Heady folk fusion from unique European outfit

Galway won’t know what hit it when Magda Navarrete & Caravana Banda play The Rowing Club, Woodquay, on Sunday, April 24.  The band plays music that draws from Balkan, Polish, Flamenco and gypsy traditions. If that sounds like a heady fusion, let it fall to the late David Bowie to simplify things. Let’s dance!

The band met when Polish singer Magda Navarrete was staying in an artists’ residence in the Polish mountains. She was getting ready to leave when a gang of musicians arrived.

“They were dropping off their things and going off to do a concert,” Magda says. “I heard them speaking Spanish, and the owner of the place said ‘these are my friends from the Czech Republic’. They had been living in Madrid, and I said ‘oh, I lived there too’. They saw me with a cajon [box-shaped drum] and they started to talk to me.

“I said I did flamenco music and they said they played Balkan brass,” Magda continues.

The musicians asked her if she’d like them to play for her and she said she would.

“They went outside the house, and were gone for a few minutes,” she recalls. “I thought ‘ah, they’re not coming’. Suddenly, I saw them pass the window, playing. I went outside, it was summer, and I saw this huge view of the mountains. They were playing and I thought ‘oh my God, this is the thing I was looking for’.

Calling themselves Caravana Banda, the band played Magda a song called Amor Y Oro. The song stuck in her head – “I was dreaming about it,” she says. So, four days after that chance meeting, she took the night train to Prague and met with the band’s musical director Tomas Prusa. They decided to start a project together.

“We had this day of chatting to each other, drinking a lot of Czech beer, eating a lot of goulash, thinking about how we could make this fusion work,” Magda says. “It wasn’t that obvious – I’m Polish, but I do Spanish music. They’re Czech, but they do Balkan music. But we found a nice spot in that music where we use our folkloric influences.”

Magda goes on to explain this cultural mish-mash a bit more.

“We use some very old Polish melodies, and we turn them into rhythmical things,” she says. “And we also use some Czech songs. They have a tradition of wine, and celebrating it, because their region Moravia is almost touching Italy. Wine can be mature or very young. If it’s very young, you can get very sick. So they’re singing about ‘how old or young is this wine? How bad are we going to feel afterwards?’ These kind of things!”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.