Band welcomes fans onstage
By Blaise Hammer
Oct. 9, 2007 10:06 p.m.
Beirut probably has a rough relationship with its security team, as the band promotes extreme audience participation at its concerts.
“You should definitely jump on stage. Stop by and say “˜hi’ and jump on stage for sure,” said Jason Poranski, a member of Zach Condon’s Gypsy and Eastern European-influenced group, Beirut.
“I think we all enjoy it, getting people up there, musicians or audience members, anybody.”
Beirut, now on tour promoting the recent release of its second major LP, “The Flying Club Cup,” will stop by the Avalon tonight and let the local crowd infiltrate the stage. And though you may be wary of crashing an onstage dance party of a group you haven’t heard before, Poranski hopes that audiences will come precisely because the band is little known.
“You know, this music is fun to play. And I think everybody wants to hear something else; people want to hear something new,” Poranski said.
Beirut’s music has rightfully been called foreign by many uninitiated ears.
Beirut strategically avoids the conventional rock band arrangement of bass, guitar and drums, and instead it intermixes traditional orchestra sounds with some modern alternative folk undertones. With blaring trumpets and an amalgam of eccentric instruments such as the ukulele, mandolin, glockenspiel and euphonium, their hodgepodge accumulation of sound has been dubbed “gypsy.”
The creative force behind Beirut is band leader and creator Zach Condon, who started Beirut a few years ago after coming home from a trip to Europe. And though people love to discuss the Gypsy or Eastern European sound, Poranski sees these things as merely muses for the band or as a background for the music to grow.
“Any artist has to have some sort of starting point and influence or guidelines, and the thing about those is that that’s really what they are, just a starting point to express yourself in some way,” Poranski said.
The growing success that Beirut has experienced over the past year can largely be attributed to the Internet and the blogosphere, where Beirut has been grabbing the international attention of World Wide Web watchers.
“(The Internet) does help. I mean those first shows had a lot of people attending and that’s mainly due to the Internet, due to a MySpace type of thing. You can’t complain, that’s the era we are in, right? It helps us out for sure,” Poranski said.
And now that the fan base is there, Beirut will be taking to the roads yet again to share its music around the world.
In a fashion hardly characteristic of music called gypsy, most of the venues that Beirut will be playing at this time around are more posh than the average bar or small club. But the spirit remains, and such an atmosphere neither stifles the music nor the crowd.
“We just played in Toronto last night, where it was a seated venue and surprisingly everyone was standing up anyway. We had a bunch of people jumping on the stage and dancing,” Poranski said. “The fans aren’t just sitting there nodding their heads.”
