Cocek

Video Find of the Day

One of the tricks I use to find international folk music is to take the trouble to dig up the terms the people in each region and ethnic group use for their different kinds of traditional music. Sometimes I find a term that crosses cultures and leads to new discoveries every time I search on it. One great example is "cocek." Cocek is an anglicization of several words from different languages, sharing a common origin in Turkish. There is Serbian Čoček. In Macedonian Cyrillic it's: чочек. In Albanian: Qyqek. In Bulgarian: кючек. You also want to look out for transliterations such as
kyuchek.

Cocek is believed to have originated with Ottoman military brass bands. It was adopted into gypsy culture which both preserved it and developed it as dance music. In English it's therefore been called gypsy brass. It also is called belly dance music, because it's often used for that sort of thing.

Here's a great video example.



More examples of just the music, no videos, can be found in Real Media form at Cocek Music. I especially like Prokupacko Oro