Balkan Brass

Balkan brass band music — known locally as truba or trubači — is a brass-led wedding and festival tradition concentrated in southern Serbia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania. The standard line-up is two or three trumpets, two or three flugelhorns, several tenor horns, a tuba and a goč bass drum with cymbals. Tempos run wide, from slow čoček (around 80 BPM) to driving brzo kolo dance pieces above 160 BPM. Solo trumpet lines are heavily ornamented with mordents, slides and quarter-tones, drawing on Ottoman maqam practice.

Brass instruments arrived in the Balkans via Ottoman military bands in the nineteenth century, but the modern wedding-band repertoire was developed primarily by Romani musicians in the twentieth century. The annual Guča Trumpet Festival in central Serbia, held since 1961, is the genre's central showcase, drawing tens of thousands of attendees each August. Boban Marković and his son Marko have dominated the festival's main prizes since the 1990s. Goran Bregović's soundtrack work for Emir Kusturica's films, especially Underground (1995), pushed Balkan brass into European art-cinema consciousness.

Listen for the trumpet's slides between notes — quarter-tone bends inherited from Ottoman tradition that are essentially absent from western European brass-band music. Tempos accelerate across a tune; the closing fast section, called the kolo, is the climax of every set. The bass drum's heel-and-stick technique produces two distinct tones that anchor the metre.

Boban i Marko Marković Orkestar's Balkan Brass Battle (with Fanfare Ciocărlia, 2011) is the canonical modern document. Goran Bregović's Underground soundtrack (1995) is the most accessible cinematic entry.

The Guča Trumpet Festival's main prize, the Golden Trumpet, has been won most years since 2001 by either Boban or Marko Marković — both have won it so many times the festival now sometimes asks them not to compete to give other bands a chance.