cocek in new york

What people in new york do for fun...

The Golden Festival was last weekend, and I am still recovering. Every year for a weekend in January, the band Zlatne Uste puts together this amazing festival of Balkanish music with dozens of bands and lots of dancing, held in the Good Shephard School in the Inwood section of Manhattan.(1) The bands range from traditional Balkan groups to Balkan-inspired groups to sort of anything vaguely Mediterraneanish or bordering on some Balkan country. It is the musical event of the year, even if you are not part of the subculture that goes to Balkan camp every summer. (Seriously, there's one on the east coast in the Catskill mountains of New York and one in California.)

I've been going to Golden Festival for the past seven years and it is a wonderful experience with great musicians playing simultaneously in the gym, the cafeteria and another room. I managed to miss most of the people I really wanted to see, with all the running up and down between rooms, but I did see Zlatne Uste, Slavic Soul Party!, Gogofski Trio, Jeni Jol, Souren Baronian and friends, a Moldavia-Jewish trio and Raquy and the Cavemen--a sort of techno group with Arabic instruments. I managed to arrive for the last thirty seconds of my friends in Veveritse, and the last ten seconds of my friends in Ansambl Mastika.

Ververitse: JR, Catherine and Quince

One of interesting things is that the festival draws a wide variety of people, all ages and types, and from various parts of the country. I met people who came from Cape Cod, Baltimore and California just for this. One of my friends was there for the first time. I asked if he was impressed by seeing Brooklyn hipsters folk dancing and he replied that he was more impressed to see pudgy accountants folk dancing, pointing to some older, distinctly unhip but blissful folks. Another interesting thing is that I have met very few people who actually have any connection to the Balkans other than their love of music and dance.

(1) A few blocks away from the Good Shephard School is a beautiful stone farmhouse built in 1784, surrounded by massive blocky "pre-war" apartment buildings.