14 June: Midsummer fundraising performance for St Mary’s Old Church in Stoke Newington at 3.15pm, location is opposite, outside the new church, afternoon is free for all.

18 June: Bow & Bellows will perform in Blacktooth’s production Into the Mystic with WB Yeats at the Union Church Community Centre, Ferme Park Road N8, 7.30pm

Would you like Bow & Bellows to play at your event? Please get in touch. You can listen to our music on Bandcamp and YouTube.

Repertoire

Much of our repertoire is drawn from the songs and dances which have been heard at weddings, parties, feasts, and wakes for hundreds of years, most of them originating in Eastern Europe but some from further west. We play Klezmer tunes, fast dances from Transylvania with wild, asymmetrical metres, slow haunting waltzes from Romania, jazzy gypsy pieces, as well as toe-tapping French and Celtic melodies. Download set list.

We sing songs in Serbian, Bosnian, Roma Gypsy and Ladino, Georgian, Bulgarian, French and very occasionally in English.

As well arranging music from many traditions we play our own compositions. And whilst the bellows of the accordion and the bow (with its fiddle) are the basis of our sound,  our music is also influenced by the fact that one of us plays several other instruments – the Baritone Horn might be whipped out to give the flavour of a Macedonian brass band, or the high sopranino recorder to conjure up vast mountain distances.