01	The Last Balkan Tango						08:53
	02	Begin-Ing						07:53
	03	Octoberburrekfest						04:01
	04	Balkatino						04:08
	05	Slow For Julia						05:56
	06	Begin For Julia						03:52
	07	Rumbatto						04:12
	08	The Last Waltz In Budapest						05:00
	09	What Life Offers						01:20
	10	Tango Apocalypso						06:05
	11	Shadows Of Reminiscence						05:34
	12	Ending						04:49
	13	Orient Express						07:00

Last Balkan Tango
Artist Boris Kovac & Ladaaba Orchestra
Date of Release Sep 11, 2001

1. The Last Balkan Tango performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 8:55
2. Begin-Ing performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 7:56
3. Octoberburrekfest performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 4:03
4. Balkatino performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 4:10
5. Slow for Julia performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 5:59
6. Begin for Julia performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 3:55
7. Rumbatto performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 4:14
8. The Last Waltz in Budapest performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 5:03
9. What Life Offers performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 1:18
10. Tango Apocalypso performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 6:07
11. Shadows of Reminiscence performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 5:38
12. Ending performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 4:51
13. Orient Express performed by Kovac / Ladaaba Orchest - 7:04

Boris Kovac - Sax (Alto), Sax (Soprano), Producer, Mixing
Nenad Vrbaski - Violin
Bogdan Rankovic - Clarinet, Clarinet (Bass)
Borkowsky Akbar - Executive Producer

2001 CD Piranha 1573


"La Danza Apocalypsa Balcanica"
The Last Tango Before the End of the World
"Take all what Life offers to You, Today You are Rose and Tomorrow:" sing the "Ladaaba Orchest" on one of their "Apocalypse Balcanica" tracks, trying to emulate a saloon atmosphere teeming with crude living "on the edge" - which usually refers to the Balkans. The fact is that this unstable ground, inhabited by a Babylonian blend of languages and nations which talk all at once without listening to each other, became a synonym of the occasional outbursts of endemic violence and other kinds of nihilism. Still, regardless of all, The Balkans are interesting mostly because of the crossing of different cultures and traditions which give birth to amazingly vital artistic products and strengthen the feeling of vitality, which is opposed to the notorious "death culture".

"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 weaving its aural pattern by interlacing various "music".

Indeed, a fascinated swaying in the rhythm of tango - with sharp movements of arms, legs and body which can hardly hold back its passion - is but a small item in the offer called "An Apocalyptic Dance Party". Though the last dance call occurs in a terribly limited space, like with Schecherezade invited to tell her last story in order to postpone death. The firmament under which the listener is seduced mediates no feeling of anxiety: the sky may be cerulean blue and clear like in Mediterranean and life can either be easy and sweet at times. The dance drags us into a time left to Balkan people without pathos and the irresistible kitsch. In a characteristic manner, Kovac's individual artistic style gathers compelling tones of the last music before the end of the world, inspired with the sound of the Balkans. His Orient Express travels according to the following itinerary::.. Budapest- Szeged - Novi Sad - Sofia - Istanbul. From within that composition (train) it sometimes seems that nothing is more natural on this planet than dancing with "LADAABA" and Balkan people, becoming engrossed in the time when apocalypse is already behind us and around us, the only unbeaten future which continuously recurs.

Looking out of that Orient Express, we pass through a multitude of themes and motifs, the multitude of faces and sounds characteristic of Vojvodina region, which is a Panonian part of Yugoslavia, inhabited by at least sixteen ethnic and national groups. No wonder, then, that you can recognize in this music the "shades" of gypsy, Serbian, Hungarian, Romania, Ruthenian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Turkish and other ethnic music.

In the key of the fateful tango and playing with the image of the "great lover" who is placing his heart at the feet of his beloved, everything seems to be free and easy, almost like at a wedding party. Still, a part of the face is hidden in the shadow. Behind the sporadic gayety we can smell the "Geschmack" of a tavern more pertaining to Vienna than to the Balkans. At the turn of the 19th century, Vienna is noticeable for a typical central European Secession art movement whose rebellion against artistic conventions anticipates the decline of the empire. However, Vienna was the secret center of the Balkans. Therefore, Kovac's composition (train) passes through Vienna on its way to the East...

Thus in the music of "LADAABA orchest", a mixture of tango, folk dance and Secession, waltz and burek (a characteristic pie prepared in the Balkans), carousing, suffering and wit, laughter, tears, sacrifice and surrender, Dionysian drunkenness and vulgar primitivism, on the millennial edge, and for the sake of the promising moment of happiness, The Last Balkan Tango dances again - for dancing, not living, is what matters to us.

Relja Knezevic
in Novi Sad, February 2001.
translated in English by Vladislava Gordic



Recorded and mixed at Barbaro Studio Bukovac Pannonia/Yugoslavia,
Sep-,Nov 2000)
Master of tone Marinko Vukmanovic Mare. Produced and mixed by Boris Kovac and Mare Vukmanovic,
Postproduction operated by Bane Micic
Front cover by Otto Dix "Grossstadttriptychon", c VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2001
Executive production by Brigitte Bieg & Borkowsky Akbar
Made in Germany by: Pi'ra:nha



Boris Kovac & the LaDaABa Orchest
The Last Balkan Tango: An Apocalyptic Dance Party
(Piranha)
US release date: 11 September 2001


by Barbara Flaska
PopMatters Music Critic

e-mail this article

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?







Boris Kovac
& LaDaABa Orchest

"The Last Balkan Tango"
CD-PIR1573 (D-only EFA CD01939)
File under: Yugoslavia/Jazz/Balkan Tango



The Last Balkan Tango
Welcome to an apocalyptic dance party with Boris Kovac, composer, instrumentalist and multimedia artist from the Vojvodina, the Pannonian part of Yugoslavia. No wonder that he knows what he?s writing music about. So keep calm and take your dearest and nearest with you... Let?s dance in hope, faith, pleasure, love...




Reviews
"Kovac slips easily across that twilight zone where contemporary composition and folk music touch."
Chris Cutler, London
ffff (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:.
Eliane Azoulay, TELERAMA / France,. 30.May 2000

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, AFISHA / Moscow Russia April 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:
Relja Knezevic, DNEVNIK / Novi Sad YU, March 2001.


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:
orsinos lied Q U E Rfunk Karlsruhe Erstsendung: 08.07.01 13:00
Roland Altenburger

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: *****
Magazin Beorama, Belgrad, May 2000, (festival RING RING 2000.)

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 the East.
mark: ****(*)
Wolf Kampmann, Jazzthetik, Germany Jun 2001.

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.
World Music Charts Europe

More under:
http://www.ladaaba.com
http://www.boriskovac.com
http://www.cyberrex.org/ringring





Boris Kovac and The LaDaABa Orchest
The Last Balkan Tango: An Apocalyptic Dance Party
Piranha (www.piranha.de)

September 14, 2001:
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.


"Begin-ing"
Yugoslavian minstrels Boris Kovac and The LaDaABa Orchest, residents of Novi Sad, celebrate life in the ruins, both concrete and psychic. For twelve more searing, lovely, bitter and explosive instrumental tracks, Kovac and company explore the folk roots of tragedy and the complex, modern composition of excess. They ask a simple, fathomless question: "Just imagine there is only one starry night left 'til the end of this world... what would we do?" and then proceed to answer it with the confusion that is this new century. God? Decadence? Hope? Despair? Wait for the random moment to choose for you? Be with those you love or just do a tango with whoever passes by? "Let god come with you, if he's up to it?" These songs pose the questions, ignore the obvious answers, and cut like a knife through the rubble of rhetoric without muttering the words.

That saxophonist Kovac and his orchestra of accordion, bass, percussion, reeds and guitar have spoken to their own situation is a marvel. That it translates so well and so unexpectedly to our own is scary and yet ultimately promising. They drag their exhausted partner across the marble floor. They kick up the dust in an unpaved street. They revel with the revelers at a wedding and mourn the interment of morning. In the final movement of The Last Balkan Tango, they board "The Orient Express" for a tour of the past and the future; a ride through the defiant dances of the Balkans, a tango in the midst of the fall of the old Europe, on a journey to "a better world," possibly this one, probably not. Kovac proves that we humans, in all of our utter oblivion, still manage to move the cosmos with our music, still find hope in our inner spirits, and seek a way out of the morass that might allow everyone else to come with us. He welcomes us into the new millennium, a time that might require us to be fatalistic, but might not have to be fatal. - Cliff Furnald


Audio: "Begin-ing"
(c) (p)2001 Piranha Musik, Germany

CD available at cdRoots
LaDaABa on the web: www.ladaaba.com





Boris Kovac

Boris Kovac is one of a handful of modern composers and performers from the region of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia whose names reached Western Europe and America. Strongly influenced by folk music from that region (a fascination he shares with Istvбn Mбrtha and Ernц Kirбly), minimalism, Bela Bartok, and the philosophy of Bela Hamvas (also influential on Hungarian composer Tibor Szemzц), Kovac's music takes multiple forms. His production can be split in three categories: the deeply spiritual cycles he writes for his ensemble Ritual Nova; more formal contemporary chamber music for dance and theater; and finally his LaDaABa Orchest, a party band for the end of the world.
Kovac was born in 1955 in the Vojvodina region, at the extreme northwest point of Yugoslavia. Bordered by Hungary, this region historically enjoyed an independent status until the Yugoslavian war of the early '90s when it was annexed by Slobodan Milosevic. Kovac's parents made him take accordion lessons when he was a child, but it only led him toward academic music and, besides one year of study on saxophone, he is self-taught on a wide array of instruments.

In 1977, Kovac formed the ECM-style jazz group Meta Sekcija, his first project. Things became serious with the formation of Ritual Nova in 1982, which included within its ranks keyboardist Stevan Kovacz Tickmayer. With this group Kovac would explore a highly original form of composition, blending ancient traditions and postmodern techniques to express spiritual ideals like brotherly love and peace; a reaction to the difficult times Yugoslavia would go through for the next decade and a half. Kovac released his first LP, Ritual Nova, in 1986 on the small Yugoslavian label Symposion. The English label Recommended picked it up for distribution and released its 1989 follow-up in its Eastern-European series Points East.

Political instability sent Kovac and his group into exile in 1991. For the next five years, Kovac lived in Italy, Austria, and Slovenia. During this period he worked mostly for the theater and began work on Anamnesis: Ecumenical Mysteries. This cycle (his most profoundly spiritual to date) became in 1996 the first of two albums for the Canadian label Victo. That year, Kovac resettled in his home town Novi Sad. In 1997, he participated in the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville and toured the world with his ensemble. Meanwhile, he struggled to rebuild a creative music scene in his region. Prompted by the NATO bombardments in Kosovo and the enduring instability of the region, he formed La Danza Apocalyptica Balcanica (or LaDaABa Orchest) in 2001, a zany ballroom orchestra to exorcise the madness of war. The group released its first album, The Last Balkan Tango, later that year. - Franзois Couture


1995 Ritual Nova ReR
1996 Anamnesis: Ecumenical Mysteries Victo
1996 Play on String: Music for the Last Dinner More Music
1998 East off Europe: Closing the Circle Victo
2001 Last Balkan Tango