Olifantenpad Brass Band w/ GOSTI

Oifantenpad Brass Band

Olifantenpad Brass Band was conceived in 2025 out of deep and long enduring love of Balkan/Eastern European Brass Band Music. Come and immerse your ears and your hearts with this 10 piece all brass group with a side of percussion. Queensland’s only Balkan/Eastern European Brass band play a mixture of the familiar and not so familiar Eastern European tunes. Beautiful brass-filled folk and modern tunes from Ukraine,Turkey, the Balkan States, Romania to name a few, will fill the room.

Come be merry, warm the body and bop along, let loose, stand in silent judgement, or just try something new. It’s live and local music played with passion, and you’ll probably love it.

Gosti

Tunji Beier at the age of ten was studying Yoruba drumming in Nigeria. Six years later he travelled to Bangalore in South India to study percussion for three years at the Karnakata College of Percussion under the mentorship of Mr TAS Mani. This intense period of study enables Tunji to bring his mastery of the mridangam, kanjira, ghattam and morsing to the instrumentation of Gosti.

Philip Griffin’s skills and interests in music performance span instrumental and vocal forms from Medieval music to World Music/Jazz to Germanic opera and many more besides.  In his own words, “Since the 1980s I have been playing music in a wide variety of styles, photographing all kinds of things (but particularly birds, frogs and reptiles), making videos, teaching, music directing choirs and theatrical productions, and quite a few other activities besides”.  In this trio he mainly plays oud, laouto, electric bass and rabab.

Linsey Pollak discovered a bamboo grove when he was 19 and has been making and designing wind instruments ever since. While making instruments in London in the 1970s, he travelled to Macedonia to study the gaida (Macedonian bagpipes) for eight months; an experience that changed his life. Since then he has created dozens of varied music projects and toured his solo shows all over the world. In this trio he plays his self-made instruments – cylisax, hybrid duduk, clarinis, gaidanet, Crow and Donna.

The music played by Gosti is mostly original compositions by Linsey Pollak.  However, each of the three players brings a diverse array of sounds, skills, styles, and emotional content to the music that develops and extends each of the compositions. The real strength of the trio lies with the journeys that these pieces are taken by way of the improvisations and solos of all three players and also by the ease with which they all play and improvise together. The sound of Gosti is fresh, but listeners can also hear the maturity and depth that long-term musical partnerships can bestow.