On its fifth full-length album, 'Cervantine,' A Hawk and a Hacksaw's love of the Balkans continues unabated, but with new songs and collaborators. In 'Uskudar,' the music finds an equal balance of sweet, sour and earthy sounds with nimble string melodies and a grunting tuba.

I've got a lot of respect for tuba players, just carrying that thing around.

You start way down on a low B flat on the tuba and you have a chromatic scale; you can match the colours all the way up, till you get to the top of the trumpet.

I hate to say it, but Christmas as a kid was always a moneymaking venture for me. I played trumpet, and a friend of mine who played trombone and a guy who played tuba, every Christmas we'd go out for three or four days beforehand and play Christmas carols on our horns.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

I wouldn't want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It's very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don't have the bass, it's like being amputated. It's like you have no legs.

I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.

I like a lot of bass players. I like a lot of tuba players too.

I play the baritone horn - which is like a mini tuba, and is the least sexy instrument you can choose, and I generally say I don't play one so I don't have to acknowledge it. I also play fife.

I can produce any instrument, any sound that I can imagine; it may be percussive to the audience, but in my mind it may be a piano, a melody, or a tuba, or a harp, or a harmonica. My mission is to allow people to hear the dance in its purity and up against any other type of sound or music.

I played the tuba in high school. I wanted to be a member of the marching band. I thought, what can I play that has the most effect? What can I play to get people to laugh?

I don't play the tuba.

After I learned the piano, I went on to learn percussion, the tuba, b-flat baritone, French horn, trombone, trumpet, most of the instruments in the orchestra. Trumpet was my instrument.