root salad Briga
Polish father, Quebecois mother, Balkan heart. Turbo folk, but not as we know it, discovers Tony Montague.
B
riga invites people to dance at the start of her set but the call goes largely unheeded. It’s scorching hot and the audience scattered on the
grass at the Vancouver Folk Festival stage wants to hear the music before considering verticality and vigorous movement.
But once the fiddler puts her bow to the strings the dancers are on their feet. The band’s crooked and compelling Balkan rhythms and Briga’s soaring, wailing fiddle brings half the baskers to their feet, play- ing music clearly rooted in tradition but with an international feel and flair stamped Montreal – one of the most hybridised places in North America.
The musicians’ names alone suggest several of the ingredients. As Briga launch- es into Malayeen – a new tune she wrote for Saddam Hussein’s favourite belly- dancer, who still performs – she’s backed by the darbuka of Maghrebian percussion- ist Tacfarinas Kichou, with Alix Noël-Guéry on keyboards, Marton Maderspach on drums, and Jérémi Roy on bass.
As for Briga – real name Brigitte Dajcz- er – she was born to a Polish father and Québécoise mother and grew up in Cal- gary. She played in an all-girl punk band for a while before moving to Montreal twelve years ago and immersing herself in Greek, Balkan and Middle Eastern music. Now she feels very much at home, closely connected to some of the city’s lesser- known communities.
“I started out playing with Les Gitans De Sarajevo – I’m still in the band – and learning from Carmen Piculeata, a well- known Roma musician here,” says Briga, interviewed two weeks earlier at a café in Montreal’s Latin Quarter, where she lives. ”The composition Couscoucescu on my first album Diaspora came from one of his stories of being summoned from his vil- lage when younger to play for [former Romanian communist dictator] Nicolae Ceausescu.”
“All my Balkan and Roma influences come from the communities. These people are friends of mine, yet few people seem to know they’re here. From Les Gitans I learned the ornamentation for Serbian tunes. Carmen showed me a lot more things, but drew the line at Bulgarian ornaments – which are played really fast and are hard to decipher on the spot. The bowing in particular baffled me.”
Briga formed her own band in 2008 and released that debut album Diaspora that made waves on the music scene in Québec. “I was trying to emulate the Balkan sound but coming from more of a Montreal multicultural angle, though, I
feel I didn’t leave enough room for the musicians to bring out their full identity. With Turbo Folk Stories [2012] I let them be themselves more with the repertoire I brought back after touring in Bulgaria.”
In search of the elusive bowing-action, Briga got funding to go to Sofia and study with ace fiddler Georgi Yanev for a couple of months in 2010. “The economic situa- tion in Bulgaria was very bad and in order to survive he was going into the Roma communities and doing weddings, and had his own sound system and van – strict- ly cash-only.”
“It’s funny because when I asked
Yanev about the bowing he said ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, everything will fall into place.’” recalls Briga with a laugh. “I thought ‘I came all this way to be told this?’ But that’s exactly what happened. He didn’t know how to explain it himself. I think just being next to him, playing and listening, I heard the phrasing and under- stood it. He threw me in the water – sink or swim. ‘Let’s go play a Gypsy wedding’. But I survived and it was the trip of a lifetime.”
W
hile the music on Turbo Folk Stories – crowd-funded via Indiegogo and self-released – is mostly Bulgarian in origin there are a couple of Roma songs, one from Macedonia, and influences from further east. Briga plays with much of the wild spirit of Balkan turbo folk and chalga, as heard on one of her compositions Night At The Officers Club. It was inspired by a friend’s description of a ‘wild east’ bar in Serbia frequented by Bulgarian and Serbian troops on either side of the cultural and community divide.
“I used to play with an amazing gui- tarist, Peja Manov, who got depressed by the Montreal winter and moved back to Serbia. He ended up playing at this hole- in-the-wall at night where these officers would mingle and drink together. It wasn’t friendly, and sometimes there’d be gun fights. I asked him what happened when guns were pulled – ‘did you stop playing?’ He said ‘No! Are you crazy? If we stopped they’d turn around and shoot us!’”
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