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Penguin Eggs Magazine, No.28.
Boris Kovac & La Campanella
World After History: A Pannonian-Mediterranean Round-Trip
Piranha
If you're looking for an unsettling soundtrack to summer, then look no
further than World After History. Here the familiar evocation of pan-Mediterranean
place in sound is weighted by a deep Balkan melancholy, which is only fitting
given Boris Kovac’s residency in Novi Sad in Vojvodina. Kovac’s saxophone takes the melody in most cases, but he also gives space to the other instruments – most notably, Goran Penic’s accordion and Vukasin Miskovic’s classical guitar.
The compositions themselves are claustrophobic night club collisions of jazz, folk, and cabaret elements, with different characters emerging sometimes within the space of a single piece. Voices also occasionally lift from this mix, usually as background colour to the music, although a couple of times as ominous intonations more to the fore. But it’s not all night club smokiness – Dur AA and Limping Waltz are both almost sunny at times and the use of a string quartet also gives some pieces a more classical air. Boris Kovac has a number of other releases on the Piranha label, and on the strength of this I will be doing a little digging into his back catalogue.
– By Richard Thornley
Sing Out! magazine, Derek Beres
From the opening stabs of Boris Kovac's saxophone you know a journey awaits. Never mind the song is called "Intro Trip;" all this Yugoslavian bandleader¹s excursions are voyages beyond the expected. Nuanced in the subtle insanity of Balkan jazz, his records are more like mental battles.
His ability to veer from heartbreakingly gorgeous melodies, fluttering wings of brass symphonies, into breakneck accordion-driven fury is incomprehensible. One can only imagine shifting drunkenly in a tanchez (dance house) in a state somewhere between paranoia and ecstasy. World After History, like its predecessors, is a soundtrack to the movie of Kovac1s mind. It envisions a sacred space stretching past dualistic thinking; much in Eastern European arts reaches for such climax. Whether strolling gently through "Latina" or falling intoxicated to the Wonderland-ish "Crazy Love Waltz," Kovac creates sonic images of wintertime carousels bouncing to the high-pitched wails of tango-fueled jazz (his last record was, fittingly, titled The Last Balkan Tango). Given these cerebral titles, Kovac is as much philosopher as brassist he seeks personal spaces which make sense through incoherence. Hence the melancholic opening of "Dukeland in Your Heart." The trio of saxophone, classical guitar and accordion emit a slow, startlingly sad portrait of a decimated planet past the confines of history. To put all this into perspective: the Zen koan, what is the sound of one hand clapping?
Of course there1s no answer it1s an inner realization that moves us past the realm of linear thought. After you1ve meditated for a bit, turn on World After History for the closest interpretation imaginable.
QUER funk Karlsruhe Erstsendung,Roland Altenburger 14.08.2005
From Cuba to Pannonia. Pannonia is located in Serbia, ex Yugoslavia and it is the homeland of Boris Kovach, the music genius who has given us this new record that surpasses all his previous works. Boris has named it “World after History” and it seems it is a religious confession of music Hinduism. Kovach believes in birth, life, death and rebirth of culture in former Yugoslavia which was torn apart by civil war. If he didn’t receive a Golden Bear award (Orsino), later he would have had to receive a platinum one. Two years since the release of “Ballads at the end of Time” and “The Last Balkan Tango” Boris has announced a new spring since the apocalypse. Because of that i would rather hug Boris Kovach and his band La Campanella.
Froots, Garth Cartwright
… Seductive as this album is – beautifully recorded with all players offering a fat weave of sound ... World After History is still worthy of purchasing if only the sounds of an older, more laid-back and baroque Europe are rarely captured as they are here.
Shepherd Express
The music merges hope with melancholy, folk traditions with orchestration, nostalgia with optimism. Tuneful and rhythmic and led by his own fluid playing, Kovac’s music is both grounded and path finding – a testament to the resiliency or culture and spirit in a region trying to repair itself after a decade of horror.
Global Beat Fusion 08/01/05
This is not hard music, however, the depth is in its subtle penetration. Kovac creates long, creeping symphonies that are more potent sedatives than drilling rhythms. World After History, like his prior efforts The Last Balkan Tango and Ballads at the End of Time, is future classical, as nimble and light as it is charged.As a result of his theater passions, Kovac takes the empty space of sound and fills it majestically.
MG,world music charts europe
Pan-Balkan composer/musician Boris Kovac and his ensemble La Campanella take a Balkan view of the Mediterranean.
Quoting footballing philosopher Albert Camus's observation that "the sun is an answer to all historical dilemmas!", he and his band (Roma, Serbian, Hungarian, Macedonian...), paint the picture from the other side of the sea. and describes it as " a cool turning away from the pains of the Balkan's recent years to a more hopeful and promising reality", and this beguiling blend of Balkan and Mediterranean influences seems like the way to go.
Chris Cutler, London
"Kovac slips easily across that twilight zone where contemporary composition and folk music touch."
Kim Burton,
Song Lines,
London, May/June 2003.
Compassionate, apocalyptic and grimly nostalgic music from the leading Serbian artist Boris Kovac, a philosopher and musician from Serbian province of Vojvodina –a melting-pot and perhaps the most ethnically diverse area in Europe , with a host of competing and collaborating musical cultures – has developed one of the most individual and instantly recognizable voices to emerge from the post-Yugoslav musical scene. This, his second CD for Piranha, shows that he has continued to grow.
Simon Broughton,
Song Lines, London,
May/June 2003.
From the other end of Serbia, the Vojvodina region in the north, comes ace saxophonist Boris Kovac (unfortunately not in the Barbican festival). While Markovic is a great village musician, Kovac is a sophisticated composer – and one who needs to express what his country has been through in his music.
...Boris Kovac belongs to a small circle of composers and performers of the world music from Europe who have managed, after a thorough study of their own musical tradition, to give innovative solutions, going beyond the geography and any kind of frontiers, and in that way giving a new dominant dimension to their heritage, without yielding under the cliches coming out of random mixing, imposed by the musical market.Boris Kovac presents "Ballads at the End of Time", post apocalyptic music for dance of those who have survived the end of the world, music full of nostalgia, black humor and elegance, with clearly set coordinates of the big Balkan pot, starting from the brutal poverty of Gipsy, and getting on via winking to the ancient and decadent waltz, cha-cha-cha and
the refined tango, a delicacy of sophisticated balls in the big royal salons of old and wealthy Europe...
Klaus Halama,
SOUND.DE
May 2003
Apocalypse Now. On scene this time the Balkans. Boris Kovac's personal processing of the Milosevic era puts the true soul of this region freely, which longingly thirsts for well-ordered conditions. Not the metal blowing cliche will be served here, on the contrary it concerns marvelously melancholic Balkan Ballads, which make this CD a true jewel.
STEREOPLAY
One hour ago the world went down. The only survivors are musicians from the Balkans. And they are mourning with clarinet, saxophone, violin, accordion, double bass and percussions for this beautiful old world, which reached from nervously elegant Vienna to the colorful solid Constantinople. Between all nightmarish nostalgia flashes again and again dance-like optimism and lets the CD listener ask: Why was this treasure full of inspiring moments not already saved before the apocalypse?
Klaus Halama, SOUND.DE
Boris Kovac is master of theatrical finely produced Melancholia.
Hardcore-Brass or Hi Speed-Gypsy are not his style.
He is the King of Waltz & Tango with his heart striking for Eastern Europe. He prefers to play early in the morning in fog-imposed Danube valleys his lamenting melodies, rather than filling a hot-summer marketplace with exposing sounds. He is affiliated closer to Tom Waits or Frederico Fellini than to Goran Bregovic or Naat Veliov.
From Istanbul to Transylvania , from Vienna to Montenegro, the music of Boris Kovac is at home everywhere and even an erotic Cha Cha is possible.
LaDaABa - La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica - continues - bitter-sweet, moving - however - not hopelessly.
Cliff Furnald
DIRTY LINEN,
June 2003
The second and final edition of Boris Kovac & LaDaABa Orchest´s La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica is titled "Ballads At the End Of Time". The follow up to the critically timed Fall 2001 release, "The Last Balkan Tango", shares the same eerie timing, delivered to my doorstep the morning the first "coalition of the willing" bomb dropped on Baghdad.
Volume two is more subtle; darker, sweeter and deeply melancholy, a work that asks you to "imagine the morning after the apocalypse. Are we still alive? It appears so."
The work is soaked in Balkan and western European dance styles, and LaDaABa is a fitting dance band for the end of time. Backing Kovac´s mournful saxophone is a small ensemble of bass, percussion, violin, clarinet, and accordion. It offers a stripped-down, sometimes dire sound fitting for the subject, but it also offers hopeful moments, bursts of merriment, and simple pleasure, the same mixed emotions and roller-coaster changes that made the first volume such an effective antidote to its time. In the notes, Kovac offers that this is the second and final edition of La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica. "I hope that such a theme will never inspire me again." Amen
www.wmce.de, April 2003
Once a month radio-Worldmusic-specialists from twentythree European countries select their individual top ten favourites out of current Worldmusic releases from their playlists and mail them to Berlin. The nominations are processed in a data-base and the top ten is then published as the WORLD MUSIC CHARTS EUROPE. BALLADS AT THE END OF TIME reached top ten on European Broadcast Union monthly chart!
Simon Broughton,
Song Lines, London,
January 2003
In the old, converted colliery of Zollverein where WOMEX, the world music expo took place, there was a round metal gasometar-like structure with a circular concrete bunker where some of the showcases took place. It seemed a fitting environment for the Serbian Boris Kovac and his LaDaABa Orchest (La Danza Apocalypsa Balkanica) as they worked themselves into an exagerated theatrical frenzy, determined to enjoy to the full their last hours before the impending apocalypse. “ Let’s dance! Let’s dance!” screames Kovac into a big microphone – the sort used for the wartime broadcasts. He was dressed demurely in a white suit with a pink handkerchief in his breast pocket, as if he’d fled from the society wedding. Then he started running maniacally round the stage, honking out wild improvisations on his sax. The bassist threw off his shirt and started to dance bare-chested, and the music suddenly slipped into a beguiling romantic tango – sax, clarinet and accordion singing together in sweet harmony. Just as in a Berlin drawings of George Grosz ( imitated on Kovac’s CD cover), what we where expiriencing was the dark underbelly of poular cabaret music. And the tunes where intoxicating. Suddenly Kovac poured out a glass of blood-red wine and offered it round the band. After another outburst, the music subsides into an incredible stillness and concentration for a soft bass solo and a foghorn-like bass clarinet. The seductive melodies of half-remembered dances returned as your life passed in flashback.” Today LA DANZA, and tomorrow…Boom! Apocalypsa Balkanica,” yelled Kovac. “See you in a better world.”
Heather Hermant
in Global Rhythm magazine, Summer 2002
Eastern Europe. The Block. Where dissident rockers overthrew the system, elected poets to government, and vanished into freedom… A bloody revolution. Balkanization… Eastern Europe. A thin man, furrow-browed, in white suit, girates about with saxophone, ghost with a rhythmic tic… Thin Man smiles, accosts the fiddler, hangs greasy burek [Balkan fried bread] for all to behold. Accordion soars, clarinet reeds out melodic tango, rhumba, samba. Thin Man bellows into radio mic: "Budapest, Novi Sad, Beograd, Istanbul," beckoning journey on the Orient Express: ball in Vienna via Yugoslavia's exiles depressed at Oktoberfest, over Novi Sad's underwater bridges precision-bombed by NATO, through Belgrade's dictatorship, and onto Istanbul. Welcome to the last night on Earth. You are dancing seductively on an apocalyptic border with Boris Kovac and LaDaABa Orchest. It's music that captures the complicated paradox of polarizations; dancing gleefully with God in a suitcase, standing in a crack among multiple precipices, it's a joyously tearful cacophony headed for the End, no fixed address, yet anchored to a multiethnic region of Serbia perched between historic worlds. It's The Last Balkan Tango, conceived during the NATO bombing, completed in Milosevic's dying days, and Serbia's first ever release on a major world music label (Piranha, 2001)… Boris Kova's drive for a universally accessible new ritual, a third way that allows the individual not to take sides. Kovac clearly throws categorization wide open. A sax player with an experimental background, he doesn't necessarily consider himself world music fare, which might be why The Last Balkan Tango is one of the most captivating world music releases of late. "I do not belong to that genre any more than to another. I do not represent Balkan culture at all. I represent just myself using my life experience related to Balkan political destiny." On what attracted him to Kovac Piranha Records director Borkowsky Akbar says, "We didn't release the album because it is from Serbia, but because we love the music and we were looking for an additional artist to add to our Gipsy&Balkans focus. Boris is perfect because he is a great visionary, composer, musician and producer…
Elisabeth Having
Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung/
Germany, 6th of October 2002
At the Rurich festival Ladaba has given a tremendous party between melancholy and relaxed joy, an amazing dance above a volcano and over the graves of Balkan... An evening composed by beautiful melodies, by music that is among jazz, a harmony of klezmer, tango, waltz, rumba, and the traditional tune of Balkan folklore, and convincing swinging here and
there. It sometimes appears to be frantically sad and painful, a bit morbid, and then again compliant and wildly relaxed. The Apocalypse ends with a wish for us to meet in a better world.
Jan Mildorer -
Reinzeitungm Germany, 6th of October 2002
...Boris Kovac is calling to the last dance in a glittery, colourful sonorous
world, placed somewhere between painful melancholy and wild ecstasy... With his magnificent Ladaba orchestra, Kovac makes an atmosphere that throws the audience into a wild whirlpool of diverse feelings... It is a unique potpourri of styles, with different curtains of sound from a dance hall which merges all from Serbs, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, to the Turks. The message from the party right before the Apocalypse is clear: Enjoy the dance. It can be the last one. Kovac and his band are playing just that way. That is the way cosmopolitan musicians do it, musicians who know how to convince one absolutely...
ALFRED PRANZL text
JÖRG BLECHER translation
SKUG MAGAZINE - Vienna
Even with its name, the La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica Orchest
denotes its working on the verge of catastrophe, its edge still called Yugoslavia. Although the actual catastrophe is over (the CD inner sleeve features a picture of the bridge over the Danubia in Novi Sad, destroyed by NATO bombing), it still resounds
in the heads of the Voivodina people, who rather have a last dance than
resign to their fear of a certain end. Boris Kovac, head of the orchestra,
proves to be the Max Nagl of this pannonic part of Yugoslavia, as he productively succeeds in merging tango and waltz, marching and Balkan dance into a spicy melange. The drunkenness of a Dionysean feast, grief and sorrow mingle to an opulent
salon atmosphere, trickling down into our hearts, unto the bottom of our
hearts.
Christina Roden
CDNOW Contributing Writer
The idea of a tango band from the former Yugoslavia is at once arrestingly peculiar and far less bizarre than it might appear at first encounter. The dark, sex-and-death obsessed mindset behind the Argentinean tango actually has much in common with the impassioned fatalism so often found in the Balkan region. Both populations seem to experience existence as a senseless pageant staged for the amusement of pitiless gods, but to be lived to the hilt nonetheless. Ladaaba (La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica) Orchest seems best equipped to play midnight sets at a nightmare cafe smack in the middle of a minefield, where pink lampshades barely part the shadows, and mushroom clouds float over the cocktail shakers. Each dance could be the last, but probably won't be, because that would be too easy.
As in the South American original, the instrumental forces consist of clarinets, accordion, saxophones, guitars, percussion, and a guest violinist. The compositions constantly shift gears, veering between orthodox tango, Piazzolla's latter-day intellectual deconstructions, cool jazz, incendiary Balkan horas, and Fellini soundtracks. Whatever festivities are still possible in a war-zone materialize as a tango, a beguine, a rumba, or a waltz. Beer-soaked choruses, quickly aborted distant reed riffs, snatches of drunken bravado, and world-weary philosophy break through like weak radio signals and die away. It's all very adult in a cartoon-like way, with a savage, subversive humor underpinning the band's pervasive sense of irony toward its own unrelenting psychodrama. These people really should get over themselves, but if they did, they wouldn't be nearly so much fun to listen to.
Gazeta Wyborcza,
Poznan, Poland April 2002
What do we know about Panonia? After Monday's concert we do know that 5 people come from there for whom the scene is their element. It's their mean to show happiness and suffering. It maybe also the kind of therapy. Leader of the band and the guide in our trip was Boris Kovac. The man who combines talent of the musician and the comedian. He burns on the scene playing with bravura on the saxophone, making comments, dancing, operating with some requisites and being the director of this jazz orchestra. Everything is on the edge of overacting. Kowac is as a clown, as a mime, as a dance leader or acrobat. The scene is his element. His friends, that is accordionist, clarinettist, contrabassist and percussionist are either not lacking of acting abilities. All of them easily follow their director changing quickly the convention and making improvisations. All of them, what was seen during the concert, adore their profession and seem to be happy while playing. They are ready to put away their instruments and join some odd situations or sing in a choir. They play with whole their bodies and mimics. We were told that was the last night before the end of the world and we were invited to the last dance. Although decadency was a little bit too artificial we still joined Balkan tango and waltz and rushed to dance crazy rumba. Unfortunately carnival madness has been given the taste of sadness because Panonia lies in Serbia - 'and you know what that mean' said Kovac to the audience in Blue Note.
PopMatters Music Critic
Barbara Flaska
Release date of September 11, 2001. The inside photograph shows what might be a small impromptu shrine -- a white kitchen candle with a burned wick but no flame, a heart cut from white cardboard with a message written in red, and near these are placed small handpicked bouquets of white daisies with dim yellow centers. The ground supporting the shrine has been run over, compacted, and scraped flat by a large machine. In the background are the huge metal treads of some large earthmoving machine, probably a bulldozer big as a tank. Remind you of anything? The ashes might always outweigh the garlands and wreaths. This is the usual beginning of another chilly, gray day in Yugoslavia, but this translates beautifully.
There are the first sounds -- the deep gong is struck twice and resonates into a prolonged echo, then violins, saxophones, clarinets, balalaikas, accordians, drums, sudden surprising lines of poetry explode, art made as a response to the direst of circumstances, all combining into something beautiful and nearly wild. This is clamorous, keening music that makes an apocalyptic tango with a stranger pulled from a doorway seem like the best and most natural thing to do. Not somber music for a gloomy day, but music composed and played when the world's thrown out of kilter, shifted suddenly from its axis, and most suffer from loss of equilibium. The next dawn might be streaked with the beginning of the apocalypse. Who in deepest heart and thought wouldn't want to imagine being one of the ones dancing "The Last Waltz in Budapest"?
This is La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica inviting you to spin as you dance on the extreme edge of an abyss, to stay calm and take your beloved with you. Mostly the atmosphere is woven instrumentally which makes the rare words even more significant, English dramatically spoken with a natural Slavic accent: "Forget about the despair / Take your riches with you just in case / Let God come with you, if he feels up to it / Bachanalia implied / Take your nearest and dearest with you / Let's DANCE in hope, faith, pleasure, love . . . / Let us be HAPPY at least one (more) time in life. . . ."
The missiles may have stopped raining down, but may be coming back soon. If this music is a saloon, the bartender has gone temporarily mad and has been handing out free drinks to customers all day. The band is wearing white tuxedos and mismatched ties, but they play as if they were reminded of the band on the sinking Titanic playing as others wait for space in the lifeboats.
But this band won't play as if pretending nothing is wrong or that things aren't dangerous. This band has thrown away their charts and just cut loose and they play brilliantly, a jazzy Eastern European rumba, just like "Rumbatto". The chink of chains and the clinking of glasses with a toast, an accordian and balalaika begin the romantic "Slow for Julia" (you may blink back tears if you dance) while the remainder of the song is carried by saxophone. The band remembers a livelier dance tune and follows with "Begin for Julia".
For the "Ending", maybe the last song on that stage and so the band performs a memorable whirling dance song so the audience will always remember them, the bandmaster finally takes the microphone and introduces the musicians by name and instrument. "Farewell and goodbye. See you in a better world. La Danza . . . Apocalypsa . . . Balcanica!" This is so cool -- nobody in America has come up with anything like this yet. Although not similar in music style, I found myself reminded of Czechoslovakia's own Plastic People of the Universe. Time to take a trip to where the edge-livers dwell. To be asked to consider what our answers might be when asked nearly unfathomable questions: "Just imagine there is only one starry night left till the end of the world / What would we do?" This record may not be for everyone, but it most likely is. Afterall, if this might be the beginning of the end, what would you do?
The World's Global Hit
November 2001
Stephen Snyder
For experimental composer Boris Kovac, the tango - with its intense emotions and barely suppressed violence - was a natural medium for depicting life in the Balkans. At the geographical center of western and eastern Europe, the old Yugoslavia was a rich blend of cultures for 35 years. But that ended when civil war began tearing Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s. Kovac says his home city of Novi Sad suffered especially because of its strong opposition to the Milosovic regime. Then in 1999, things got even worse, courtesy of NATO warplanes. Though it was not his intention, Kovac's CD provides a kind of solace for Americans ... a gift from one war-scarred country to another.
Sacramento News and Review
November 15, 2001
By Mindy Giles
This question Yugoslavian Boris Kovac--guide/clarinetist/composer-turned-Rod Serling--poses, then answers on this rare find of an album. Bass clarinet, accordion, guitars, violin, drums, percussion and soprano sax glide you, drink in hand, onto a worn tavern floor for a lyrical last tango in the Balkans, then onto an Orient Express train ride through multi-stylistic themes and motifs--shades of Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Gypsy regions. Ironic, passionate, subtle, sacrificial, replete with just-out-of-earshot murmur and a Lotte Lenya-like clink of glasses, the music laughs bittersweetly in the face of chaos. "Forget about the despair / Take your riches with you / Just in case / Let God come with you / If He feels up to it." Gather friends on a Saturday night and seal your fate.
What do you say about music or art at these times? Strangely, just a few weeks ago, this recording came in and sat on my desk, awaiting my response. Last week I found myself listening to the mournful, almost plodding opening track, a sound both tearful and weirdly hopeful. These eight minutes of dark despair suddenly burst like a bubble, followed by a frenzied, thirty seconds of dancing, and then with a "Hey!" it's done. The Last Balkan Tango is a soundtrack for the decadence of one world cast against the furor of another; life vs. reality.
Kim Burton, Songlines, Winter 2001.
For many years philosopher and performer Boris Kovac, has been exploring his own musical path, using a misical language that has a strong and deliberately sense of structure…
…perhaps the finest, slow and deeply felt "Shadows of Reminiscence" is straighforward in its sensitive and direct emotion.
DR RHYTHM'S WORLD MUSIC ROUNDUP (August 2001)
I'm really taken with a new CD on the ever-excellent Piranha label from Germany. Boris Kovac and Ladaaba Orchest THE LAST BALKAN TANGO (www.piranha.de) subtitled "An apocalyptic dance party" posits the question, "Just imagine there is only one starry night left till the end of this world... what would we do?" The answer is provided on this album: party like there's no tomorrow. Though it's burdened by the tragic events which have overshadowed the lives of the inhabitants of the eastern coast of the Adriatic, this album dances in joy. There's more than a touch of the "duende syndrome": the notion that suffering brings out great musical expression.
This group was put together to provide a heartening blend of all the musical and cultural influences of the region, so there are touches of Gypsy, Serbian, Hungarian, Roumanian, Slovak, Bulgarian, and Turkish music. There's tango, folk dance, waltz and general rowdiness aplenty. The leader, Boris Kovac, returned to Yugoslavia in 1996, after 5 years living abroad, and put together the LaDaABa Orchest (Their name stands for La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica) to create the sound of saloon musicians on the edge. This album succeeds and has a bittersweet finality to it, redeemed by a Fellini-esque ribaldry.
Edo Dijksterhuis, NRC Handelsblad, Den Bosch / Holland 13.08.2001.
The Serbian sax player Boris Kovac mixed in his performance theatrical dance and dramatic sounded poetry. Dressed in a nightclub outfit he presented with his orchestra "La Danza Apocalyptica Balkanica", with a lot of melancholic east-european walz en wedding music on turbo speed. But the solo's of the leader where very energetic and directed to free jazz and the band played more than only traditional folk music. Complex Balkan rythms where mixed with swinging latin-jazz which made a curious Serbian salsa. The audience witnessed a new musical genre: the Latino Balkanica or Balkanico.
orsinos lied Q U E Rfunk Karlsruhe Erstsendung: 08.07.01 13:00
Roland Altenburger
GOLDEN ORSINO price
Today, it seems to me like I never heard records which really inspired me that much. One of them is the album of Boris Kovac. ... "The Last Balkan Tango" pulls the soul out of the body; so much emotions, so much honesty, so much devilish good musicallity is placed in this small framework…
mark: ****(*)
Wolf Kampmann, Jazzthetik, Germany Jun 2001.
No, this album is not cheerful. It is sombre, tragical and dramatic, although there are careless and winged moments. Balkan dances, not the unrestrained round-dance, but falls into the wild exaltation of one bloody apocalypse. …His music, with its quality, shades the international music scene. Since Laibach's album Nato Occupies Europe, The Last Balkan Tango is the most piercing warning from theEast.
Eliane Azoulay
TELERAMA / France,. 30.May 2000
f f f f (the highest possible mark)
Finally the humorous tango. Who breaks with a rigid tradition, machism of the "side-walks of Buenos Aires". And who's in the connection with the trumpets of Balkan, the swing of Gipsies, Jewish dance, cabaret mockery, in order to create an "Apocalyptic dance" music and "celebrate as we should die tomorrow". ... In this music we recognize disarming waltzes, slows of enamoured, devilish rhumbas. ... The whole, without the least pathos, is flirting sometimes with the kitsch….
drMáriás in bahia.hu music news and mp3 portal, Budapest 2001 May 14th
Boris Kovac and the Last Night of the Balkans „By the beginning of the 90's Kovac became something like the Balkan's Michael Nyman or Philip Glass due to his work and recognition, and then everything changed. The once free country turned into a cage, welfare into poverty, peace into hatred, freedom into slavery. After he loses all his opportunities for work and any realisation of projects, not to talk about promotion and contact with outside world, after existence sank onto the level (or even lower) of pure organic existence and noone listened to Boris' talk about freedom and protests he went back to work in own peace. He mowed to a lonely village-house with his excellent self-made studio and started working, writing, playing and recording new music, which was to present a new world, the desired world, a new renaissance with faith for peace and the come-back of a very simple normal life. But then, suddenly the worst news came: those of the bombings. No electricity, no water, no sense. Apocalypse. The feelings, the questions, the beliefs and the sense of roots turned even more mature and stronger of Boris than ever to end up in a happily-sad folkish tango, actually a requiem for all that had gone. A requiem of music that had been played, that had been loved for ages, for people that should love, more than ever in a very last apocalyptic tango played with the background horror of exploding bombs.„
Magazin Beorama, Belgrad, May 2000, (festival RING RING 2000.)
The audience got great satisfaction, and the message was entirely evident and rationally uncatchable and unexplainable. It was the only concert which, just after it's finished, demanded one more thinking and living through again.
mark: * * * * *
AFISHA / Moscow Russia April 2001.
It looks like they are playing for the last time. Feeling of there music is - wild. Like the world has changed pole and the music that usually encourages as young wine, now cools the blood and remains frozen on the fingers...Jurij Saprjikin
Relja Knezevic
DNEVNIK / Novi Sad YU, March 2001.
"La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica" is a myth and a story of the Balkanic area, the aesthetics of transience and coincidence which defy the games of fateful forces. It is an invitation to dance on the extreme edge of that abyss known as Yugoslavia (the authenticity of Boris Kovac's artistic creed is not to be questioned, in spite of the offered "choice" between Milosevic's rule and NATO air campaign) or a multistylistic masterwork…
World Music Charts Europe
The soundtrack to the moment before the apocalypse - if Serbian Boris Kovac would have his way, we'd all be dancing to his exquisitely bittersweet band as the missiles rain down. And indeed, it would be a not-unpleasant way to go, as the mournful strains of the Ladaaba Orkest provide a melancholy yet spirited accompaniment to the end of time. True to the traditions of the cultural melting pot that is his homeland, Kovac and the Orkest draw on tango, waltz, calypso and rumba and mix them all into a Balkan hot-pot, albeit one with hidden spice.
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