Bajanski Bal

Bajanski Bal love to dig through the huge treasure chest of eastern european folk songs, select the odd forgotten jewel, put it through the crusher, pick out a couple of the key ingredients, throw them into the turbo-shaker with a big portion of their own home-made spicy sauce and serve it up as a gourmet delicacy. A favourite raw material are the old „street songs“ from Odessa, the original melting pot of ukrainian, russian and jewish cultures.

Mix in a few original compositions and you get a sound-coctail made up of Slavic Folk, Gypsy- Jazz, Klezmer, Retropop and old Soviet film-music. It conjures up images of the lost „socialist spirit“, naive love stories, tongue-in-the-cheek heroism und street-wiseguys. And it sounds full of an exuberant energy for partying and dancing, unaffected virtuosity, and honest vocal craft, all drenched in the traditional slavic melancholy.

The band members are all experienced musicians, with decades of stage-exposure in a variety of musical genres to their credit, but the band itself only exists since five years. At first it was a singer out of the russian Red Army Choir, a russian-ukrainian accordion virtuoso, and a polish-ukrainian guitarist. After a few small concerts at various slavic parties they soon found a swedish tuba-torturer and a drummer (with an obscure eastern heritage), tested them for performance under difficult party conditions, and embarked on an musical offensive of the western world.
Since 2006 they tour through Europe and make it a point of honour to turn every club floor into a throbbing mass of happy faces, bouncing bodies and kicking knees.