TWM Bulgaria Romania Folk Music and Culture: Yuri Yunakov

Yuri Yunakov is a Turkish-Bulgarian Rom and is one of the founders of Bulgaria's wildly popular "wedding music" style. A saxophone player of incredible skill, his command of the style's fast-paced, complicated, and shifting time signatures has been known to make whole rooms full of people get up and dance “as one” in joyous frenzy.

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BULGARIA/ ROM SAXOPHONE 1: ROM WEDDING MUSIC In 1983, a famous young Roma musician Yuri Yunakov joined forces with the renowned clarinetist, Ivo Papasov, and helped build the "wedding music" movement in Bulgaria. The musical style called "Wedding music" evolved from Indian, Turkish, Arabic, Rom, and Balkan traditions, and it was also influenced by such western styles as jazz and rock. Yunakov drew on his Rom musical roots and plunged into the freedom of the wedding style. Improvisation and freedom is crucial to this style, along with complex time signatures and unusual tunings. Even though there was persecution from the political powers that feared such musical/ political freedom, the Papasov-Yunakov band attracted a devoted following. People would line up for blocks to crash wedding parties when they found out that the group would be playing. Eventually, the political powers had to give up trying to silence the music, and they even had to create official festivals of this music! Now Rom “wedding music” style is spreading its influence far beyond the borders of Bulgaria.

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