Though each group brings a unique sound to the stage, both were formed out of a love for discovering and preserving the sounds of centuries past. From soft ballads and love poems to wedding songs and choruses sung by the whole band, this collaboration embraces tradition while also creating something entirely new.

Oliver Schneider, band member and founder of Orkestar Slivovica, describes it as a hybrid of genres.

“It’s as if a New Orleans and Mariachi band got together and went to Turkey to create a whole new sound,” he explains.

Combining flamenco and Sephardic melodies

The lead singer of Ventanas, Tamar Ilana, has been singing and dancing to this music her entire life. While born and raised in Canada, she travelled so extensively throughout Spain with her mother as a girl that it became a second home. Picking up many traditional songs during these trips, she also gained a rich understanding of the people and culture behind the music.

Her mom, an ethnomusicologist and a singer, took Ilana travelling with her around the Mediterranean, gathering Sephardic songs and performing them.

“My mom’s goal was to collect and learn these folk songs before they were lost. So, I learned with her and started singing them,” Ilana explains.

Ventanas’ repertoire is a unique mix of Flamenco and Sephardic music. In speaking about the group’s musical style, Ilana’s passion for the music shines through in her explanation of the joining of the two genres.

“Flamenco can be very intense and emotional in expression, even sounding like crying sometimes. Sephardic music takes more of a bird’s eye view of the stories and doesn’t express it as intensely. But I mix them anyways,” says Ilana, laughing.

Despite both genres having roots in the Balkan area, Ilana points out the historically significant observations around the pairing of these two genres: Sephardic music originated from the Jews who were expelled from Spain, and Flamenco came with those immigrating to Spain.

“While these roots have remained, the exact rhythms and repertoire in Morocco are going to be a bit different in Spain,” says Ilana. “But there is some overlap, so it comes together nicely with the band.”

Ventanas fuses these sounds together in a new way by taking instruments that may not have been present in one world and introducing it to the other. Collaborating with Orkestar Slivovica is just another method of producing the innovative sounds they set out to create.

Orkestar Slivovica

For the twelve-piece brass band Orkestar Slivovica, a similar devotion lies at the heart of the group. Born and bred in Vancouver, band founder Oliver Schneider became captivated by the distinct heritage and intricacies of Balkan music and the sounds of Serbia in particular.

“When forming the band initially, I actually didn’t know much about the music. I took a research trip to Serbia to try to understand it better. I found the key to understanding [the music] was to learn the dances that go with it – that’s what makes the music come alive,” he explains.

Much of Slivovica’s repertoire has its origins in the genre from which it was formed: wedding and party tunes. Because of this, the band has made a name for itself in the Vancouver Serbian community, especially when it comes to having a good time.

“This music has a lot of complexity and improvisation to it. We are most drawn to playing Turkish-influenced music from the south of Serbia. It’s immensely fun to play; where we end up musically in a given night really depends on how the audience is engaging with us,” says Schneider.

For more information on this show, please visit www.caravanbc.com.