These boys of summer are members of Toronto’s Lemon Bucket Orkestra. They have lots of exciting reasons to blow their own horns, and no difficulty getting audiences to dance to their beat.
LBO began in 2010 as a four-person street busking band consisting of Mark Marczyk, violin and vocals, Oskar Lambarri, drum and vocals, Tangi Ropars, button accordion, and Alex Nahirny, guitar. In 2016, it’s now a band of 16-plus, rolling merrily into its sixth summer and gathering members as it goes, the way a rolling ball of burdock gathers more burdock: vocals, strings, winds, brass, percussion, including a range of world/folk instruments. The music is every bit as vigorous as “Balkan-klezmer-gypsy-party-punk-super band” suggests, and so is their schedule.
Counting Sheep: A Guerrilla Folk Opera is LBO’s current performance project. It’s an interactive video-music-dinner-theatre play about the Maidan Revolution, which will be performed August 5 to 29 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival following its May 26 to June 5 Toronto run at Broadview Place. The Ukrainian polyphonic choral music, exuberant performances and powerful visuals offer a visceral experience of living with present-day revolution. Based on the 2014 Kyiv experiences of band-members Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva, the show includes the audience alongside the ensemble members in stylized white sheep masks – there is food and music and dancing for everyone, blurring the line between what is theatre and real life.
But before Lemon Bucket Orkestra takes off for Edinburgh they’ll be shaking things up here in Canada. They have Toronto concerts at Roy Thomson Hall (“Live on the Patio” series, June 23) and at the Opera House, with Romanian band Fanfare Ciocarlia (TD Toronto Jazz Festival, June 29) followed by appearances at eight Canadian festivals including the Hillside Festival (July 24, in Guelph), Ottawa Chamberfest (July 28), and then another concert at Toronto’s Mel Lastman Square (July 29).
Lemon Bucket’s newest recording Moorka, nominated for a 2016 JUNO Award, has just won a Canadian Folk Music Award – “World Group of the Year.” It includes folk songs the band learned on their last European tour from local musicians in Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, and Macedonia, but these are spiked and shaken up into the stirring musical mix LBO audiences now hunger for in Canada and around the world. By all accounts, no matter where the band is playing, people find themselves irresistibly drawn in – weirdly at home with and involved in music that is simultaneously exotic and familiar. This includes the passengers on a delayed Air Canada flight from Toronto to Frankfurt in 2012 who were treated to an impromptu concert while Lemon Bucket waited to take off for their “Balkan Station Romania Tour.”
