Get Balkanized!

CAFÉ ANTARSIA ENSEMBLE’s Songs Of The Table is a high passion “world folk” album inspired by Greek Rebetiko, Kritika rebel songs and Balkan Rroma/Gypsy music, rooted in the rhythms of Middle Eastern percussion and Americana folk. The CD was recorded in the summer of 2006 in the sanctuary of Pagosa Springs, Colorado, produced by Kevin Johnson after Nikos Brisco and Ruth Margraff returned from a four month Fulbright “New Opera” fellowship in Athens, Thessaloniki, Paros and Crete (Greece). The CD features exotic, handmade instruments such as French Gypsy Guitars, Greek Bouzouki, Tzouras and Baglama, Cretan Laouto, Accordion, Tabla, Riq and frame drum. Greek-Texan composer/songwriter Nikos Brisco's hauntingly urgent melodies are complemented beautifully by the panoramic poetics and portrait-driven lyrics of playwright/performer Ruth Margraff. The album’s ornaments and vocals owe much to wandering the maketplaces of Sarajevo, Dubrovnik and Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia as well as to the painted darkness of New York City’s downtown theaters and epic taverns all the way from Astoria, Queens to the timeless island of Crete.