Fake Orchestra
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.
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.
In Slovenia, he composed a lot of music for film and theatre productions and released an album of his compositions
ince the 1980s, Leonardi has been a prolific composer of music for Slovenia
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 first culminated in the album titled Fake life, a live recording from the 2001 Cerkno Jazz Festival.