Take a look at the list of influences that Serbian guitar master Goran Ivanovic claims on the MySpace page of his great gypsy Jazz/World group, Eastern Blok, and you can form an interesting opinion based on that information. First, a good many of his countrymen show up on the list, so if you guessed that Ivanovic leans toward Balkan traditionalism, you’d be right. Brazilian Jazz/Flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia, banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck and Garaj Mahal’s Fareed Haque also figure pretty highly in Ivanovic’s roll call, and it’s certainly not difficult to hear their strains in his supple, speedy and precise playing style.
And what are we to make of fascinating entries like Oregon, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Sidney Bechet, Debussy, Bach and Miles Davis twice? Rest assured that if Ivanovic tips his cap to them, you’re likely to hear ephemeral traces of their work in the sinewy and exhilarating Jazz/Klezmer/Folk flights of the guitarist and his band of gypsies.
Starting off initially as the Goran Ivanovic Group, Serbian-born/Chicago-based Ivanovic and woodwind player Doug Rosenberg welcomed upright bassist Matthew Ulery and percussionist Michael Caskey to the group in 2004, just in time for their acclaimed eponymous debut album in 2005. Their song “Blacksmith’s Dance” was among the top three finalists in that year’s John Lennon Songwriting Competition.
In 2006, the quartet started operating under the Eastern Blok banner, releasing Folk Tales in 2007 and garnering wild praise from The Los Angeles Times, Downbeat and Acoustic Guitar, among many others. Since then, Eastern Blok has become an exotic favorite within the Chicago music scene, a jazzier, Middle Eastern-meets-Eastern European spin on the likes of Poi Dog Pondering. A popular draw on college stages as well as in college classrooms, Eastern Blok’s “Balkan Fusion” is redefining World music from a Jazz perspective and vice versa.
Eastern Blok plays the Blue Wisp Friday. Get show and club details here.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2010.
