Raya Brass Band, the Brooklyn-based acoustic quintet have developed a reputation in town and elsewhere for two things – their music which is a mix of both Eastern European (mainly Balkan and Romany) folk and American based grooves that feels strangely familiar to Eastern European audiences and American audiences, and for their exuberant and frequently impromptu live sets across town. They’ve played late night rooftop parties, Mardi Gras celebrations, large Balkan music festivals, community shows and as previously mentioned impromptu gigs where they just show up with instruments in tow and play – or teach Balkan folk dance moves. On their website and in press materials, the band has a few hilarious photos playing in a Brighton Beach bathhouse and reportedly they got listeners at an upstate New York town so riled up that the cops had to be called.

   Granted, American bands paying tribute to Eastern European folk in some fashion isn’t very new. Over the last decade bloggers, critics and fans have raved about bands such as Beirut, Gogol Bordello, and there are of course, countless local bands who play some sort of folk music. Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising that musicians would be drawn to the traditional folk music of the Balkans – it’s a passionately exuberant and complex music that works with different scales and unusual time signatures. And if you ever go and see someone do Balkan folk live, the audience gets swept up by the boisterousness of the music. For a brief moment you live much more passionately than you ever have before.

  What Raya Brass Band has excelled at is creating sounds as though it has some elements of New Orleans brass bands, the quick, stomping drum rhythms of bhangra and Afrobeat, jazz and of Balkan folk. Consider it Belgrade by way of New Orleans, perhaps?

Simply put, this shit is funky as hell and through repeated listens you’ll hear something you probably didn’t (and hadn’t) noticed before. And yet, this is music meant for the listener to passionately dance and stomp about – not to sit around and coolly observe. The music of the Balkans and the Romany people tell stories of thieves, lovers, eccentrics, of great, overwhelming passion and desire. Sitting around with arms crossed, like a jaded, bored hipster is seemingly impossible once you hear this, unless you have no soul.  However, in some way, the one weakness about Raya Brass Band’s effort is that some of the wild, boisterous, dangerous energy of the source material seems missing – mainly because you don’t have the musicians in front of you, all sweaty and wild.  If anything, this album can be considered part of a lengthy argument of how truly universal funk really is – that every culture has a genre of music that expresses the joy, hopes and sorrows of its people in a way that will make you dance, shout, and stomp about.