Though she grew up in Calgary, violinist and singer Brigitte Dajczer—who goes by her stage name Briga—feels very much at home now in Montreal. It’s been 12 years since she moved to the city, and her music reflects its exuberant multiculturalism and free spirit. She’s happy to venture beyond her comfort zone, combining Balkan songs, the core of what she plays, with a range of influences from pop, rock, and punk.

Born to a Polish father and Québécois mother, Briga is deeply involved with Montreal’s strong but little-known Roma and Eastern European communities. “A lot of my playing I learned from Carmen Piculeata, a well-known Roma musician here,” says Briga, interviewed at Café Gitana in Montreal’s Latin Quarter.” The composition ‘Couscoucescu’ on my first album Diaspora came from one of his stories of being summoned from his village when younger to play for [former Romanian communist leader] Nicolae Ceausescu.

“All my Balkan and Roma influences come from the real community,” she continues. “These people are friends of mine, yet few people seem to know they’re here. From the group Les Gitans de Sarajevo, in which I still play, I learned the ornamentation for Serbian tunes. Carmen showed me a lot more things, but he drew the line at Bulgarian ornaments—played really, really fast and hard to decipher on the spot. The bowing in particular baffled me.”

Briga formed her own five-piece band in 2008—with Montreal artists of Québécois, Haitian, Hungarian, and North African origin—to play her hybrid high-energy Balkan music. After a couple of years she got a grant to study music in Bulgaria with the country’s number-one fiddler, Georgi Yanev, and her stay provided the inspiration for the music—both traditional and newly composed—on Briga’s excellent 2012 album Turbo Folk Stories.

“It’s funny because when I asked him about the bowing, he said ‘Don’t worry about it, everything will fall into place.’ I thought, ‘I came all this way to be told this?’ ” recalls Briga with a laugh. “But that’s exactly what happened. I think it was being next to him, playing, listening. I heard the phrasing and understood it. He just threw me in the water—sink or swim. ‘Let’s go play a Gypsy wedding.’ But I survived and it was the trip of a lifetime.”