Unza Unza Orchestra • Amsterdam Klezmer Band • DAAN

A long time ago, in a distant land, a group of friendly guys put themselves at the service of a great cinema mage, to together create a music at their image : unheard , joyful and colorful.
Fruit of their dreams, their experiences, or their respective influences; step by step, day by day, song by song, they created their own music ; Improbable mix of country rhythms, Turkish marches, Italian classical, gypsy trumpets, South American sounds, techno-pop loops, musette, Balkan base-punk, kolo, gypsy tradition… UNZA UNZA was born.

After two and a half decades of travel, countless concerts given on the most prestigious stages around the world, their spiritual leader, decided to add a new masterpiece to his already very rich cinematographic work. Understanding that he had to devote himself entirely to it, he decided to leave band, for a while.
So with the blessing of the “boss”, the group decided to extend the journey and continue to carry the flame of this very specific music. Driven by the same idea, their enormous experience and their insatiable appetite for music, the band joined on vocals by Alexandar Bijovic, now becomes :

THE UNZA UNZA ORCHESTRA

On the program, new compositions, Balkan standards, but also, and always, music from their favorite film director’s movies.

Mix a dose of klezmer with a pinch of jazz, add a shot of Balkan and a smidgen of Gypsy, et voilà, you’ve got the recipe for Amsterdam Klezmer Band. Brass, double bass, accordion and percussion all bolster each other with pulsing grooves full of subtle yet raw energy. They really like to make an audience sweat, but they can make you dream away on a soulful lament as well.

The Amsterdam Klezmer Band started out on the streets in 1996 as a group of buskers playing internationally as a celebrated band with a rock-solid live reputation. During all this time the band managed to stay on the radar non-stop, touring all over the world. Their impressive tour list containing far over a 1500 shows by now. They built an audience of connaisseurs that have been loving them for many years, and there’s always a young crowd merging. Their music is inspiring fellow musicians from Latin America to Russia resulting in colorful AKB-song covers you will find on Youtube.

AKB re-energizes the sound of klezmer by throwing contemporary styles and techniques in the mix. Balkan and oriental Music are gratefully used as key influences. The band manages to keep their music fresh, urgent and often highly danceable wherever they take the stage.

DAAN is an atypical self-made musical & visual artist with a love for cult pop-music with a rock attitude.
In a tradition of writers as Serge Gainsbourg, Peter Gabriel, Beck, Sparks or even Robert Palmer he combines all genres, from electronic dance to country or indie lofi rock.

But he’s a songwriter in the first place, with a passion for twisted metaphoric lyrics, packaging his expression with pop-art like simplistic titles as “Icon”, “Victory”, “Exes”, “Housewife”, “Friend”.  Sounds like Bach after a heavy night out and only a cheap little synth to tell the story. Even if Daan started out as a New Beat backing vocalist in the eighties, he sees no problems into combing this with his love for Randy Newman or George Brassens’ cynical romanticism.

He first had significant indie success, late 90’s, with his band Dead Man Ray, formed with ex dEUS guitar player Rudy Trouvé, touring Europe with their filmic krautrock sound. But his solo career really took off in 2002, with his first hit “Swedish Designer Drugs”, followed by a string of award-winning golden records, appreciated by a bizarrely mixed audience.
Besides his many studio albums and intense live appearances, he also writes soundtracks for films, or acts himself like in the 2020 Hungarian film “Eden”. From his early years as a celebrated graphic designer, he keeps on designing his album covers and directing his own videos.