Barikada
- World Of Music - Svastara - 2008 |
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ZORAN MADŽIROV - THE BOTTLEMAN
P o r t r a i t
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Zoran Madžirov - The Bottleman
(MK / USA)
P o r t r a i t |
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Zoran Madžirov, The Bottleman, is
Nu-Jazz / Alternative / Classical musician from New York, New York,
United States of America. Zoran Madžirov - composer, performing & recording
artist, was born 14.01.1968 in Strumica, Macedonia. He lives around the planet
prepering
for jammin' on the Moon. He plays Bottlephone, Vibes, Drums, Tuned-Bike-Wheel,
Marimba, Musical Bottles and Glasses, Percussion and is always ready to make
music out of everything, or
better to say, "nothing".
Zoran Madžirov is the inventor of the Bottlephone
- a new feature of a solo music instrument and brought it to a professional
playable level over
the last
20 years. It contains up to forty carefully chosen, diatonically liquid-tuned-bottles,
on two rows and two floors. He also created and developed special mallet
technique, which allows him playing on extraordinary virtuoso level. Beside
his own, he
uses the Vallotti and Pythagorean tuning system. Changing completely the
concept of what a solo percussionist can do, you are witnessing an alternation
in musical
history.
Having performed with or for musical giants like Sting, Harry
Bellefonte, The Scorpions, and many others, Madžirov chose to further explore
the vibrations
in our universe. His extraordinary mallet technique, as Tito Puente called
it, gave Zoran the gift of flying with his feet on the ground. He is also the
founder of the group Les Barons Karamazoff in 1987, including Saša Dejanović
- guitar & Edin Karamazov - guitar, lute, wash-tub-bass (also known as
Sergej Karamazov or Edin Džananović) performing classical and world music,
very unusual
way, touring world-wide.
His latest CD releases, "Dalnovod" with Petar
Tashev and "Bottling Jazzy" with Alexandar Spasoski, are
where he define himself as a contemporary musician, composer and improviser,
inaugurating
the new main-stream and assuring future for the jazz today. In 1995 the Arte
TV Channel issues an extra TV emission in honor of his body work. Macedonian
Radio-Television has realized two documentaries and appearing on Eurovision
2000, and Mondovision on new-years eve 2005. Collaborating with bassist Ellington
Mingus, appears on numerous jazz festivals (SJF 2000, Girrona-jazz-in-bottles-2004).
He is starring in Saša Orešković's true story based on reality, "Round
Sound", a music documentary film where he is also the co-author. US Department
of Justice awarded him with Green Card as an alien musician with extra ordinary
ability.
Macedonian percussionist Zoran Madžirov has made a career
of birthing the blazing virtuosity and individualism of Balkan jazz into the
21st century, streaming inimitable instrumentation and the latest incarnations
of modern music into this genre's vast sea of influences. This year's offering,
"Bottling Jazzy", begins with (and returns to) sparse fragments that evoke
Radiohead's Kid A, peppered with perhaps the sonic equivalent of drinking fine
wine and
Madžirov's claim to fame: 40 diatonically-liquid-tuned bottles he has titled "the
Bottlephone" and plays with mallets.
Enlisting the help of wünderkind
computer sound designer Aleksander Spasoski, Madžirov performs electronica-inflected
jazz with significant nods to canonical Western classical composition and Macedonian
folk song. But the glue that holds everything together is the joyous aplomb
with which he leaps into the Great Unknown, manifest in both his self-crafted
feature instrument and the effervescence and surprise of his songcraft. Notes,
tone colors, and rhythmic patterns enter and exit on their own terms, creating
a series of compelling coincidences that give each track its unique flavor;
at the same time, echoes of "head" structure and folk aesthetics
render the music's ambience as a cloak of tradition.
The first two tracks stand
firmly within electronica genres (lounge, drum and bass) that have come to
characterize the urban metropolis in the majority of Americans' imaginations,
thanks to mass media. After making himself intelligible to this target audience
(a talent honed in NYC subways), Madžirov slowly challenges the listener to
focus on motifs and their development, as well as the role of different instruments
in giving them shape. The subsequent "Shturec" and "Tu Be Ve" move
into the more experimentalist ground covered by To Rococo Rot and Björk's
Medulla, as the Bottlephone moves to the fore in volume and relevance.
From
Track 5 on, Madžirov commences a call and response with a wide variety of
personal influences, mirrored by the appearance of guitar and accordion: it
is here
that the disc enters the realm of the extraordinary. On "Round Above," the
bottles become a melody instrument accentuating the melancholy of this waltz
with the delicacy of a fragile ego. In stark contrast, the following track, "On
the Phone," finds Madžirov breaking out into improvisations with logic-defying
speed and clarity.
The CD reaches its apogee in Madžirov's reworking of a Macedonian
song in traditional 7/8 meter, "Opa Iha." On this track (no. 9),
bottles and samples present the melody in ghostly shards and neurotic repetitions
before
it erupts into completeness via live brass orchestra and vocal exclamations.
This thought-provoking musical commentary on the relationship between past
and present can be taken as a statement of the work's credo, where a respect
for "roots" runs deep enough to honor their ability to accommodate
the new realities that Madzirov pushes himself to face head-on, time and again. © Amy
Frishkey.
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