The Kombos Collective will premiere its latest arranging and recording project Vardari, on May 31 at the Berkeley Finnish Hall (1970 Chestnut St.), in Berkley, CA.
The event is a live musical exploration that spans nine languages and multiple cultures of the Balkans, with a strong Hellenic influence. Vardari explores the interconnected musical traditions through original arrangements performed by a world fusion ensemble. The event will also feature a folk dance lesson for attendees.
Kombos Collective Director Ellie Falaris Ganelin / Photo Credit: Ellie Falaris Ganelin
The catalyst behind Vardari is Kombos Collective Director Ellie Falaris Ganelin, a Greek speaker and flutist with mixed Balkan heritage.
Ganelin worked with native speakers to coach her on pronunciation and lyrics for the songs in Vardari. Any one song can include combinations of 2-5 languages like Albanian, Armenian, BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian), Bulgarian, Greek, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), North Macedonian, Romanian, and Turkish.
The name for the Vardari project comes from the Vardar or Vardaris River which, like the music, transcends borders. Ganelin sourced her music ideas from personal research, as well as from the crowd-sourced repertoire and lyrics of the International East European Folklife Center. The Berkeley-based organization offers education in folk music and dance traditions of the region.
“So much of my music career the last 14 years has been about celebrating my Hellenic heritage through music,” says Ganelin. “I’ve learned over time that the folk and urban folk music traditions of Greece and more broadly, the former Ottoman lands of Southeastern Europe and Anatolia, don’t always neatly fit within national borders. Melodies end up being quite portable: at first, because of commerce and traveling musicians, and later on, because of the emergence of recorded music and of course, the Internet. The songs I’ve curated could be considered historical greatest hits, melodies that are so magnetic that people adapt and translate them in their respective languages. Vardari confirms what people of this region know in their hearts. The backbone of our collective musical traditions use the same underlying modes: an undercurrent that makes these musics more interconnected than different.”
Vardari has been awarded grants from the Fleishhacker Foundation, InterMusic SF, and the Elios Charitable Foundation.
Following the premier, the Kombos Collective will perform at the Berkeley Balkan Bacchanal on August 16 (Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA) and plans to self-release a full-length album titled Vardari: Shared Balkan Melodies on September 5.
Kombos upcoming projects also include 100 Years of Hadjidakis, celebrating the centennial birthday of legendary Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis, which will take place in October.
Kombos Collective has released several full-length albums and performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, as well as cultural centers and universities across the U.S. and Canada.
For Tickets please visit the Kombos Collective website.
