Global Mashup 4: Balkans Meets El Barrio

QPTV’s Roslyn Nieves joins Flushing Town Hall’s Executive and Artistic Director Ellen Kodadek, Deputy Director Sami Abu Shumays, Jazz Producer Clyde Bullard, and Shawn Choi, Director of Marketing and Community Engagement, to bring you Flushing Town Hall’s Global Mashups Series on Queens Public Television's channels. In each Global Mashup concert, two cultures are mashed up on one stage with an open dance floor! First, each band plays a set, then the two meet and jam. The mashup often results in a unique, never-before-heard blend of two different cultures. QPTV captured the entertaining cultural series and now the television programs will cablecast in Queens on Spectrum, RCN, and Verizon Fios for the first time! Global Mashup #4: Balkans meets El Barrio Balkans Raya Bras Band has been thrilling audiences with their engaging live shows since 2008. They performed the hard-driving Balkan wedding music typified by such groups as the world-renowned Boban I Marko Markovic Orkestar, Kocani Orkestarnd Fanfare Ciocarlia. The group prefers to play where the dancers are, lighting up the dance floor with gleeful abandon for average listeners and Eastern European folk dance aficionados alike. The band regularly brings it brand of irrational exuberance to weddings and parties, nightclubs festival stages and dance halls nationwide. Notable performances include Lotus Festival, the Kennedy Center’s, Millennium Stage, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Radiolab Live, collaborations with choreographer Eliot Feld and Ballet Tech at the Joyce Theater and a production of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater, as well as annually since their inception at Zlatne Uste’s Golden Festival. El Barrio Spanglish Fly is part band, part celebration: 12 musicians igniting a party that quickly spreads to the audience. They have been hailed as the premier band of the Latin boogaloo revival, “single-handedly reviving sixties bugalu in NYC” (NBC New York). Boogaloo! That mix of Latin and soul/R&B that emerged from the clubs, the street corners, the transistor radios and the pool halls of 1960s Spanish Harlem, “El Barrio”. Inspired by Latin boogaloo, or bugalu. Spanglish Fly plays irresistible grooves that blend Afro-Caribbean rhythms with the fervor, the feeling, and the harmonics of 60’s soul. SPANGLISH FLY “roars through covers, originals, and transformations of previously untouched soul hits” (Village Voice), paying homage to the boogaloo genre while refreshing it for a new generation.