Inspector Gadje: 'Gangam'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

“We’re all losing probably collectively gallons of sweat on stage —  I mean, everybody’s shirt is soaked wet at the end of the show.”

That’s how Marco Peris Coppola, the Italian-born San Franciscan percussionist and creative strategist of Balkan brass band Inspector Gadje describes one of their stage performances. 

With 14 band members, Inspector Gadje is a frenzied force of nature that Coppola describes as participatory and celebratory, inspired by Balkan weddings and funerals. But it’s also a very demanding style of music. He says it’s not just the kind of music that makes you jump up and dance, it’s like a “therapy session,” and a way of “liberating emotions.”

“This is not just for my band … anytime you go and listen to this style of music, I see people walking in with a certain face, and I see them walking out with a smile,” he says.

Their song “Gangam” is no exception.

“It’s … a very high energy, hard-to-sit-still-through kind of music,” says Coppola. “It’s embedded in the Hijaz scale [that] is used not only in the Balkans, but also in Turkey and some parts of Middle East. But really, it’s embedded in solos as well. Sometimes it feels like the song is an excuse to get to the solo where the improvisation happens and where people get a chance to show themselves.”

Growing up in Italy, Coppola played drums with a protest band. When he moved to San Francisco he joined the Brass Liberation Orchestra, a band that plays at progressive demonstrations around the Bay Area. An association called Voice of Roma, a cultural nonprofit that promotes Roma music and works to dismantle stereotypes about Roma people, invited him and the other band members to do a six-month course with a master teacher of Roma music. That’s where Coppola learned to play a Balkan drum called the “tapan,” or “davul.” 

“After I got like an initial grip on the style, I was hooked — it was like a drug,” Coppola explains. He and four other students from the course founded Inspector Gadje.

They’ve now been playing Balkan music in the Bay Area for the last 11 years. He says their music has evolved over that time and that while they knew they could never play Balkan music like they do in the Balkans, he says they created their own American, Bay Area style that they have been playing at biannual Balkan parties since 2013.

“It kind of became almost like a ritual for this community here in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area to meet twice a year,” he says about their parties. “When I do the programming, I always try to have a different or new element per show so that there’s always a change in the color and the feeling of the evening.”

Another huge influence in the band has been Coppola’s fellow band member Ismail Lumanovski, who lives in New York but whom Coppola says they try to fly out to San Francisco at least once a year to perform and play with Inspector Gadje. Lumanovski started out as a prodigy in the Roma community, which, Coppola adds, is no mean feat.

“Ismail stood out and somebody saw him and give him a scholarship to come and do a senior high school summer program here,” says Coppola of Lumanovski, whom he says is now known throughout the Balkans and Turkey. “Then Juilliard landed their eyes on him and gave him a full-ride scholarship. … He became the first clarinetist at Juilliard. So now his career is very interesting, because he will play featured solos on various symphonies and orchestras around the world, and then he has his own project called New York Gypsy All-Stars, which is sort of like jazz, for lack of a better word.”

Ultimately, the Bay Area has also been a huge influence in the music they make.

“Coming to the Bay and seeing how all these different cultural backgrounds interact with each other, I feel like that energy and that combination of people leads us to new spots in the music that maybe have not been tried because we haven’t had this particular mix of  personnel in the same room practicing together,” he says. “The level of focus has to be there. But we always try to goof off and have a great time on stage either way. And, yeah, a lot of times I have a hard time falling asleep after.”

The band’s members include Danny Cao, Noah Levitt, Will Magid, Shane Cox, Ismail Lumanovski, Morgan Nilsen, Mike Perlmutter, Greg Jenkins, Ofir Uziel, Paul Marini, Joshua Sirotiak, Jeff Giaquinto, Greg Stevens, Greg Michalec, and Andrew Cohen.

You can hear Inspector Gadje live, performing at the Kafana Balkan Party at Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St. and Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, on Feb. 3.