The Brooklyn Rail

There’s a dangerous trap that many new New Yorkers fall into, the concept that time spent sleeping in the city is time wasted. I am a proud victim of this. Since moving here two years ago, I’ve shared a stage with Grammy winners, dined with Iranian dissidents, competed in pun competitions, cooked for a queer bar, befriended one of Joey Ramone’s ex-girlfriends, and met more than one dominatrix. And I can directly link the beginning of my appetite for the city’s limitless supply of unique delights to New York’s Balkan dance scene; specifically, the Staten Island revival of Zlatne Uste’s Golden Festival.

I first learned about Zlatne Uste (almost Serbian for “golden lips”) from the 2013 documentary Brasslands. The doc follows ZU and two other bands as they prepare to compete in the Guča Trumpet Festival. The festival is like a competitive Woodstock; once a year, thousands of people descend on this quiet Serbian town for three days of exhilarating, frantic music. On the third day, bands compete in front of a panel of judges and an audience primed to burst (imagine a crowd at an AC/DC concert the week after they released Back In Black), and each year a winner is crowned.

In the doc, ZU represents the first American contingent ever to compete at the festival. Brasslands introduces them as a group of hyper-committed hobbyists. Old-school New Yorkers with neither a professional musician nor a drop of Balkan blood among them, the members of ZU have dedicated over forty years to the music and folk dances of the Balkans. They are earnest, obsessed, and just unspeakably charming.

People who are hip to the goings-on in NYC knew about ZU before Brasslands. Over thirty years ago, ZU started one of the most legendary parties Brooklyn has ever known: Golden Fest.

By the time that I got to Golden Fest, it had been severely diminished both by the pandemic and the closure of the Grand Prospect Hall, the majestic Park Slope venue that housed it for decades. After two years of not being able to dance together, they decided to revive Golden Fest at Snug Harbor on Staten Island. This was a one-off, but it was enough to get me hooked. As I approached the site, I heard the nasal whine of zurnas, double-reed instruments that sort of look like a combination wooden flute and a trumpet. Despite its innocent appearance, the zurna is one of the loudest instruments you'll ever hear in your life. It howls like an ambulance siren. On more than one occasion, people have told me that ancient Turkic armies would play zurnas during battle to direct battalions as they were fighting. The instrument became a COVID obsession; I bought one the moment the pandemic hit. My girlfriend at the time informed me she would break up with me if I practiced in the house (when we finally did break up, I remember thinking “At least now I can practice zurna”).

To prepare people for Golden Fest, ZU started teaching Balkan folk dancing classes, which continue to this day. Every Wednesday at the Hungarian House on East 82nd Street is one of my favorite events in all of New York City. Accompanied by a live band, Michael Ginsburg, one of the founding members of ZU, leads an enthusiastic group of between twenty and forty people in learning intricate folk dances from across the Balkans. Many of the people in this group have been involved in this folk dance scene since the eighties.

I spoke with Michael and his wife Belle Birchfield, also a founder of ZU. They’ve been together for decades and their shared joyous enthusiasm makes them perfect candidates for what kids today would call #CoupleGoals. Though both have dedicated their lives to playing Balkan music, it was the dancing that initially caught their attention. “My parents were both folk dancers,” remembers Michael, “when I became a teenager, there was a teen folk dancing group in Manhattan every Saturday.” A lifelong athlete, he remembers taking to the intricate dancing very quickly. After a while, he noticed that most of his favorite dances happened to come from the Balkans. “I liked the mathematical nature of the music and the precision and athleticism of the dancing.”

Belle also discovered Balkan dancing as a teen. Dancing in a group was immediately appealing to her. “It’s just a more connected feeling than dancing alone or with one other person,” she says. “It’s a much more approachable thing as a teenager.”

“In the Balkans, they call it kef,” Belle tells me. “It's this feeling of joy. when you have kef, you're going to empty all your pockets of money. You don't care, it's not what's important. It is the connectedness to other people. Kef doesn't happen by itself.”

The first time I went to dance class at the Hungarian House, there was an immediate familiarity that I recognized but couldn't name. I've come to realize that it is the feeling of being surrounded by a certain kind of New Yorker, the kind who expects you to be quick, focused, fun, and serious. Dancing at the Hungarian House is not the disorganized free-for-all that makes clubs so unbearable. No ketamine-soaked psychonauts are telling you to “just feel it.” The steps are intricate, there is a right way and a wrong way, and people want to see you succeed. It's fantastic.

At my first dance class, a woman came up to me between songs. “You're a musician, aren't you?” she asked.

“I sure am,” I smiled, thinking she saw some innate musicality in my dancing.

“Yeah, I could tell. Ya know, you don't need to move on every single sixteenth note.”

She spent the rest of the evening standing right next to me and gently scolding me each time I made a wrong move. There is something about a perfect stranger deciding to dedicate an hour or so to correcting my form. People who didn't grow up around New Yorkers might think this behavior is rude, but the truth is it's the exact opposite. It is the essence of warmth. This is somebody telling you, “Hey, you're new here. Welcome. Here’s what you gotta do.” I was in love. It was kef.

Balkan music in New York isn't all wholesome hand-holding on the Upper East Side. For the past several millennia and until the sun burns out, Slavic Soul Party! plays every Tuesday at Barbès in Park Slope. Barbès is the greatest bar in New York City. It’s home to just about every kind of non-electronic music you could imagine. And in the tiny performance space, you can dance your ass off every single Tuesday to one of the coolest Balkan bands playing today.

“A lot of people who aren't from the Balkans think we're doing something traditional in my band,” says bandleader Matt Moran. “But when we go play in the Balkans, people are like ‘Whoa.’” Anyone a bit familiar with this music would also be surprised the first time they hear Slavic Soul Party!. After twenty-five years they can play traditional Balkan music well enough to make you think you're in Belgrade, but that's not what they're all about. They weave from Balkan classics into Louisiana-style second-line brass, have recorded their own version of Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, and have an impressive repertoire of original music that draws on any influence you can imagine. What brings all these styles together is the beat of the Balkans, complex odd-numerated time signatures that go beyond the traditional dance rhythms of most Western music.

But as Moran pointed out to me, you don't need to focus on the time signature once you start to feel the music. The energy in these rhythms seems to build up and then explode in each measure, and you can’t keep your feet still. The more people I spoke to, the more I heard a common theme come up: regardless of age or musical ability, everybody talked about the incredible feeling of dancing in a group to such high-energy music. Without exception, everyone talked about the happiness of it all, the kef.

At the end of our conversation, Belle told me a story about an interaction she had a year ago with another dancer: “We were just coming back after the pandemic and this woman I was talking to said, ‘There's something different about this. There's something here that reminds me about life before the pandemic’ and I was like, ‘yeah, joy.’”