Borderless beats

In 2008, the Budapest-based television station Duna produced a series titled Állomás, or station, portraying a rundown train depot in the fictional village of Tuslag, a place which seemed to bear the marks of Serbian, Romanian and Hungarian culture. Tuslag was portrayed as an amorphous backwater inhabited by a cast of colorful characters whose daily trials and tribulations had little to do with nationality.

Naturally, the series' theme song and soundtrack featured music by Budapest's Besh O Drom, a band whose eclectic and youthful interpretation of Balkan beat has been rocking European dance floors since 1999.

Listening to Besh O Drom's 2006 CD Once I Catch the Devil, it's easy to imagine wild all-night dance parties at the Tuslag train station, as the band's beats and instrumentation leaps across regional borders as if they didn't exist. The band's founder and saxophonist Gergely Barcza spoke to The Prague Post by phone from his Budapest studio, describing the core of Besh O Drom's sound.

"We have the cimbalom and the accordion, which really are the flavor of Hungarian and Romanian folk music bands. And we have a brass section with clarinet and saxophone, which is more in the style of some of the Romanian or Serbian brass bands. So we mix our music from these elements, and of course we use Hungarian and Roma songs," he says.

That potent mix helped their second album, Can't Make Me!, go gold in Hungary and land on the European World Music Charts in 2003. To hold down their wide-ranging sound on their first two albums, Besh O Drom enlisted the help of the Hungarian minimalist turntablist DJ Mango, aka Modul, who put an electronic spin on the band's classic sound. These days, their rhythm section includes the Zappa literate Atilla Herr on bass and the veteran Hungarian R&B/Jazz drummer Zsolt Jánky, whose credits include Etta James and Earth Wind & Fire.

While Barzca's previous musical studies and his intensive gigging in Israel have made him tonally tolerant to sounds from as far east as Persia, he admits that "if you listen to a folk song from Albania, it can sound to some Western ears like it came from another planet."

Still, Besh O Drom's infectious foot-tapping sound can make Middle Eastern melodic leaps accessible even to those whose musical preferences might otherwise draw a sharp line between Western Europe and the former borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. Helping hold Besh O Drom's high-velocity music together is a list of singers including Hungary's Borbála Magyar and Lili Kaszai. Although Magyar will not be on the current tour, Barzca tells us "Lilly's voice can deliver Roma songs in a very authentic way, and on the other hand she sings with the traditional Hungarian technique, which is also very unique."

While echoes of the Carpathians and Transylvania can be heard on almost every song, traditionalism often takes the back seat with Besh O Drom. As Barzca explains, "We don't have many slow songs, and that has been a problem. When we started to play, we played for dances. We always tried to play a few slow songs, but we couldn't, so we said it's not in our karma." 

Live dancing audiences from Australia to the Americas keep pushing Besh O Drom's accelerated beat, and one good reason for keeping up the momentum is the enthusiasm Besh O Drom has experienced on tour. As Barzca recalls, "The audiences in Mexico seemed to understand every movement of the music as they listened and danced. This is probably because the Mexicans use music in a similar way as they use it in the Balkans, for expressing the joy of life and being intensively happy."

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com