Brilliant stuff: Oi Va Voi

[ill-esha]

back from the middle east with an amazing cd in hand...
maybe i've just been sleeping on this band, but i am just so blown away right now that i had to share.....
they combine every possible amazing world music culture with electronic AND live fusions.. yikes.. this humbles me so much as an artist.. i can only aspire to this type of innnovation.

OI VA VOI


(Excerpted from bio on webpage.. listen to music here )

Nik Ammar: guitars
Josh Breslaw: drums, percussion
Leo Bryant: bass
Steve Levi: clarinet, vocals
Lemez Lovas: trumpet, vocals, piano, keys
Sophie Solomon: violin, viola, piano, accordion, melodica

OI VA VOI's début album "Laughter Through Tears" is the sound of six young Londoners searching for an identity in 21st Century Europe. Steeped in the rhythms of Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and beyond, "Laughter Through Tears" is the soundtrack to 1001 Urban Nights. Drawing as much on modern dance music as their Jewish cultural heritage, theirs is a contemporary sound. No other group is out there mixing things up as boldly and as brilliantly as OI VA VOI.

OI VA VOI burst into life back in 2000, the six members of the group drawing on disparate musical experiences. Trumpeter Lemez Lovas started out DJing leftfield jazz, Latin and hip hop, drummer Josh Breslaw had hit the fatback beat in hip hop and rock outfits and Sophie Solomon played out as a drum n bass DJ as well as gaining praises from Nigel Kennedy among others for her talent as a violinist.

....
It's easy to fathom the appeal. OI VA VOI has both an exciting dance-floor friendly sound and an emotive singer-songwriter quality that's built around a unique instrumental line-up of trumpet, clarinet, violin, guitar, bass and drums and complemented by powerful lyrics. The club-friendly rhythms come courtesy of Leo Bryant's basslines and Josh Breslaw's drums rather than pre-programmed machinery. Although they started out by taking old klezmer tunes and giving them 21st Century beats, the group soon broadened out their sound, dipping into everything that they heard around them (one early suggested title for this album was Magpie Music). If Sophie Solomon's violin is casting a spell with a traditional tune from the old country, then you can bet that Leo Bryant will be laying down a skanking bassline. If Steve Levi's clarinet is blowing fiery klezmer then it will be complimented by some jangling guitar licks from Nik Ammar.

Surely the first release to find room for jazzical rude boy Earl Zinger, venerable Yiddish singer Majer Bogdansky and Uzbek pop diva Sevara Nazarkhan as well as the emotive vocals of Scottish singer KT Tunstall.

You underestimate the breadth and power of this band's sound at your peril. They are forging a new, true identity, which both draws on their roots and celebrates the cultural pluralism that surrounds us all. OI VA VOI's music speaks of the 'here and now' but knows of the 'way back when'. OI VA VOI has the intelligence to understand that identity springs from many places, from everything we've seen and heard and felt. Like the tastes of the best contemporary fusion cookery, the images of cutting edge art or the prose of postmodern urban writers such as Zadie Smith, OI VA VOI create something new through mixing and matching ingredients that they know, love and understand.