Creating an aural tapestry of music
Briga one of the many musicians coming from around the world for Mill Race Festival
Briga, a.k.a. Brigitte Dajczer, says her sound has a lot to do with playing in bands and on other people’s projects.
It’s about sharing and finding a common ground, notes the Montreal-based singercomposer, a little jetlagged having come from Serbia the day before and now on her third cup of coffee.
“There is a part of you that is you and a big part of you that is not you. You are in a band and you are involved. You are sharing that identity,” she says.
“I am hanging out with the Algerians playing in Algerian bands. I am learning about all of the culture and stuff. That is not really me!” she exclaims.
“It is me musically and then the same with ex-Yugo communities. Here I am hanging out with the Serbian guys or the Bosnian guys and again feeling their love of the music and feeling my love for the music. At that point, I woke up one day and said, ‘Who am I?’
“It is same with my Polish identity,” she adds. “I can identify with the Polish music but I can’t speak the language because
my father never showed it to me.
“He cut out that part of his past so I am feeling sort of ... displaced. I was hanging out with people who had recently immigrated to Canada and connecting through this place of displacement even though I am first-generation Canadian. So mixing it all up comes from my own internal identity. I am trying to figure out who I am and where I am at.”
The sound that has emerged is a unique Balkan/Bavarian tapestry of jazz, gypsy, folk, pop, punk and hip-hop set to mystical strings, complex rhythms and breathy English/
Québécois vocals.
Briga will be joining musicians from around the world for three days of folk music of all strains at the 26th edition of the Mill Race Festival in downtown Cambridge next weekend.
“Music was always in me and I was playing a lot of instruments,” says Briga, who began playing the violin at a young age. “It was very much a big part of my life even though I stopped playing the violin in my teenage years.”
The musician, who hails from a Polish/French background, was born in Montreal but grew up in Calgary. In 2001, she returned to Montreal, where she became part of the city’s Roma/ eastern European music community, learning more about Serbian musical ornamentations when she began playing with Roma musician Carmen Piculeata (from the Gypsy Orchestra of Montreal).
As a side player she spent a lot of time at Café Sarajevo because of all her “ex-Yugo” friends were into Romani music and she heard some of them talking about Bulgarian violin virtuoso Georgi Yanev.
“Nobody even knew who Georgi was in Canada,” notes Briga.
“I called him up and he did not speak a word of English or French,” Briga says with a laugh. “He was on soundcheck when I called him and he was wandering from one person to another handing over the phone asking them to talk to me. At one point I was talking to these people and they said, ‘Mr. Yanev would like to know: what do you want from him?’
“I told him I want to go and study with him in Bulgaria and I can pay him for the lessons and that is what I want from him,” adds Briga with another laugh. “So I met him and it took off from there. It was wonderful.”
Briga’s acclaimed 2012 “Turbo Folk Stories” was an exotic marriage of Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian songs.
Briga’s other albums include her 2009 debut “Diaspora,” “Wake,” (2014) and 2017’s “Femme,” which was nominated for a 2018 Juno for World Music Album of the Year.
Briga’s Klezmer-laced love song “Ibrahim,” from “Femme,” is based on a “lively five-day affair” during a visit to Turkey while she was visiting expat Canadian friends and met a Turkish man, Ibrahim, through an online dating site.
“It was a microcosm of a relationship where we went through the infatuation and we had our first fight. I got all upset and he got all upset. I wrote the song for him sitting on the bus going from the European side to the Asian side of Istanbul. It is funny. We are still friends.”
For Mill Race, Briga says she will have her whole band on hand — including Briga on violin/vocals, Tacfarinas Kichou, percussion; Alix Noël, accordion and keys; Grégoire Carrier-Bonneau, bass; and Marton Maderspach on drums and alto — at 13 Food and Beverage on Main Street for a set between 7 and 10 p.m.