Kocani, a little village near the Macedonian frontier with Bulgaria, has become the heart of the new Balkan folk music, thanks to the local Kocani Orkestar, a "brass-band" formed by seven extraordinary musicians. Their music is a cocktail of frantic rhythms, noisy and hypnotic sounds. A "drunk" music, with a bass tuba and trumpets as the main features. "Our music is pure tradition" the Orkestar leader Nat Veliov told. "Our melodies are handed down from father to son; sometimes I take this music from the streets and arrange it on my way".

The band's features are a pair of trumpets, three tuba, clarinet, sax, accordion and drums (with traditional instruments like "zourna", a sort of oboe, and "tapan", a curious tambour). That's enough to create the exciting and colourful sounds of the second Kocani Orkestar's album, "L'Orient est rouge" ("The East is red, as the title of an old Chinese communist song that became popular in Yugoslavia during the Tito years). The inheritance of the brass janizary or Ottoman bands is upgraded with the sounds of the gypsies orchestras and is melted with traditional folk music of Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania, Macedonia and Serbia. Many tracks are traditional dance songs: "cocek" (the typical female ones) and "oro" (the collective dances in circle).But you can also find the influence of modern rumbas and jazz atmospheres (Veliov played in jazz bands for several years). It's a firework of sounds that was made popular in Europe by the Emir Kusturica's movie "Underground" with a soundtrack composed by Goran Bregovic. "But we do not have anything in common with that project ", Veliov and his companions proudly remarked.

The Balkans brass band was born inside a single family. "My father beat me to make me go to school", Nat Veliov remembered. "He didn't want me to play trumpets. Now he's in the Orkestar too, together with his son". The "time of the gypsies", for the Veliov family, ended only a few years ago: "My grandfather still used to travel in a caravan", Veliov told. "But today we have our home and when I'm travelling for my job is good to think of my family waiting for me at home".

You can be inebriated by watching a concert of the Kocani Orkestar and you can be involved in crazy dances all night long. Say it to their greatest Italian fan, the songwriter Vinicio Capossela, who used to enjoy like a child playing in his concerts with his Macedonian friends.