Kef Times

Although Eva Salina represents the younger generation of American teachers at the EEFC workshops, she has been on staff off and on over the past 18 years. She has taught song survey courses, introductory singing, singing classes for kids, and Romani singing. As an American who “grew up at Balkan camp,” she is a professional performer and teacher whose work is steeped in Balkan music. 

“When I was seven years old, someone gave me a cassette of some Yiddish songs,” Eva says. It was a recording of a 1970s-era LP recorded by members of Aman, the Los Angeles-based folk dance performing ensemble. Eva really connected with the voice of the singer, Pearl Rottenberg (later, Pearl Taylor). “These were not-so-well-known, beautiful Yiddish songs, and the lyrics were all transliterated in the liner notes,” she says. “I taught myself all of them.”

Her parents, Mark Primack and Janet Pollock, were not musicians but wanted to support their daughter’s enthusiasm for that style of music and started looking around their Santa Cruz community for someone who could give her lessons. They couldn’t find anyone singing Yiddish songs, but they did find a band, Medna Usta, performing Eastern European music in local cafes and clubs. Mark approached one of the members, Ruth Hunter, about the possibility of the 7-year-old Eva taking some lessons with her. Eva remembers Ruth walking up the hill to their house, accordion on her back.

“It was as if somebody had lit a pilot light inside me,” Eva said. “I was so moved and inspired by the music.” She continued to take lessons; Mark started taking accordion lessons with Ruth, and eventually Janet took singing lessons with her as well.

Around the same time, a neighbor, Susan Wagner, started hosting monthly gatherings called večerinkas, featuring folk dancing, live music, eating and socializing. Eva remembers Susan and another dancer/musician, Karen Guggenheim, welcoming her family into the gatherings, where they started to experience the music in a social context, integrated with food, dance, and community.

After a year of lessons, Eva’s teacher Ruth announced that she would be moving to Boston and suggested the family consider attending the EEFC workshops to continue learning the music. So in 1992, they went to three days of Balkan camp at Mendocino. Eva was 8 years old and her brother, Luka, was 2. The family loved the experience and began to attend camp every year for the full week.

Eva’s arrival at camp coincided with a shift in the teaching community from mostly American-born instructors to a gradual influx of teachers from Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria, as a result of the fall of communism in the Balkans in 1989 and the subsequent opening of borders. Besides experiencing dancing and a variety of singing styles at camp, Eva began to study Bulgarian traditional singing, both at camp and with various Bulgarian teachers coming through town. She studied with Petrana Koutcheva, Svetla Angelova and Tatiana Sarbinska, with whom Eva took her first trip to Bulgaria, in 1996, at the age of 12.

 

Navigating music as a teenager

“While I didn’t learn very much actual musical content on that trip,” Eva says, “I learned so much about the context and the history and the language and the land and the people that informed the music. That was critical for me in terms of not seeing Balkan music as something that existed once a year, in a little magical forest in northern California. It provided an opening into the complexity of the cultures surrounding the traditions, the history, the politics, religion, language, all of that.” Even at age 12, Eva found herself learning about the tensions that existed; the instability of the economy and the currency, and the active conflict going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The following year, in 1997, Esma Redžepova and members of her ensemble, from Macedonia, came to teach at the workshops for the first time.

“The music Esma brought was electrifying and vibrant and expressive,” Eva says. “I felt a freedom in terms of how much room there was for each person to put their own emotions into the music. Not just freedom, but somehow an obligation to commit 100% to its soulfulness and spirit. That was a jumping-off point for me in terms of exploration, really wanting to feel that fullness and engagement all the time when I was playing music.”

Before that, Eva had been questioning her involvement with this music in the first place. It certainly wasn’t something she shared with her teenaged peers, and her ancestry didn’t link her to the traditions. She felt pressure to execute songs perfectly, rather than express herself through them. But learning about Balkan Romani music was the turning point.

“As much as technical precision or skill is prized within the different Romani musical genres, there’s also a tremendous value placed on a unique interpretation and a specific voice, an identifiable voice, whether it’s an instrument or a singer,” she says. “In working with Esma, I started to understand that that was not just a suggestion, but a requirement, and the more I explored that, the more I realized I could simultaneously study to improve my skill and also expand my own creativity.  That it wasn’t just about, ‘do this for 25 years and maybe you’ll get it right,’ but that those two progressions could, and should, be happening simultaneously.”

When Eva was 14 or 15, she was asked to teach at Sweet’s Mill, a folk music camp northwest of Fresno, in the Sierra Foothills. Back in the ’70s, Sweet’s Mill had been the site of the earliest West Coast Balkan music and dance camps, but for years before and since then it has mainly been the home of general folk music camps with many traditions represented. Eva found it to be a looser context for learning and sharing, as opposed to what she perceived as a more academic approach at Balkan camp, which she also continued to attend. She discovered that the better she became as a teacher, the more confident and self-possessed she felt as a performer. She enjoyed helping people access their own power and expression.

She was invited to teach her first Balkan camp class in 2003, at Mendocino, a survey of Balkan singing. Although she felt “under a bit of a microscope” as one of not so many young people who have grown up in the community, her class and the ones in the years that followed were well received. In 2012, now that children occupied a larger space in the camp community, she suggested starting a children’s singing class at Mendocino—the class she wished she had had as a child.

 

Being a kid at camp

A recurring cause of growing pains in the community throughout the history of Balkan camp has been the community’s stance on the presence of children at camp. (See the “Kids at Camp” story in our Fall 2007 issue.)  Eva says that 20-plus years ago she felt like an unwelcome guest in some of the classes; her presence as a very young and quick learner could be disruptive for the adult students.

“It’s beautiful for me to see, especially now, the incredible amount of support, resources, time and energy surrounding the young people in our community, which is so different from how it was back then,” she says. “As destabilizing as it can feel to have a 14-year-old show up in your class who can grasp something very quickly, it’s actually the most hopeful thing that can happen to a community: to have young people who are just there blazing, building on the work of the generations before them. I think the best thing that we can do is support and trust the young people.”

Having felt “like an island out in the sea” when she was a teenager in the community, Eva is happy to see the many teenagers and young adults coming to today’s camps. In her most recent in-person class, at the 2019 Iroquois Springs camp, were numerous young people who had just been on the YAMMS (Young American Musicians to Macedonia and Serbia) trip.

“The kids who had been on that trip were so fired up, they wanted to talk about identity politics, cultural appropriation, gender dynamics—all these things that I feel we have to talk about now in order to work in these traditions responsibly,” Eva says. “It was so exciting to me to feel like I could both share my perspective and encourage them as they move forward on their journey.” In that same class at Iroquois Springs there was a 65-year age range of from the youngest person to the oldest in the class. Eva found it an exciting challenge to create a language of learning that could equally engage an 11-year-old and someone in their late 70s.

 

Mentors

When you become an adult in a community, Eva points out, you shift from everybody older than you being an authority, to being in a position where you can choose who your mentors are going to be. She feels grateful to have had a few close mentors in the community. The three that stand out the most for her are Ruth Hunter, Tzvetanka Varimezova and Ethel Raim.

We’ve already talked about Eva’s early work with Ruth Hunter. It was later, when Eva was 17, heading off to UCLA to study ethnomusicology, that she met Tzvetanka Varimezova, who arrived in Los Angeles at the same time. The Bulgarian singer was beginning a residency as an adjunct professor at UCLA. She has since become a favorite instructor at the EEFC workshops (see a profile about Tzvetanka in Kef Times, Spring 2013).

“[Tzvetanka] brought me back to Bulgarian music and helped me find my unique expression within the tradition that had been  such a major part of my childhood,” Eva says. “She showed me how it was possible to be a complete and total musician and an extraordinarily generous teacher at the same time—to model that with grace and presence and great skill and diplomacy, and be confident enough in yourself and your abilities that you could empower everybody around you. She was, and still is, a huge influence on me, and a big inspiration.” Along the way, Eva completed a Bachelor of Arts in ethnomusicology from UCLA.

In 2007, when Eva moved to New York, through her friendship with Catherine Foster she came to know Ethel Raim, a singer well known to the EEFC community and a groundbreaking leader in folk arts research, preservation, documentation, programming, presenting and teaching, as well as the founder of the Pennywhistlers Balkan choral group in the 1960s.

“Ethel helped me to understand lineage and legacy,” Eva says. “Through knowing her I have come to identify the kind of cultural worker I want to be, and the lineage that I hope to be a part of in my work, particularly as a teacher. She has been tremendously generous and supportive with me on both a professional and personal level, and is an extraordinary musician, not to mention the work she has done to bring Balkan song, Yiddish song, and many other musics to new ears all around the world. Practically every time I teach, someone in their 60s or 70s who is in the workshop will come up to me and say, ‘45 years ago, I took a workshop with Ethel Raim, and it changed my life.’” [A note from your editor: Me, too.]

 

Performing

Eva has made guest appearances with many bands, toured internationally with Slavic Soul Party! and recorded with Édessa, Opa Cupa, and SSP!. She has produced four albums since 2009, available via streaming platforms and via Bandcamp and Apple Music (and you can always email her for hard copies: eva@evasalina.com).

In 2007, Eva started working with Aurelia Shrenker, a singer from Massachusetts she had connected with through Larry Gordon and Patty Cuyler of Village Harmony. They formed a duo called Æ, named after the printer’s symbol, pronounced “ash,” which provides an appealing typographical combination of their initials. They performed traditional music of the Balkans, Georgia, Corsica, and Appalachia; toured in several states; and produced a CD. Both women had studied multiple traditional singing genres; in this project they explored them together, playing between traditions.

“I grew to love the intimacy of a duo,” Eva says. “The Bulgarian women’s choir has a massive sound, but it’s also a created tradition. The brass band sound basically obliterates anything within a hundred yards of it sonically, and that’s great, it fills your body. But there’s almost a concept of chamber music in terms of how two people have to stay so present to each other. There’s no smoke and mirrors, there’s no artifice, there’s no fancy lighting, there’s nothing you can hide behind. Creating an intimate listening space around traditional music was something that I thought was important, and wasn’t happening enough.”

With similar intent, over the past 15 years, and more consistently in the last five, Eva has been touring together as a duo with accordionist Peter Stan. Peter was born in Australia but grew up in Queens; his family are Roma from Banat, the border region of Serbia and Romania. Together, they explore the listening side of Balkan Romani music.

“Everyone thinks that Serbian Romani music is only brass band music,” she says, “but actually, there’s all this listening music that gets mostly overlooked, outside of the Balkans. There are songs that were written equally for the accordion and the voice.

That was something we felt we could represent, just the two of us, and it would feel complete.” The two have appeared in many cities, including three European tours, and in two Library of Congress broadcasts. Information about their 2018 CD, Sudbina: A portrait of Vida Pavlović, can be found via Eva’s website.

 

Teaching: If you sit around waiting . . .

For the past six years Eva has directed a chorus at the Jalopy Theater and School of Music—a community chorus of about 35 people who sing traditional harmonies from the Balkans, Caucasus Georgia, Ukraine, Corsica and Sardinia, as well as from a variety of American folk singing traditions. She also sits on the organization’s nonprofit board. The chorus reunited this fall for their first outdoor season since March 2020, culminating the season with a performance at the Brooklyn Folk Festival in November, 2021.

At her 2019 Balkan camp class and in a series of online workshops over the past year, Eva has enjoyed working with students in a more solo- and performance-oriented way, helping singers access and develop more of their personal expression. She found the shift to online instruction actually aided this work, given that people were living and working from the comfort of their own homes and often felt more free to experiment without the pressure of an in-person group (and with the option of a mute button).

“If you sit around waiting for people to give you permission to be yourself within a tradition that you weren’t born into, you will be waiting a very long time,” she says. “I try to facilitate that [sense of permission] even with people who have never sung this music before. A lot of people have trouble accessing their own expression. Sometimes singing in a language that you don’t speak fluently can give you a little bit of a filter so you don’t feel quite so vulnerable, and so you can express or emote based on the melody. . . . You understand where the song comes from and what you’re singing about, but you also start to make this little secret story that’s just about you in the song, and what moves you within the song. I believe you can do that without compromising the language and the integrity and the history of the tradition.”

Eva also imports textiles and other items, visiting flea markets and local markets wherever she travels and bringing things home to share, and sets up booths at festivals where she’s also booked to perform. Since the onset of the pandemic, she has built up an online shop linked to her website to feature these imports, including jewelry, Turkish scarves and towels, and a proprietary skincare line (with a cult following) that she has created.

Eva and her partner, Ron Caswell, also a musician, have a two-year-old daughter, Rosa, and split their time between New York City and a small farm in Upstate New York. She’s eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to come teach at an in-person camp again, and introduce her daughter to the loving and family-friendly community of Balkan music and dance lovers.

“I’m very excited to raise a child in a healthy, intergenerational version of the EEFC community,” Eva says. “I think intergenerational communities are the richest resource we have right now because of how far we’ve gotten away from traditional ways of living. Being able to be in a dance line and have little kids running around, and for that to be okay, is so important. Children learn what they live, and I think the more inclusive we can be to them, the better off we’ll be in the long run.”

Known for her warm and welcoming teaching style, Lise Liepman has taught santouri (Greek hammered dulcimer) or Greek ensemble off and on at EEFC Balkan Music & Dance Workshops since 1988, mostly at Mendocino and several times at the East Coast Workshops, and taught Turkish dancing at balkanalia! when that camp was produced by EEFC. She’s also a carousel-restoration artist.

When Lise Liepman was in eighth grade, she had to create a family tree for a school project. She wrote the whole family tree, filling in occupations where possible.

“Under my name I put ‘Artist? Musician?’ and ended up being both,” she says. “Who knew?”

Growing up in Southern California and moving to Marin County (Northern Calif.) at age 14, Lise was part of a musical family. Her great-great-grandfather was a double-bass player, her maternal grandfather the first-chair violinist in the Boston Symphony, and her German father’s family claimed classical musicians as far back as the 1800s. All four children studied classical music, Lise on piano. (Lise’s two brothers perform with classical orchestras to this day.)

Her first exposure to Balkan music and dance was a folk dance physical education class at her high school.

“It was probably the Israeli dancing that grabbed me first,” she says. “Probably something like Mayim—it was fun, like running. The dances were kind of organized but also free. It wasn’t like the modern dance some of my friends were doing, which I didn’t understand at all. I liked the structure of folk dancing and the fact that you could put your own style into it.”

At the age of 17 Lise enrolled at UC Berkeley, where there was folk dancing outside on the grass every Friday at noon to recorded music, the UC Folk Dancers danced Friday nights at the women’s gym, and Sunni Bloland was teaching international folk dancing in the Physical Education Department.

“My biggest influence in college was Sunni,” Lise says. “I took all her dance classes and eventually worked as her TA (teaching assistant) for many years. I learned a lot about teaching from her and how to break down dances so they made sense to people.” Although Sunni Bloland’s specific focus was Romanian dance, she taught dance from many countries; her three levels of classes—beginning, intermediate and advanced—were tremendously popular, drawing up to 150 people.

Lise became one of the organizers for the UC Folk Dancers, helping to run the weekly party. “Then we would all go up the hill to the International House and keep dancing until much later—every single Friday,” she says. Other nights they would go to Aito’s, a Greek restaurant, or one of the international folk dance groups in the area.

In 1976, as part of a bicentennial celebration of 1776 that Sunni produced, Lise became part of a clogging group, made costumes and performed—her first experience with performing folk dance. At about that same time she started going out with a folk dancer who would have a big influence on her life.

Carousel Art

Her boyfriend’s parents did carousel restoration, and Lise started learning about the craft. Not long after, barely making it through college due to dancing six nights per week and having taken most of the art and folk dance classes available at Cal, she dropped out of school and began working an apprenticeship with the parents. Their son later started his own carousel restoration business and, though he and Lise were no longer romantically involved, she worked for him for years, eventually opening her own business in 1987.

In the late ‘70s she went back to Cal and designed her own independent major based on the classes she had taken and the work she’d done. She has the only degree ever issued at UC-Berkeley in American Folklore: Carousel Art and History.

Westwind

Shortly after the bicentennial celebration, Lise saw the folk dance group Westwind perform. She thought, “Wow, I want to do that!” and auditioned and got in. One of the directors was Dennis Boxell, an “amazing choreographer and teacher, with impeccable taste. He really knew how to put a performance on that was brilliant,” she says. Although controversy and scandal later eclipsed Boxell’s creative reputation, he had a great, positive influence on her.

In Westwind she quickly rose through the ranks and became choral director of the ensemble’s mixed chorus of about 40 singers, including some extremely gifted singers and instrumentalists. During this era Lise sang with the group Savina as well. She later became dance director and eventually artistic director of Westwind, in a shared position with Joe Finn and Allen Nixon.

Early camps

In 1981, Lise got together with George Chittenden, a winds-playing musician who had recently returned from an extended trip to Turkey, where he had studied zurna. The next year, Lise went with George to her first Balkan camp, at Mendocino.

“I got a scholarship to work in the kitchen,” she says. “In those days it was an eight-hour commitment. Pretty much you did that and got to take one class. We worked so hard in the kitchen, but it was so exciting, and we were in our 20s, so it was no problem to stay up and party all night.”

Camp was different in those days than the family-friendly scene it is now. Lise remembers everyone being more or less the same age at the camps, with “a lot of hanky-panky and hooking up going on.” She remembers taking walks down to the creek (something she rarely does now); in those days it seemed there was more time to enjoy nature, despite the kitchen duties.

“I remember the singing classes,” she said. “It was Carol Silverman,¹ Carol Freeman² and Lauren Brody.³ It was hierarchical—you had to take the beginning class, and then you graduated to the intermediate class. Only if you were good enough did you get to take the advanced class.” (These days, although different levels of singing are still offered, there is no such hierarchy.)

By 1984 Lise was playing percussion, tambura and tamburica music, and singing and dancing. That year at camp she heard a santouri for the first time.

“I heard it and thought, ‘Whoa. What’s that?’ and ran over to the room where it was being played. I couldn’t believe what I heard. It was so lyrical—a light sound, but also strong because it was percussive. It was harplike; not a drum, not a wind instrument. It was so different.” A woman named Lisa Rose was playing.⁴ The next year, Lise and George went to East Coast camp at Buffalo Gap; Lise ordered her first santouri from longtime EEFC workshop teacher Yianni Roussos⁵ and started studying the instrument with him.

Studying santouri and travels abroad

The next year she and George took a year off from work and lived in Athens, Greece, for six months, to study music. But first they traveled from northern Greece to Eastern Turkey with Joe Graziosi⁶ and David Bilides (both EEFC Workshop instructors)—neither of whom they knew very well at the beginning of the trip. The four ended up having a great time.

“In those days, there were no cell phones or Internet,” she says. “If you wanted to call home, you had to go wait at the post office for two hours. All our mail went to poste restante [general delivery] in whatever city. Such a different time than it is now, when everybody just calls everybody on Skype. There’s no getting away. But we were really away for a year, out of touch.”

In Athens, Lise studied with master santouri player Tásos Dhiakogiórgos, a classically trained musician. This was in contrast to the folk musicians with whom George was studying gajda, zurna and clarinet, whose teaching methods seemed completely random. Lise also had brief studies with two other santouri masters: Yiannis Sousamlis, a.k.a., Kakourgos; and later Marios Papadeas.

 Wedding and work life

In 1987, back in Albany, Calif., Lise and George rented the Mendocino Woodlands (the Balkan camp site) for a four-day wedding celebration with dancing to live music played by many friends, including Yianni Roussos, whom they brought in from the East Coast. They showed slides of their travels in Greece, Turkey and Africa.

Lise’s full-time return to her carousel business coincided with a peak in the carousel-collecting world; there were conventions where she would be invited to speak. and she would go speak at them. People were spending tens of thousands of dollars on carousel animals. That’s not the case anymore, she says.

“I hit at just the right time to build a business when interest in carousel collecting was on the rise,” she says. Although there are many carousel restoration specialists in the U.S., Lise is one of only about a half dozen that do high-quality work. “I still have good business, but it’s not like it used to be, where I was backed up for two years and people would get on the waiting list. I feel like I came into this at a very, very serendipitous time.”

Ziyiá and Édessa

Joe Graziosi had been telling Lise, George and drummer Dan Auvil that they needed to meet Christos Govetas⁷ and Beth Bahia Cohen,⁸ who were playing Greek music in Boston. At the 1990 Mendocino Balkan camp they all met and formed the bicoastal band Ziyiá, to specialize in regional traditional music of Greece.⁹

Soon Ziyiá got involved in the Greek Orthodox Folk Dance & Choral Festival known as FDF (for Faith, Dance and Fellowship)—a large festival held annually in Southern California—and started to really build repertoire together. In the early days Bob Beer and David Bilides often performed with them. They started becoming known in the Greek community and were hired for weddings and workshops and camps all over the country.

In the early ’90s, in connection with one of those workshops, they learned some music for Dennis Boxell, who was teaching dances from Édessa (a city in northern Greece, near the Macedonian border). Boxell sent them recordings of some brass band music from the area. The music called for accordion.

George had a student accordion with 12 buttons on the left and two octaves on the keyboard side. Lise learned three tunes on it and they played those tunes at the workshop, with David Bilides on tupan, Dan Auvil on snare and George on clarinet. Little by little, as they got called to play other gigs, Lise would learn a few more tunes on the accordion. (Eventually she got a full-sized accordion.) Later they were joined by Ari Langer on violin and Paul Brown on bass. Numerous other musicians, including several guest singers and various percussionists, have been part of Édessa for shorter or longer periods.

“This was one of the first American bands to play that Florina/pushteno kind of repertoire,” she said. “Look at how many people are playing it now! But this was one of the first live bands that people had heard, and it was so exciting.” Dubbed Édessa Power Block by some of their folk dance fans, the band soon became known as just Édessa.

Lise and George also played in a rebetika ensemble, Rebetiki Paréa, that toured in Holland in 1995. Lise played baglama and santouri, George played guitar, Bob Beer sang, Vaggelis Fragiadakis played bouzouki and Nancy Klein played percussion.

With either Ziyiá or Édessa, Lise and George have played and taught at many dance and music workshops, including three in Japan,¹⁰ and all but one year of World Camp, an East Coast dance and music camp that celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.

With Souren and Haig

Another important influence has been the music of Souren Baronian and Haig Manoukian, brilliant Armenian American players playing clarinet and oud, respectively, who have been frequent instructors at the EEFC workshops.

Lise, George and Dan met them in the late 1980s at the then-annual Hawaii folk dance camp Makahiki Hou, where Souren and Haig were regulars. Together with percussionist Polly Tapia Ferber the group started playing Turkish/Armenian repertoire and released a recording. After Haig’s death in 2014, the group re-mastered and re-released that recording, “Near East Far West.”

Next generation?

The EEFC’s Program Committee, on which Lise serves, has been talking a lot about the young generation that’s been coming to the camps. Most of them are not coming to it from dancing; in the Bay Area there are clubs where 500 people will come to hear a brass band play. Those people are not so interested in traditional dances that line up with the music, but they do love to dance—freestyle, energetically and preferably to fast music.

“Do we want those 500 people at camp? Maybe; it would be a different camp. And is that what we’re working toward? Is that really the mission? It could be,” she says. “There are not many young dance teachers. Alex Marković is the youngest person we’ve seen. There are some in the Greek community, but they’re not interested in coming into our community, and it’s not for lack of asking. No matter how wonderful our older dance teachers are, if you’re a 20-year-old and you see an old dancer, it just might not be as exciting as seeing a really hot-shit 25-year-old. We need dance teachers like that and we are trying to find them.

“We’ve talked about having some young folks do some very simple dance lessons before some of these hipster gigs in the Bay Area. It wouldn’t have to be a great dancer, or even someone we would hire as a teacher at the camps, but someone young and enthusiastic who could tap into that hipster crowd to get them to actually start to like line dancing. I think that might be the future, to find young people like that who then tap into this younger crowd that’s going out for brass music.”

The EEFC and life

Lise served on the EEFC Board in 2000 and 2001 and has worked on the Program Committee for many years.

“I enjoy the work,” she says. “It’s like a big puzzle, putting together 25 teachers for an interesting week. You can‘t please everybody; there will always be people that kvetch about something. But more often, people are just thrilled. They can’t wait for camp and then they get there and say, ‘Oh, wow, I can’t believe you got that person.’

“The camps have provided George and me an environment to meet so many amazing people we might not have met otherwise,” she adds. “I think that’s why I want to do the programming work. It’s challenging work and there’s no compensation for it, not even a work exchange; if I want to go to camp and am not on staff, I have to pay to go to camp. But I feel like this is a way of giving back. Balkan camp has given George and me an unbelievably rich life and continues to do so.”

 

 

 

 

Footnotes

1. Profiled in KT Spring/Summer 2001.

2. Profiled in KT Spring/Summer 2000.

3. Profiled in KT Summer 2006.

4. Years later, Lise bought that very instrument from Lisa Rose, and it’s currently on loan to Nesa Levy, another musician in our community.

5. Yianni Roussos has declined to be profiled in Kef Times.

6. Profiled in KT Spring/Summer 2003.

7. Profiled in KT Spring 2010.

8. Profiled in Spring 2009.

9. See the story of Ziyiá’s first 10 years in the Spring/Summer 2000 Kef Times.

10. Read about Édessa’s teaching in Japan in our Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue.

Catherine Foster attended her first EEFC Balkan Music & Dance Workshop at Buffalo Gap in the early 1990s and has taught brass band ensemble or clarinet and saxophone at the East Coast workshops numerous times since 1994. But she has been performing Balkan music for more than 30 years. Currently a member of Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band and director of the Catherine Foster Brass Band, she has also toured with Yuri Yunakov and worked with Roma brass band musicians in Serbia.

Catherine Foster grew up on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Wash., one of five sisters. Their parents, immigrants from New Zealand, played various kinds of music, including early music on recorders. Their mother taught the girls to read music and play basic things on the piano when they were very young.

“I can’t remember not knowing how to read music,” Catherine says. “I’ve always had that.” She also has a good ear, as does everyone else in her family.

Eventually the daughters developed their own musical interests. Catherine’s oldest sister, Susan, sings and for a time played viola with the Seattle Philharmonic. The next oldest, Elizabeth, lives in Australia, where she is working on a doctorate in piano pedagogy. Catherine’s twin, Leslie, lives in Tacoma; she plays Scandinavian fiddle with Hale Bill and the Bopps and composes music. And Mary, the youngest, is a professional piano teacher on Bainbridge Island.

When Catherine and Leslie were going into sixth grade, their mother said, “You can play in the school band. What do you want to play?” Catherine said, “The drums.” Her mother said, “Not in my house.” That was the end of Catherine’s drumming career. Instead, she and Leslie started playing clarinet, but Catherine hated it. She switched to trumpet and played that through middle and high school.

“When we were in high school, somehow Leslie discovered folk dancing and dragged me into it,” Catherine says. “We went to the University of Washington and danced with that group. That was very important in those formative years for us; it gave us a way of surviving high school. I was not a rock concert kid.”

By her late teens, Catherine was dancing two to three nights a week. At a dance camp in Oregon, she and Leslie met Atanas Kolarovski and were surprised to learn that he lived in Seattle and, along with his wife, Ljupka, had a restaurant called Yugoslavia. The restaurant became like a second home for the two girls. Catherine remembers Atanas coming out of a back room into the restaurant with his accordion and playing. Sometimes there would be other musicians as well.

“He was very important to our dancing in those days, and he figured prominently in our developing sense of style,” she says. “He’s a great teacher and has the energy of a lot of people. He would walk into a room on a Friday night where we’d be folk dancing and the energy level would jump up a few notches. It was amazing. You could be three or four people down the line from him and feel his energy through everyone’s hands.”

From Scandinavian Fiddle to Balkan Brass

After high school, Scandinavian music came into Catherine’s life. Leslie was working for a man named C. Alan (Bud) Johnson, who had an artwork business on Bainbridge Island. He and his daughter Laurie played Scandinavian fiddles together. Leslie took up the violin and began playing with them, then Elizabeth joined, and finally Catherine. The five named themselves the Rollingbay Fiddlers (after the name of their neighborhood) and started playing for dance parties and festivals. They played almost exclusively Swedish music.

“When I play the violin now, the only thing I can do is Swedish,” Catherine says. “My hands only know that ornamentation.”

In the early ‘80s, Catherine was taking classes at Seattle Central Community College when she heard about a brass-style Balkan band starting up. She called them up, offering herself as a trumpet player, but there wasn’t an opening. Not long afterwards, they called her back and invited her into the group. That was the Borozan Brass Band, which included Peter Lippman on trumpet, Sonia Tamar-Seeman on clarinet, and others.

“That was a great funky brass band,” she says. “That was my beginning playing brass. Peter had been overseas a few times and had tapes from the Guča (Serbia) Festival (Sabor Trubača) and other interesting source material, which we learned by ear.” Even though Catherine is comfortable with sheet music and notates tunes to teach them, she says she can’t learn a piece of music from reading it. “But if I listen to it and play, learning it that way,” she says, “I’ll have it forever.”

In 1986 Peter Lippman moved to New York and Catherine went to work in Alaska on a fish processing barge, a seasonal job she describes as “extremely exhausting and interesting and boring and difficult and wonderful.” At the height of the season, she was one of 100 people living on a 200-foot “shoebox,” with a keen sense of community and camaraderie tempering the hard work.

After returning to Seattle and working at some unmemorable jobs, Catherine moved to New York City in 1988. Peter Lippman had told her about Zlatne Uste. Catherine contacted Michael Ginsburg, the director, and told him she played trumpet and was interested. She was invited into the band.

Going to Guča

Catherine’s first trip to the Guča Festival, in 1990, was Zlatne Uste’s third. It was also her first time in Eastern Europe.

“The level of musicianship across all the bands that came to play and compete at Guča was eye-popping, really amazing,” she says.

Working with a Roma band called Zlatni Prsti, Catherine remembers discovering how much she didn’t know, and how elusive authentic styling was.

“I was struck by how much passion is in the music, and how hard the lives are of the Roma people who struggle to make a life, a living,” she says. “It took away any romantic notions of ‘gypsy’ music. Their lives are really difficult, and they make this fantastic music. Also, I saw the music in its own element, not separated from daily life—music has an important function at a wedding, funeral or war sendoff. It is always played for life events and purposes, not just a recreational party. It was interesting for me to see all of this.”

Around this time, Catherine attended her first EEFC Balkan Music & Dance Workshop. She remembers being struck by the level of community at camp, and by the luxury of having “a whole week of days in a row to spend in my music head without thinking about anything else.”

Working with Yuri Yunakov

In 1994, Yuri Yunakov came to the States from Bulgaria and taught at East Coast Balkan camp. Catherine, who was teaching brass band ensemble that year, wasn’t really aware he was coming, but she had brought a clarinet, which she “didn’t really play.” Because Yuri was there and the schedule was in her favor, she decided to take his clarinet class. It became clear to her almost immediately that she could really understand what Yuri was doing.

After camp, Catherine, who had been attending classes at Hunter College, applied at the college for a scholarship to take private lessons from Yuri. Although she had unsuccessfully applied for a scholarship every previous term she had been there, this time she received a departmental scholarship for private lessons.

She then had to call Yuri and make sure he would be there, wasn’t planning to go back to Bulgaria, and would give her a certain number of lessons and a grade. Not being a Bulgarian speaker, she was nervous as she dialed his phone number. But when his answering machine clicked on and she started talking, someone picked up and a voice said, “Catherine?” It was Carol Silverman; she had been sitting in Yuri’s apartment at the moment Catherine called. Carol helped with communications, Yuri said yes and Catherine began taking lessons.

“It was most amazing,” Catherine says. “A lesson with Yuri meant I would schlep on the train to catch a bus and walk to his apartment, come up to the third floor, he or his wife would make Turkish coffee, there would be some sitting around and smoking cigarettes, then we’d start working and somebody would bang on the door and everything would stop while he greeted the visitor. A lesson would take three hours.” Yuri’s visitors were often shocked to see an American play Bulgarian music and a woman playing clarinet.

“He is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had and he was very generous with me,” Catherine adds, pointing out that Yuri significantly cut his charges so that Catherine could continue studying with him after the scholarship money ran out.

“He gave me access to how to style this music that I had not had until that point,” she says. “I’ve rarely had the opportunity to work with someone over an extended period like that.”

In 1999, Catherine was invited to participate, along with Yuri, Neshko Neshev on accordion, Salif Ali on drums, Lauren Brody on keyboard and Carol Silverman on vocals, in the World Music Institute’s Gypsy Caravan national tour. The show also included five other ensembles, groups from Russia, Hungary, Romania, Spain and Rajasthan.

“Playing with Yuri was both incredibly amazing and wonderful and at times frustrating and humiliating,” she says. “I was not a musician of that caliber, and it was hard to stand up on stage next to a giant like that and play.”

Leader of the Band

Besides performing with Zlatne Uste, Catherine performs with the Kavala Brass Band, made up of some members and alumni of Zlatne Uste and guests, focusing on Greek Macedonian brass repertoire. In that group she plays clarinet except when Lefteris Bournias joins; on those occasions she plays saxophone. Four members of Kavala, including Catherine, play biannually at the Obersteinbach dance camp in Germany, which features Balkan dance primarily.

And then there’s the all-women Catherine Foster Brass Band, which had its debut at the 2014 Golden Festival and plays mostly South Serbian Romani repertoire. Unlike Zlatne Uste, in which most of the members are older and came out of the folk dance scene, the new ensemble’s members are relatively younger and trained musicians. Starting a band from the ground up is quite different from joining an existing band, or pulling together a band of people who already know and play this music, Catherine notes.

“It’s a lot more work and a different kind of work than being in ZU,” she says. “Being the leader of the band, and having members who aren’t necessarily familiar with this tradition, I need to learn ways to help them. I played the tenor horn at camp this summer to help me better understand that section. I loved feeling that end of the band’s energy. I’m a very melody-driven person—I have melodies in my head all the time—but the vertical structure of the music does not come as naturally to me. I’m looking forward to working with this band as it grows and develops; I see it being a few years before it really gels.

“The all-women aspect of this band is particularly important to me,” she adds. “It’s a serious statement. There are so very few women musicians in the Balkans. There are singers, but hardly any instrumentalists. Sometimes girls play, but as soon as they marry, that’s the end of that. Playing the music of someone else’s culture has always been complicated for me. I try to always be respectful of musical form and culture. I don’t feel I can just shout from the outside that women should be allowed to play instruments. But I can be a model. Among my goals is to play with this band in Serbia and Macedonia and just do what we do and be seen and heard.”

Life in the City

Throughout her years in New York, Catherine has worked at various day jobs, including a brief stint teaching driving in Manhattan and later doing office work for that company. These days she works in the publishing industry for a small company that makes indexes for books. She recently switched from full time to part time there, which is financially difficult but gives her more time for music.

“It’s hard to practice in an apartment,” Catherine says. “I practice in the closet in the back room, and I try not to do it past 9:00 at night. I don’t practice nearly enough, and it’s a big problem finding rehearsal space in New York, although two of my new band’s members have very accommodating households.”

In 2012, Catherine married her longtime partner Ethel Raim, Artistic Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and founder/director of the all-women’s vocal ensemble The Pennywhistlers, one of the first American groups to sing Balkan music. They live in Greenwich Village and occasionally perform singing concerts together.

Teaching at the Workshops

“I love teaching at Balkan camp,” Catherine says. “Teaching makes me focus in a different way on the music and how I play it and how it happens. I find it very focusing to have to think about ways of teaching, and it’s always interesting because everybody has a different way of learning. I love being a camper and I love being a teacher.”

One challenge she faces at camp, as do the other staff members, is the different levels of students who come to study—a mix of beginning and experienced musicians, amateurs and professionals.

“I love seeing all the young people there,” she says. “Sarah [Ferholt]’s young people’s band is amazing. I find the camps to be wonderful and nurturing places for both younger and older musicians.”