Andy Irvine & Dónal Lunny's Mozaik ~ 'Suleiman's Kopanitsa'

On Saturday 16 July 2005, Mozaik performed in Dolgellau (Wales, UK) during the yearly open-air festival called 'Sesiwn Fawr' ('the Big Session' in Welsh), which was also the first gig of Mozaik's very first UK & European tour (16 July-28 August). Since its creation, Andy's "band to die for" had already toured in Australia (1 March-1 April 2002), the USA (19 March-11 April 2004) and Ireland (18 July-3 August 2004), but since I had been unable to travel to any of these earlier tours, I was determined not to miss this one!

Their set turned out to be very close to the track list of their first album, 'Live at the Powerhouse', including this great Macedonian/Bulgarian dance tune, 'Suleiman's Kopanitsa', which had also been recorded on Andy's 'East Wind' studio album in 1992, under the name of 'Dance of Suleiman'.

Unfortunately, this video is of poor quality, because the crowd of 5,000 people was very noisy, the sound system kept howling with feedback, and the on-stage camera crew seemed quite determined to obstruct my view at random, thus causing me to have to shift my camera repeatedly in my attempts to film the band! {8-((

However, I decided to upload it anyway, because:

1. there are (currently) very few videos on YouTube showing Mozaik in performance, which is a great pity;

2. most importantly, and for those who already know this very exciting tune, Dónal Lunny's bouzouki arrangement on this occasion is quite different from the live album recording and, I think, truly amazing and well worth listening to.

Above all, you can see that these outstanding musicians are really enjoying being together once again, and playing superb music!

I therefore hope that all you Mozaik fans out there will appreciate this great performance, even if the audio-visual quality of this video is quite inferior to the standard I would have liked...

With kind regards;
Patrick.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Mozaik
• Andy
• Irvine
• Dónal
• Lunny
• Nikola
• Parov
• Bruce
• Molsky
• Rens
• van
• der
• Zalm
• 'Dance
• of
• Suleiman'
• Macedonia
• Bulgaria
• Kopanitsa
• 11/16
• Sesiwn
• Fawr
• Dolgellau
• Wales
• July
• 2005

[surfandtradpcm]

@damieno1773 I have the first cd it's for sale on amazon.

[damieno1773]

Thanks again Patrick for sharing this. I just love Mozaik. I've got Changing Trains, but can't get hold of their first CD, pity as they are just brilliant.

[surfandtradpcm]

I love mozaik but there is one more video on you tube of them playing