In 2022, trumpeter Volker Goetze commissioned fellow Staten Island musician, composer/accordionst Guy Klucevsek, to compose and arrange music to accompany the visit of Little Amal Walks to Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island.

They formed an ad hoc quartet with Jeff Hudgins and Doug Wieselman for the event. A year later, Goetz raised additional funds for Klucevsek to create more material and the quartet reunited for a concert performance at the Newhouse Center at Snug Harbor, preceded by a week of recording at Casa Klucevsek. This is their first performance outside of Staten Island, to coincide with the release of their debut recording, “Little Big Top,” on Motéma Music.

Klucevsek’s eclectic, wide-ranging music pays tribute to Nino Rota, Rufus Reid, Kurt Weill, Ethiopian pop music, carousel music, the circus; genre music including the blues, hymn, waltz, tango, ballad and polka; and balkan folk music. He has performed at Roulette numerous times, starting in the early 1980s.

“Klucevsek’s ingenious, endless invention with ostinato, shadings of density and harmonic tension, counter-melody, virtuosic ornamental lines that spin brilliantly about the melody, divisional playing and, especially, sly displacement of rhythm and meters make his music constantly engaging. The slip-sliding metric relationships of the various lines in the mix are as sophisticated as the layered rhythms of West African drumming; witty turns of musical phrase, pull-the-rug modulations, crazy dance rhythms, surprise endings and all manner of sly musical jokes.” —Tom Strini, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel