Balkan Beat Box Cancel Tour Over Visa Troubles

There's bad news for anyone who was planning on catching Mediterranean fusion band Balkan Beat Box on either their west coast tour or at Langerado Music Festival. The band was denied entry into the United States because of visa issues, which have not been specified.

This is yet another instance in a long string of similar incidents, where a culturally unique artist or group has been denied entry into the States, usually over a minor bureaucratic detail (a common problem is that one of the tour venues didn't submit the correct paperwork to verify a performance, or other similar issues). I'm not convinced that national security and simplified entry for artists are mutually exclusive concepts. Balkan Beat Box, for example, has been in the country a number of times before. They have a reasonable amount of recognizance, they've been reviewed and covered in major newspapers and magazines... they've clearly not presented a threat to our security thus far, so why should an overly complicated process for entry (a process which often involves dozens of different people, all of whom must fill everything out flawlessly) keep them from adding a little bit of cultural diplomacy to our lives?

At any rate, for obvious reasons, Balkan Beat Box is feeling pretty bad, and as a token, they've released a free download on their MySpace page: Ramallah Tel Aviv (you may need to be a MySpace user to download this song).

Photo (c) Seth Kushner