Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Ivo Papasov (Иво Папазов)


Rotterdam 2005 worldmusic filmed by dolf pauw

A prominent performer of “wedding music,” who is frequently referred to as the creator of the genre, Ivo Papasov, is of a mixed Turkish-Roma origin. His wedding band Trakya quickly gained popularity in Bulgaria in the first half of the 1980s. During the period 1984-1989 the Communist party started a cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority in Bulgaria and as a result, the members of Trakya band were arrested twice for popularizing what was considered by the government purely Turkish music. It was around the same time when a British impresario Joe Boyd (Hannibal Records) “organized a sponsored tour of Trakya in Europe and the United States”. The tour helped the band sell a large number of records and “bring Eastern-European music to a Western audience”. In 2005 Papasov won the BBC‟s Radio3 World Music Awards “with the highest number of votes in the contest‟s history” contributing to the spread of Bulgarian “wedding music” and proving that the mixture of Bulgarian, Roma and Turkish music produces a successful outcome that is appreciated abroad.

 

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