Dancing in the Street
A curious busking troupe takes up residence downtown
by W.M. Akers
Take a stroll down Broadway or Second Avenue this weekend and you might run into Albania Mania, an Eastern European orchestra busking among tourists, singer-songwriters and would-be country stars. Their roll call of instruments includes cello, trombone, fiddle, washtub bin and musical saw, and they speak in broken English with accents of varying thickness, origin and consistency. Stop for a chat with the accordionist, Joshan, Man of Business, and he might reveal that they’re a musical family of Albanian immigrants.
“We were working for a factory that makes exercise balls and sells them to America,” Joshan says. “And we just stole 100 of them and tied them to our bus, then floated across the Atlantic to become famous and ultimately go back to Albania, our homeland, as superstars.”
The only problem is, the story isn’t quite true. In fact, the band, whose members range in age from 18 to 25, formed in Knoxville. Most are from Tennessee; all were born in the States, and they all live in Nashville. This troupe of mock Albanians—whose size fluctuates from trip to trip, even during a trip, between four and nine people—busk to travel. It’s certainly not for riches, and, as for fame—well, it never hurts to dream.
“When we met, we said, ‘Let’s start playing music on the street,’ ” says drummer Charice Starr, whose Albanian name is Jehona. “I didn’t have my sax and they needed rhythm, so I started playing drums hoping that nobody would listen to me. All I had to do was make a rhythm. Originally [in early 2005], we just played downtown for beer money. And it worked—people gave us money.”
In June of last year they bought a decommissioned school bus at auction, added an extra gas tank so that it could run on discarded restaurant grease and set out to see the western states for as little as possible.
Grease is free—they usually get it from Japanese restaurants, meaning an aroma of tempura follows them—and they quickly learned how to live on just a few dollars a day. “If you only have $2, you’ll figure out how to live with only $2,” explains Joshan, whose legal name is Josh Kaufman. Cabbage, peanut butter and discarded bagels were staples, as well as anything that could be obtained by Dumpster diving. “America’s so wasteful that you can always find a box of apples in a grocery store in the Dumpster,” he adds.
Aside from Josh and his older brother Justin, who both have an extensive musical background, most of the members of Albania Mania joined the group unfamiliar with their instruments, so the music is expectedly ragged. (They have a MySpace page, myspace.com/albaniamaniareally, with samples for the curious, and they’re recording an album now.) It’s a spooky cacophony of weepy, accordion-accented folk songs permeated with old-world melodrama. They dress like gypsies gussied up for a wedding, wearing modest dresses and muted, tight-fitting suits, and they play with absolute earnestness, moaning out lyrics of heartbreak and doom while they lean on their instruments for every ounce of sadness that can be wrung from them. That potential for melodrama is what drew them to the theatricality of Eastern music, and they chose Albania for the same reason, it seems, that Dustin Hoffman did in Wag the Dog. “Who knows anything about Albania?”
Showmanship aside, they are not over-the-top people. “The only way we could like our music was if we had characters to hide behind—people who love America and love the music that we play, who think we’re awesome and just want to be famous,” says Kaufman. “That way we don’t have to do any of these things and can still be self-loathing in private, while in public we can be showmen and hide behind our characters.
“Our music sucks, but we make enough money to live, and you get better as you need more money. Once you start gigging, that goes away. The better you get, the more money you get, and the more comfortable you get, the worse you get.”
The greatest recent expense for the band, whose cross-country travels of the last year have been funded almost totally by busking, has been replacing the bus’s engine, which committed suicide in Savannah just before St. Patrick’s Day. It incinerated while they watched. But rather than split up, the faux Albanians decided to raise the money for the repair, and at the start of June they ended their three months of rest and began traveling again, this time to Chicago, New York and Quebec.
In the end, the bus didn’t make it and was soon abandoned in favor of car travel. But in Montreal they were asked recently to play at an Eastern European music festival in September, so they will be making their way north again soon. In the meantime, they’ll be playing a few “gigs” around Nashville, including downtown this Saturday, in the vicinity of Broadway and Second Avenue.
If all this sounds a little like a musical version of the Borat gag, note that the band’s two greatest ideological commitments are to “public art, definitely, and accents,” according to Justin Kaufman. “You can’t take any of this too seriously, and accents help everything be much sillier than it really is. You want to keep everything as silly as possible.”
And despite their abandonment of the bus as the mode of travel, they have not forgotten their founding principles, nor have they lost sight of the fame that only the promised land of America can offer. “We want to be sponsored by Sparks and Oprah,” says Starr. “We want to get famous, because I’m not at college and my parents hate me.”
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