Brass insanity!! The Guca Trumpet Festival is ON

The trumpet capital of the world is not New Orleans, or Vienna, or even Elkhart, Indiana. For ten days in August, at least, it's Serbia. 500,000 visitors come to Guca (pronounced GOO-ja), about 150 miles from Sarajevo, to hear 2,000 brass musicians at the Guca Trumpet Festival.

If you're thinking of Woodstock, though, or even Bonnaroo, think again. There's not much to Guca, a village of 2,022, and the promoters don't do a lot to dress it up.

“You come here in the morning perhaps, and it can look unremarkable,” explains Shantel, a DJ and musician who performed on Tuesday at the festival. “There are no big stages like you have at major festivals and it looks like a big wedding with grills for cooking meat and people camping. It’s a bit anarchic in a way. And then it turns into a totally thrilling, emotional party extravaganza.”

There are two stages — a small platform outside the cultural center and the stadium where the award competitions take place. But the stages are a sideshow. Once you've traveled to Guca, the festival literally comes to you.

Bands wander through the streets in the center of town, mostly Roma (gypsies), and converge on tables where festivalgoers are bolting down into steaming plates of barbecue and meat stew. As they serenade the diners and the beer flows, so do the tips. By tradition, fans stick a 200 or 500 dinar note on players' brows or shove it down the bell of their trumpet to spur them on to ever greater brass pyrotechnics. Wilder playing = wilder dancing = more drinking = more tips. And so on.

"Unlike other festivals, here, musicians are close to you: you are in the middle of the band, you can talk to them," said a German named Markus, a young German fan of the Balkan beat sound. The theme of this year's edition is "You Only Live Once". In Guca's central square thousands of visitors are taking that to heart, dancing every night around Guca's trumpet player  monument in a kind of horn-fueled, Balkan rave.

Since its founding in 1961, the Guca festival has been the antithesis of the slick, expensive, corporate staging that has soured many young fans on pop music. What you can see in these videos is the vitality of this rootsy Balkan style. The musicians at Guca are young, and so is the audience. There's nothing quaint or dated about the buzzing horn lines and jumping beats — the music is as visceral and edgy as the punkiest rock.

“We live in a technocratic world,” adds DJ Shantel. “We live in a situation where pop music has lost its rebelliousness and Balkan music has this attitude that is perhaps the antithesis of the status quo we have in rock and pop culture today.”

A decidedly un-dressed up affair, Guca has remained faithful to its Balkan roots. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, however, the festival is starting to welcome the world.

Foreign bands being invited to compete in an International Top Trumpet for the very first time. Bands from Europe, Africa and the USA have come to Guca this year, and even a group of Aborigines from Australia.

15 orchestras from Russia, the U.S., Germany, Macedonia, Poland, Austria, Turkey, France and Romania are competing alongside Serbians for the title of the World's First Trumpet.

And, just when you'd thought you'd heard the last of them, alongside the candy and roasting pigs in the town center, vuvuzelas are selling briskly.

[Sources: The National (UAE), AFP, BalkanInsight.com]