THE LEMON BUCKET ORKESTRA as part of Buskerfest in and around the St. Lawrence Market (Front, between Yonge and Jarvis), tonight through Sunday (August 23-26), noon to 10 pm. Free. torontobuskerfest.com. See listing.
It’s 10 pm on a Tuesday, and the corner of Church and Wellington is packed. Over the heads of revellers, surreptitious flask-sippers and confused patio-sitters, a tuba, a violin and a megaphone peek out, the muffled sounds of energetic Ukrainian folk barely audible over handclaps, percussion and audience chants.
It’s not where I expected to be when I arranged to meet up with the Lemon Bucket Orkestra, but it’s hardly out of the ordinary for the band’s 14 members. I’d met up with Toronto’s self-proclaimed “only Balkan-klezmer-Gypsy-punk super-band” at Bloor and Spadina, but we’d somehow ended up in the midst of a hundreds-strong celebration – part public space intervention, part fire-spinning, street-dancing block party – commemorating the ninth anniversary of the great Toronto blackout of 2003.
“We love to play for people when they’re not expecting it,” says mohawked fiddler/bandleader Mark Marczyk. “Venues and festivals are fun, but what’s really awesome is getting people who aren’t saying, ‘I’m going to a folk festival to listen to folk or to a jazz festival to listen to jazz,’ but ‘I’m going to work and there’s a group of people having fun and celebrating life. I should be doing that, too.'”
Just as likely to be found marching outside a venue as inside it, the band updates the traditional sounds of Eastern European music with a modern punk edge, breaking it out of its specialized niche and bringing it to the streets of Canada.
They’ve mostly done this from a position of relative obscurity, though they recently won some internet fame when a video of them playing a spontaneous Gypsy folk tune aboard a delayed Air Canada flight spread to the pages of Gawker, CNN and Fox News.
That flight, taking them to Romania for a tour, was only a small part of their adventure. In the three weeks prior to leaving, they’d raised $15,000 for the trip through street busking, and then, after playing 15 shows in two weeks, went home with a letter from the Canadian embassy in Romania hailing them as “cultural ambassadors” and “crusaders for diversity and respect.”
“We’re not about representing Canadian culture so much as the Canadian open mind,” says flamboyant moustached accordionist Tangi Ropars (originally from Brittany, France). “We’re not just about sharing and mixing different cultures, but also learning about other cultures and respecting their traditions. We want to create a circle of creative energy.”
Interview Clips
Lemon Bucket Orkestra’s biggest brush with fame came when a video of them playing aboard a delayed Air Canada Flight went viral. Marczyk and Ropars explain how it came about, and reveal what happened after the camera stopped rolling.
Everyone in the band has a different cultural and musical background. Here, Ropars and Marczyk attempt a short list, and argue that they’re not just appropriating, but staying true to traditions while simultaneously blending and updating them.
Marczyk and Ropars explain the differences between playing for Canadians and Romanians. It’s not what you might think.
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