[Today, Chris Landriau reviews a Balkan music festival and gives an interactive lesson on Balkan rhythms.]

On a Friday night in January, I joined an all-ages group of hipsters, folkies, and music lovers of all kinds that descended on Brooklyn’s Grand Prospect Hall for the Zlatne Uste Golden Festival, a two-day celebration of Balkan Music and Culture. As I approached, the joyful cacophony I heard wafting through the doors promised to fulfill my quest to understand the music’s infectious appeal—and to rediscover part of my family history.

I went straight upstairs to the Rainbow Room for the Brooklyn Girls Band’s debut gig, where I reached my first conclusion: Balkan music is sexy. It wasn’t just the drummer in boots and red, polka-dotted tights who commandeered her bass drum with a club in one hand and a twig in the other; it was the smiling, hand-holding crowd moving circularly around the room in a sensual groove—two steps to the right, one to the left; a fancy kick here, hands aloft there. It was a communal sexy.

Which reminded me of my brother. Back in 1985, Gene was a computer programmer by day and a folk-dancing maniac by night. After work he’d throw off his business suit, grab his opanci, and fire up his Renault Feugo; then he’d tailgate over the G.W. Bridge and down the Harlem River Drive for Yugoslavian and Hungarian dance troupe rehearsals.  Home around midnight, he’d pound our carpet in knee-high boots, slap his knees in strange rhythms, and smile beckoningly.

The Balkan bug never bit me, but I occasionally tagged along and once saw Gene perform in Carnegie Hall with Zlatne Uste—New York’s only Balkan brass band at the time. Gene eventually quit his computer job and moved to California to join Aman, a professional folk dance troupe.

Twenty-five years later, the Balkan craze is exploding. What’s so compelling? As I scanned my Golden Festivals list of 50 instrumental, dance, and vocal performing groups, I was vaguely aware this music was traditionally played while doing something else—like celebrating a wedding or birth, or plowing a field. It was not only out of context, a friend told me, but dated. To a Bosnian, the Brooklyn scene might be analogous to an American stumbling upon thousands of urban Japanese doing the Virginia Reel with manic enthusiasm.

But who cares? Even out of context, the crowd holding hands and circling round the Rainbow Room seemed authentic in another way: no irony. I was drawn into the circle dance (a “Lesno,” I later learned) and slinked across the room in a sincerely joyous trance, till I bumped into two classical-music friends standing on the side with furrowed brows. Counting out loud and tapping their thighs, they wondered: what’s the meter?

The Girls Band finished and Zlatne Uste’s members coalesced in the room’s center to begin their first set of the night with a blast of brass—trumpets, tubas, and saxophone. The electrified crowd circled around them, in true village style. My friends and I clapped along until we figured out the rhythmic cycle—seven—and I was satisfied I’d uncovered another Balkan secret: uneven beats. Newly enlightened, I rejoined the Lesno and released into the forward movement, the crowd’s momentum at my back, before ducking out to catch some singing downstairs.

But wait. You too can furrow your brow while the world cavorts with abandon around you! Balkan music’s uneven beats are so distinctive and common a feature that they’re worth a diversionary look. Here’s how it works.

Try this: tap your foot to Cold Play’s “42” and you’ll notice each beat is divided into two equal parts.

Now, tap your foot to Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and you’ll hear three subdivisions per beat.

What do you hear in Norwegian Wood?

Most Western music divides the beat either into twos or into threes, but Balkan music often has a “mixed meter.” The sub-beats don’t change duration, but they’re variously combined in groups of twos and threes to create larger, uneven beat cycles, such as 12 12 123 (a “seven”) or 12 12 12 123 (a “nine”). Tapping your foot along to a nine feels like “short, short, short, long.”  Try it with Dave Brubeck’s Blue Rondo a la Turk.

Here’s Animal Collective’s Lion in a Coma, a rare instance of a pop, mixed meter “nine:”

Here’s a cut of Zlatne Uste playing a 123 12 12  ”seven”

Why more Western musicians haven’t incorporated these deliciously off-kilter rhythms is a mystery. People obviously eat it up, and the Golden festival offered a smorgasbord.

I left the Zlatne Uste frenzy and headed downstairs—through the Grand Ballroom, past the grape leaves and mammoth olives—to the Atrium. The relatively hushed room hosted what at first seemed like collegiate a capella in an alternate universe. Gravity grounded the Yale Slavic Chorus and held their adoring fans in a predictable orbit, but the music’s harmony disobeyed familiar laws; thirds and fifths were counter-balanced by otherworldly seconds and sevenths, and the music left the impression of constantly shifting shades of light and dark.

Black Sea Hotel, the next performers, so beguiled me with their three-part vocals I didn’t even notice David Byrne was in the room. If the bands were all about rhythm (and the body), I thought, the vocal music looked inward and brought another Balkan secret to the fore: harmony. “Once I started singing this music, I didn’t want to sing anything else,” said singer Sarah Small, afterwards.

Black Sea Hotel, Vurba Ima, Vurba Njama

Their performance reminded me of an album Gene had given me years ago, Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, which has so many songs with strangely beautiful harmony and mixed meter. Listen to “Dragana” and try counting along: 12 12 123 1212  –it’s an “eleven!”

Finally, I hit the Grand Ballroom’s balcony and texted Gene to say I was watching Zlatne Uste rock the multitudes with a Balkan hit parade. I thought wistfully of the 1980s when the folk-dance scene was my brother’s second family—and when Zlatne Uste decided to throw a party one January to combat the post-holiday blues. Since then, professional musicians have entered the mix, crowds have grown, and there’s less emphasis on folk dance. Slavic Soul Party mixes funk and jazz into their sound, for example, and Veveritse boasts New Orleans brass players who came to New York after Katrina. I hadn’t seen Gene in more than a year and, as I gazed down on the revelers from the balcony, felt my own post-holiday blues rising within. So I went downstairs and lost myself in one more dance.

Chris Landriau is a musician and teacher. He lives in Park Slope and brews his own Kombucha.