Orkestar Šlivovica’s full ensemble. – Photo courtesy of Orkestar Šlivovica

Twelve-piece Balkan brass band Orkestar Šlivovica has been tearing up the dance floor at parties, weddings and cultural festivals across Vancouver since 2008. Beyond consistently delivering a rambunctious good time, the group’s anarchic horn-driven ensemble serves a crucial cultural role within the various Balkan ethnic communities in the city – despite the fact all of its members are Canadians and have few ancestral links to that part of the world.

Saskatchewan-born Deirdra Kiai, whose parents hail from the Philippines and Persia, had never even heard Balkan music until she answered a Craigslist ad seeking a tuba player.

“I had a slight familiarity with Balkan music because I grew up around a lot of Middle Eastern music,” she says. “But I wasn’t practised in this specific type of music, I just learnt it as I went along with the rest of the band.”

The specific brass-based form of Balkan music played by Orkestar Šlivovica largely originates from the spread of Romani culture across Europe from India, but it also has elements rooted in Eastern European military band traditions.

Band founder, manager and saxophone player Oliver Schneider’s rationale for forming the band was simple. He found a genre of music he liked that nobody else was playing, and then started a band. As a result, in 2007, Schneider and his co-founder, wife Christina, embarked on a year-long research trip to Serbia in order to gain first-hand experience of Balkan music in its traditional setting.

Orkestar Šlivovica performing at Aisle 45. – Photo by Robin Wong

It is this commitment to cultural and musical authenticity that has made the band so popular within Balkan communities in Vancouver. Reflecting this drive for authenticity, the band hosted Serbian masters of Romani music Demiran Ćerimović and his son Novica for six months earlier this year, overcoming extreme language barriers to learn songs and techniques from them. In turn, band members feel that they imparted some Canadian ways on the pair.

“Where they come from gender roles are a little more stratified; it’s mainly men who play this music. Whereas we in this Canadian band have a very varied mix of genders. So it was a bit of us teaching them, as well as them teaching us,” says Kiai.

The fact that there is no other Balkan brass band in Vancouver means the band is in heavy demand at weddings and dance events, particularly within the Serbian community. According to Schneider, you cannot have a wedding in Serbia without a brass band.

“We love to do the full-on three-day weddings, where we process through the streets from the bride and groom’s house,” he says.

As well as filling the void in the cultural practises of individual diasporic communities, Orkesta Šlivovica has been proud to oversee the formation of a unified Balkan community, in which little of the intercultural tension and strife of yesteryear seem evident.

“We don’t really see [that] happening in the communities here and at our events,” says baritone horn player Susan Gerofsky. “We have a Bosnian fan who brings his Croatian and Kosovan friends to our concerts. There are Macedonians, Bulgarians and Romanians who are fans.”

While tensions and bad blood from generations of ethnic struggles, invasions and genocide still haunt countries such as Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, Orkestar Šlivovica events clearly demonstrate that, at least while the music is playing, these troubles can be left behind.