FERUS THE KING – JAZZ, FOLK, DANCE

Ferus Mustasfov was named “the Balkan king of swing” by the largest German newspaper “FAZ – Frankfurter Alegemaine Zeitung”. Here he tries his hand in classic jazz (yeah, believe it or not, there are couple of songs that could have been made by some of the best jazz musicians), but in most songs he doesn’t want to run away from the Balkan ethno sound that rains all over the CD, mixing jazz with folk and folk dance songs. The thing is that the ethno element in some songs is rather well covered and converted in a jazzy way, so only a person from Balkans that knows the original songs could say that this is not a regular jazz song, but it has its roots in some Macedonian or Gypsy folk song. 
The album is fully instrumental, with Ferus’s sax dominating all over the place. It is so different from song to song, you will be surprised with the richness of the various types of music stemming from the Balkans, as well as the inclusion of music of various cultures – Macedonian, Roma (Gypsy), Greek and Oriental.
Anyway, the most important thing to say is that here we have a jazz album from Ferus Mustafov, a person who is known by his belly dance music and here he proves that jazz is his domain in a rather high quality fashion.