Balkan Bump amping it up with new name
An alter ego built on a relentless groove, Balkan Bump has turned into a global force. Collaborating with heavyweights like rapper Talib Kweli, Slovenian electronic music producer Gramatik, French producer CloZee and Berkeley world fusionistas Beats Antique, he spent the two years before the pandemic playing major festivals and supplying the soundtrack for a 2020 Super Bowl commercial.
In the Bay Area, he’s a familiar presence better known as wild man Oakland trumpeter Will Magid, a beatsavvy producer, DJ and ethnomusicologist with a deep feel for Balkan and Near Eastern rhythms. On Friday, Oct. 23, he’s set to release the hiphop laced project “Osmanity,” his first album under his recently adopted moniker, Balkan Bump.
The Palo Alto native traces the emergence of his alternate identity to a 2017 track that set the traditional Macedonian tune “Irfan” to an aggressive trap beat. A collaboration with saxophonist Paul Bertin, it was his first piece as Balkan Bump and it caught the attention of
Gramatik, an EDM innovator who signed Magid to his label Lowtemp and recruited him for a series of tours.
The collaboration with Gramatik led directly to the track “Aymo,” featuring Kweli, which added a jolt of energy to “The Heist,” the Porsche Super Bowl TV ad spot introducing the electric Taycan model.
“It’s crazy ’ cause ‘ Irfan’ was this random beat that I recorded super quickly, and it got more attention than anything else I’d ever made,” Magid said.
He developed the music on “Osmanity” by drawing on scales and rhythms from Turkey, North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, which is to say lands once ruled by the Ottoman Empire. A Balkan brass connoisseur who plays with the Bulgarian Romastyle band Inspector Gadje, Magid brings his deep familiarity with traditional forms to raveinducing dance tracks.
“These styles are all very different, but they’re connected through this Ottoman thread,” he said.
“And then you add the sounds of these instruments — the oud, darbuka hand percussion, clarinet and qanun — and they’re so powerful and evocative.”
“Osmanity” also reflects his rapidly expanding circle of collaborators, like Oakland’s Ali Paris, the Palestinianborn master of the qanun who has gained renown through his work with Alicia Keys. Magid was so smitten with Paris’ playing on the 78string Middle Eastern zither that he laced the lustrous, enveloping sound throughout the album. Beats Antique is also widely featured, another creative alliance that shaped the sound of “Osmanity.”
“Will is a great producer and trumpet player who really fuses that Balkan brass band sound with electronic beats,” said multiinstrumentalist David Satori, who founded Beats Antique with belly dancer and choreographer Zoe Jakes and drummer Tommy “Sidecar” Cappel. “Balkan Beatbox is one of the first groups I saw do that, and he’s taking that concept to the next generation, adding his hyphy, trap grooves.”
Touring with Beats Antique and Gramatik as both an opening act and a member of the horn section has given Magid opportunities to introduce Balkan Bump to major arenas like Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, and New York City’s Terminal 5.
In many ways, the music on “Osmanity” and the turbocharged Balkan Bump persona dial up the sound he was creating as Will Magid, like hitting the caps lock key before typing an email.
Under his birth name, he’d been making music geared toward relatively intimate spaces like San Francisco clubs such as the Elbo Room, Cafe du Nord and the Rickshaw Stop, which was the home of the longrunning, thriceyearly Balkan Kafana dance party. But after the experience of playing major theaters and festivals, Magid believes that “Balkan Bump is more for the Fox Theater or Outside Lands.”
“It’s a little less innocent, a little more bombastic and exaggerated. From a production standpoint, it’s more compressed to make an impact in these larger rooms,” he said. “More significantly, knowing I have an audience changed the way I thought about writing. It’s one thing to make music in a vacuum at home when you’re inspired. But when you have real people listening to you, dancing, laughing, crying, it’s a great motivator.”