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the age of only 27 years, Martin
Lubenov is already among the top Balkan-accordionists.
Comparable to his famous colleague Peter Ralchev, Martin Lubenov very
early found his own style. With breathtaking virtuosity and playful
elegance he combines Balkan Roma music with shades of swing, modern
jazz, tango nuevo, salsa and musette and, doing so, pays honour to it
like Astor Piazzolla did to tango and Richard Galliano did to musette.
In Vienna, his adopted hometown, he follows up this approach with his
unorthodox Balkan quartet Orfej. With ideas for composition and arrangement
prepared for a long time past, he returned to Sofia last autumn in order
to form his “crack group”.
The Martin Lubenov Orkestar is recruited from the most famous Roma musicians
in Bulgaria whose reputation partly well exceeds the Roma scene. Mainly
thanks to bands from the north of Spain / the south of France like the
Gypsy Kings the Roma songs’ unmistakable soul became world-famous.
In the case of the Martin Lubenov Orkestar it never topples over to
kitsch and complaisance – using weird arrangements full of experimental
jazzlines, powerful brass sounds, marrying salsa to Balkan brass in
an unpretentious way, with Lubenov’s frisky tango and gypsy-swing
quotations as well as Nikolai Antov’s and Nenad Vasilic’s
brilliant guitar- and bass-backings and soli.
By incorporating all these means M. Lubenov creates a subtly light-footed
and nevertheless melancholic, definitely very southern music, which
can liberate the listeners from their fear of contact concerning the
“strange Balkans”.
Thanks to his knowledge across styles and continents, Martin Lubenov
has succeeded in something impossible with his Orkestar: a completely
new hybrid, which carries away intellectuals, jazz fans, world-music-afficionados
as well as popfreaks.
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Martin Lubenov is responsible for all lyrics,
compositions and arrangements. Martin Lubenov is born in Sofia in 1976.
The most iridescent traditions of the Balkans meet in his unconventional
play: Macedonian-Bulgarian folk music and music of the Roma living in
the southern part of the Balkans, constantly developing, bursting with
vivacity. Add to this musical base jazz, tango nuevo, Parisian musette,
Serbian, Roumanian, Greek and Turkish music, breathtaking virtuosity and
unusual arrangements: That’s Martin Lubenov.
Martin studied classical music and jazz in Sofia and Vienna. His roots
in the vibrating ground of balkan wedding music kept him from becoming
an “academic” musician. And fortunately his musical education
helped him quite soon to outgrow popular music, to which a lot of Roma
musicians on the Balkans are confined.
Five years ago Martin Lubenov moved to Vienna in order to study and soon
became a link between the music of Yugoslav and Macedonian communities
and the Central-European folk and world music scene. Fast his talent got
around and numerous musicians and bands invited him to collaborate, like
for example the Sandy Lopicic crkestar. In addition to this, he has been
instrumentalist and arranger for the Jony Iliev Band in Bulgaria.
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