A CHANCE conversation in Allendale led to the formation of a band that specialises in Balkan folk music and the even more distinctive sound of Jewish klezmer.

For it turned out professional clarinetist Dov Goldberg shared an interest in the music of south-eastern Europe with his daughter’s fiddle teacher Morag Brown, and, in turn, with her partner, Lewis Powell-Reid.

Stir Fraser Watson, a drummer who visits Bulgaria every year, Tony Abel, a double bass player with a love of jazz, and Morag and Lewis’s passion for Greece into the mix and you end up with Horovod – the band that wowed Hexham Abbey Festival-goers last night.

To date, their particular blend of clarinet, accordion and fiddle music, driven by the percussive beat of tapan, darbuka and bouzouki, has played out at gigs as far afield as Edinburgh and Lancaster, and many a place inbetween.

Dov said he became hooked after being introduced to influential Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov. “When I went into the Bulgarian genre more deeply, it was quite interesting because folk isn’t an ‘old’ tradition in the Balkans and Turkey – it’s more of a living tradition that is part and parcel of the modern pop industry.

“They have pop bands surrounded by electronic instruments playing a particular type of music, called chalga, which isn’t highly regarded to be honest, but it is as much folk as folk music played anywhere else in the world.”

The music is very different to that favoured in the west. “From a musician’s point of view, their scales are different from western scales in that they have a wider interval at some points,” Dov said. “The rhythms are more asymetric.

“With globalisation, the thing about music is that more and more, you can hear the common roots and in the case of Balkan music, some of the tunes are the same as those we associate with Bollywood and its upbeat dance tunes.”