When Goran Jezdimir left Sarajevo 13 years ago, he wasn't in a panic, but there certainly wasn't time to say goodbye to everyone. War had come to his hometown, the capital of Bosnia. Bullets were flying and shells were falling as one of the most brutal conflicts of the 1991-95 Balkan wars flared around him. Jezdemir took his flute and saxophone and whatever else he could grab and went into exile-first to Belgrade, then to Montreal as a refugee.

He had no idea of the fate of his high-school friend, singer and pianist Boris Bartula. The two had gone on to study at the Sarajevo Music Academy, and together they'd played everything from Mozart concertos to western pop songs to ankle-twisting Macedonian folk dances. But contact was lost during the three-year siege of Sarajevo, a time during which people tended to disappear without forwarding addresses.

So when the two musicians ran into one another on Montreal's busy St. Catherine's Street the encounter was explosive in a positive way. "You cannot believe the joy; it was absolutely fantastic," Jezdimir says, on the line from his home in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, a suburb of Montreal, and speaking in French with a strong Slavic accent. "Of course we started playing together at once, and that's the beginning of Les Gitans de Sarajevo [the Sarajevo Gypsies].

"Our name comes because we are wanderers, free spirits, and also because we play a lot of Roma music from the Balkans," he continues. "We are not Roma, but the Roma were not partisan in the conflict between Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats, and that's how we feel as well. In the current band we have musicians with all three backgrounds, but we are all from the same culture and speak the same language."

Les Gitans-currently a septet-takes the last element of its name partly from the Café Sarajevo, a small establishment in Montreal's Latin Quarter that's a gathering place for the city's scattered Bosnian community. The musicians of Les Gitans spent long nights jamming there, helping create a unique blend of music that's grounded in the fiery Balkan tradition but with flavours of Québécois pop and European world music.

The band created a stir on the Montreal music scene with its debut Saoroma (which translates as All of the Gypsies), and the follow-up, En Voyage, bagged a Juno nomination last year. This spring, Les Gitans' third album will be released, named Opa! after the exclamation Balkan partiers shout out as an encouragement to a dancer who gets inspired. You can hear Bartula crying it on "Ciganka Sam Mala (Little Gypsy)", an Old World barnburner that brings to mind broken glasses and empty bottles of homemade slivovic.

When Les Gitans de Sarajevo makes its West Coast debut with two shows at Coquitlam's Festival du Bois in Blue Mountain Park next Saturday and Sunday (March 4 and 5), there should be a few opa!s in the air. "We're curious to see other parts of this country we've never been to and really hope we can draw some of the Balkan community," Jezdimir says. "You never know who I might see there. I haven't been back to Sarajevo since coming to Canada, so I've no idea what happened to a lot of the people I once knew."