Fake Orchestra

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Fake Orchestra

http://www.myspace.com/fakeorchestra

Established in 1997 and anything but fake, Fake Orchestra are a masterful collective of musicians with a profoundly eclectic musical vision. Emerging from jazz music methodology, they can smoothly merge Slavic folk, African rhythms, Italian canzoni, groovy rock riffs and cabaret songs in almost one go. As easily playing avant-garde as providing likeable pop sounds, they are in a way a parody of world music industry. Still the same, they do take their music seriously.

Line up

The collective is hard to pin down, as the seven members of the band core are regularly supported by guest musicians. This in mind, Fake Orchestra are the band leader Igor Leonardi on guitar, Ana Vipotnik on vocals, Aljoša Jerič on drums (before him, this position was taken by the excellent Aleš Rendla), Jelena Ždrale on violin, Blaž Celarc on percussion, Nino De Gleria on bass and, finally, Primož Fleischman on saxophone. Musicians that sometimes join them are the prodigal multi-instrumentalist Boštjan Gombač from Terrafolk, accordionist Drago Ivanuša, David Jarh on trumpet and vocalist Janja Majzelj.

Discography and performances

After forming, the bend focused on live performances and building it's repertoire of songs. Many of them were imaginative covers of Slovene folk songs, some were their own compositions and others were more or less unfaithful takes on jazz or rock standards. Leonardi explains how their repertoire grew by the diversity of their identities, saying that "every member of Fake Orchestra brings their own ideas and their own repertoire. Ana, our singer who does the Slovene songs, was taught these traditional songs by her father. Our other singer, Janja, is an actress - she sings more cabaret and Latin stuff, meaning Spanish, French, Italian songs. Jelena [Ždrale], our violinist, has Balkan roots - she is from Bosnia - so she brought these Bosnian songs and Macedonian songs, of which we also have quite a few".

This culminated in the album titled Fake life, a live recording from the 2001 Cerkno Jazz Festival and a few years later in a studio record called Fake World (2004). While the first one was orientated to more free and improvised music, the second one reflected their takes on Slovenian and global folk music, featuring a lot of vocals. The next CD came out in 2009 and continued their musical vision, even more strongly showing the composing and re-arranging skills of the bend and its leader. In line with their concept of international musical transpositions, the album is named Made in China.

{{#oembed:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crB1K3gcqm%7C576}} An excerpt of their performance in 2009.

Igor Leonardi's other work

The band leader Igor Leonardi has a remarkable musical history, as he is also a co-founder of two important Slovenian avant-garde bands that formed and worked in the 1980s - Quatebriga and Begnagrad. There is a certain continuity from them to Fake Orchestra, as a big part of its current and past collective also played in those two bends. In those times, he also played with another notable Yugoslavian bend Miladojka Youneed.

Later, in the 90s, Leonardi spent most of his time in America, where he used to play and study with the legendary Don Cherry; he also played with the famous bend Metallica and performed on numerous international jazz festivals (San Francisco, New York, Houston, Zurich, Prague, Ljubljana, Istanbul, Belgrade etc). In Oakland, California, he worked as an expert for various strains of world music. Till now, he also composed a lot of music for film and theatre productions, released an album of his compositions and started a music TV show on National television. And, of course, played a lot with a number of bends and musicians.

External links

• Fake Orchestra on MySpace
• An article about Fake Orchestra on Rootsworld (In English)