Recap: Mucca Pazza at Memorial Union Terrace
Eric Harvey Brown
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If Madison only had Forward Music Fest to rely on, music junkies would have had to wait until the early evening to hear some live jams on Friday. Fortunately, the Madison World Music Festival picked up the slack, kicking the day off at 3 p.m. with the first of two sets by Chicago’s inimitable “circus punk” marching band Mucca Pazza. True to form, the brass, drums, and woodwinds clomped in from the horizon and performed their “oompah” ditties directly in front of the Memorial Union Terrace stage. Even though the ensemble can swell to 30 members at full tilt, this afternoon saw them stripped down to a relatively spare 16-piece.
With their mismatched school-band uniforms and haphazard choreography, Mucca Pazza made for quite a spectacle on their own, so the fest’s decision to pair them with stilt artists Dragon Knights was like sprinkling bad caviar on a righteous party sub. Covered in elaborate face paint, and pretending to ride fake ostriches, the unsmiling Knights meandered around the Memorial Terrace like an out-of-work Cirque Du Soleil act, poking at happy hour drinkers and generally acting annoyed at being so handily upstaged.
Fortunately, Dragon Knights were gone by the second set, replaced by one of Mucca Pazza’s staff cheerleaders and a much bigger, more receptive crowd. The band took the opportunity to spread out, both musically and physically. Though they managed to pile on the small stage this time around, stray members continuously popped up all over the place for solos: in the crowd, standing on the speakers, and perched on those weird oversized replicas of the Terrace chairs. Towards the end of the set, they even took a break while one member conducted the audience like a disorganized, slightly buzzed orchestra.
Whether it was a product of the band’s good vibes or the Memorial Union’s lethal beer taps, the crowd went along with it, and in what seemed like a potential momentum-killing gambit actually loosened folks up a bit. When the band kicked into high gear again, even some grown-ups joined the little kids dancing up front. Who knows what exactly Mucca Pazza were doing at a World Music Festival—they’re from 150 miles away and play music that’s about as authentically Balkan as Beirut’s—but they walked away having performed two of the most entertaining sets of a very crowded weekend.
