Balkan Beat Box Tickets

Balkan Beat Box
Balkan Beat Box is a world music group featuring Tomer Yosef, Billy Levy, Ben Hendler, Itamar Ziegler, Dana Leung, Eyal Talmudi, Jeremiah Lockwood, and Peter Hess.

The group traces its roots when Co-founders Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat met in Brooklyn. Both had grown up with music and Kaplan had been a klezmer clarinetist.

The duo was joined by Muskat who was previously a drummer in a punk band. They began playing together and had trouble finding a style that they felt represented themselves.

Since the band wanted to take ancient and traditional musical traditions, so they fuse those with hip-hop in order to create a new mix of musical styles out of the traditional world music context.

Balkan Beat Box established their own unique sound incorporating the musical styles of Jewish klezmer,Mediterranean and Balkan traditions, hip-hop and dancehall beats.The band was extremely influenced by Jamaican dub. That kind of music appealed to listeners in a club or a dancehall.

Balkan Beat Box?s first album was released in 2005 and second, entitled ?Nu-Med? in 2007. Their first, self-titled album focused more on Mediterranean sounds whereas their latter album included Arabic and Spanish influences. Both albums received global acclaim.

The song Bulgarian Chicks off Nu-Med quickly became popular in clubs and dancehalls, proving that the music scene is ready to embrace diverse and hybrid musical forms. By the end of December 2006, Tomer Yosef was considered a core member of the group.

Nu-Med features rappers from Syria and Palestine, a clarinetist from Macedonia and singers from Bulgaria, Israel and Morocco. The whole recording is steeped in studio techniques that were popularized in Jamaican music.

In an interview with Kaplan, he said that the dub aesthetic influenced the band a lot. Despite the hodgepodge of influences, Balkan Beat Box?s music sounds organic.

The klezmer, Gypsy and Middle Eastern sounds that the band members grew up with provided the soul of Balkan Beat Box. But, modern music is the band?s ever-thumping heart. Like Gypsy punks Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box?s high-energy music is best experienced live.

While commenting on the band, Kaplan came up with words that Balkan Beat Box are pretty wild. They expect to be sweating as they eventually end up turning the concert into a frantic party.

Kaplan was born in the small Israeli city of Jaffa, picking up clarinet at an early age. He loved listening to Egyptian pop, Russian and Moroccan music on the radio. He learned to play klezmer, high-spirited Eastern European Jewish dance music.

The other bandmate, Muskat?s strange, quixotic musical career started early. He gained notoriety both as a punk-rock drummer, and produced Mediterranean singers at age 18.

With Balkan Beat Box, putting all the members, energies, creativities and music together is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. With a core of six to 10 musicians, the band?s shows tend to be euphoric, exhausting two- to three-hour circuses.