by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Montrealer Lubo Alexandrov, whose early years were spent with his grandparents in rural Bulgaria, came to music the way most kids come to bathtime and haircuts—kicking and screaming.

“I didn’t have a choice, really,” Alexandrov recalls. “I was dragged from wedding to wedding, where my grandfather [a noted player of the kaval flute] played and my grandmother sang. Every morning at six o’clock—I hated this—they put music on the radio, Bulgarian music. I would wake up and try to sleep. I remember that very clearly—it was horrible. Then I started playing kaval too, but that didn’t last too long. Kaval was not so hip. When I became a teenager, I realized that playing rock ’n’ roll on the guitar was much more interesting to the girls than playing kaval. So I switched to AC/DC, Iron Maiden and all these bands.”

To re-jig a common saying, you can take the boy out of the Bulgarian village… You won’t catch Alexandrov unleashing the metal licks these days, but you will find the Balkan folk with which he grew up serving as a base ingredient in the music of his band Kaba Horo.

At 20, Alexandrov moved to Montreal to pursue studies in jazz guitar, and found himself playing groove-based jazz with a number of local outfits. “But I always wanted to do something different, and the more I played jazz, the more I realized that jazz came from something. It was not an abstract music that just became established—boom—this very introverted, modern-sounding shit. No, it came from blues, Dixie, ragtime, stuff that normal people, folks from the villages, had done before. So I said, well, why don’t I use what I really know, my heritage, and try to play jazz with that. Let’s see what happens.”

Turkish delight

What promptly happened was another digression, this time toward Turkish music, specifically that of Erkan Ogur, and with it the fretless guitar (well suited for generating notes familiar in the Orient but absent from Western scales). “I heard his tape in Bulgaria, five years ago. Within a year, I had taken up the fretless guitar, gone to Turkey and found his number—which was hard, because he’s actually really private and really famous there. I found him, we jammed and became sort of friends. Two years after, we played together here at the Festival du Monde Arabe.”

Add together the Balkan and Turkish music, and the Gypsy culture common to both, fatten things up with some funky jazz grooves (and a crack band featuring Emil Iliev, Georgi Stankov, Martin Auguste, Pascal Boudreault and Chet Doxas), and you’ve got Kaba Horo. “We’re trying to do a fusion of some kind, but really, where I want it to go is towards groove-oriented music, because the Balkan music that we love and that I’m coming from is music with a lot of rhythm, a lot of fire. We want to give people the energy that you could sense by going to a three-day Gypsy wedding in Bulgaria, that wild, sweaty energy, but yet make it somewhat current.”

To that end, Montreal’s Ramachandra Borcar, of Ramasutra fame, was enlisted as producer of Kaba Horo’s forthcoming eponymous CD. “He’s a very focused and professional person, so he helped us a lot in the direction of what songs to choose for the record, the studio and keeping an eye on everybody. Largely, the record sounds so good because he was involved with it.”

Good enough to earn a licensing deal with Justin Time for North America and Germany’s Enja label for the world. April 1 is the anticipated release date, but in the meantime, Kaba Horo will be at their regular haunt on the Main, les Bobards, on February 4.