played at Seattle biggest Albanian wedding of the year over the weekend. OK, Albanian-American, really ... but the bride was Albanian, so they were in charge.
I love playing at weddings. They're always a logistical mess -- everything runs late, dinner takes too long to serve, nerves are too fraught -- but people's emotions are close to the surface, and when musicians connect with the audience, the connection runs deep.
Which it did Saturday night. We learned half a dozen Albanian songs for the gig, which astonished them, and between those and our standard lineup of Balkan hits, we kept the dance floor jammed for five hours. The bride called us two days later, saying all her relatives were still talking about the music, amazed that Americans could play it that well. Her unofficial MC told us that while it's easy to bring in an Albanian band from out of town, "they play for money, and you play from the heart." The relatives from New York, we hear, will be heading back with stories about what they heard in Seattle.
That's still what does it for us: the look on emigres' faces when they hear their music played with the right fire in the belly. They know it when they hear it. It's all about raw emotion, not intellect. It's not music under glass, the way too many American academic preservationists play it. It's as alive as the Delta blues, and it comes from much the same place, somewhere deep in the solar plexus.
Holla!
I love playing at weddings. They're always a logistical mess -- everything runs late, dinner takes too long to serve, nerves are too fraught -- but people's emotions are close to the surface, and when musicians connect with the audience, the connection runs deep.
Which it did Saturday night. We learned half a dozen Albanian songs for the gig, which astonished them, and between those and our standard lineup of Balkan hits, we kept the dance floor jammed for five hours. The bride called us two days later, saying all her relatives were still talking about the music, amazed that Americans could play it that well. Her unofficial MC told us that while it's easy to bring in an Albanian band from out of town, "they play for money, and you play from the heart." The relatives from New York, we hear, will be heading back with stories about what they heard in Seattle.
That's still what does it for us: the look on emigres' faces when they hear their music played with the right fire in the belly. They know it when they hear it. It's all about raw emotion, not intellect. It's not music under glass, the way too many American academic preservationists play it. It's as alive as the Delta blues, and it comes from much the same place, somewhere deep in the solar plexus.
Holla!
posted by Mikhail at 10:55 PM
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