Friday, December 14, The Berkeley Balkan Bacchanal features The Keepers, Alex Hand Band and Baymele. The Berkeley Balkan Bacchanal presents a new rotation of bands the Starry Plough Pub on the second Friday of every month. Berkeley Balkan Bacchanal is a concert series featuring the other-worldy talent of musicians from the Bay Area and beyond performing Eastern European folk music. A hub in the Bay Area Balkan music scene, the bacchanal provides a platform for a community of performers, folk dancers, regular attendants and new friends to revel together every month since 2011.

The Keepers start with a bedrock of traditional Arabic beats by brother Faisal Zedan, add a layer of impeccable accordion by Dan Cantrell, and finish it off with a harmonious frenzy of horns by Joey and Calvin Lai.

With a setlist that ranges from Bulgarian wedding tunes to hot club jazz, the Alex Hand Band mines the common ground between swing and Eastern European folk dance music–the soundtrack of Western music moving across Balkan borders and being changed by European village music. Alex Hand is a guitarist, currently based in the San Francisco area. Alex’s musical journey has taken him from classic rock and punk to classical guitar, jazz and the Django Reinhardt tradition.

Bay Area klezmer trio Baymele (“little tree” in Yiddish) brings together fiddler Matthew Stein, cellist Misha Khalikulov, and accordionist Dmitri Gaskin. Cultivating and celebrating Ashkenazi Jewish musical identity, their repertoire includes Jewish and co-territorial tunes from Romania, Poland, and Ukraine, Yiddish folk song, Jewish art music, and new compositions and improvisation.