The new bohemians

MichaelHorowitz

The
new bohemians

At a recent festival, the next generation of Gypsy
musicians proves the hard-to-pin-down sound has found new life.

By Robert Christgau

Photos: nygypsyfest.com

Left to right, Frank London, Eugene
Hutz and Ismail Lumanovski

Oct. 29, 2006 | Purity is always a misleading ideal. With the
Gypsies, or Roma, an outcast people who've survived by syncretic
adaptation since they left India a millennium ago, it's an impossible
chimera. Charles Keil, one of many to search hard before concluding
that "the real Gypsy music" is a myth, quotes a Kosovo musician: "We do
not care whether it is Turkish, Serbian or Albanian. We just play it
livelier." Such commonalities as "natural" singing, idiomatic phrasing,
behind-the-beat attack, and minor chords don't distinguish it
drastically from all the other folkish musics that stick it to Western
classical strictures. And the counterclaim that Gypsies don't play
their music for gadje, non-Gypsies, merely renders the "real" stuff a
tree falling in the forest for gadje who follow various Gypsy musics
whether they're pure or not.

Until recently the gadje's choices boiled down to melodramatic,
multicultural flamenco, the truncated jazz tradition of Django
Reinhardt and then, for too long oh Lord, the mawkish "rumba flamenca"
of France's answer to Air Supply, the Gipsy Kings. The only visible
export from Eastern Europe, where most Roma live, was gentrified folk
Hungarian restaurant music. But post-Soviet Union, a few Western
European record labels invaded Eastern Europe and changed this. In 1990
Stephane Karo and Michael Winter of Belgium's Crammed Discs trekked to
the Romanian backwater of Clejani to assemble the
violin-and-accordion-based Taraf de Haïdouks (Turkish for "band,"
French for "of," Roma for "outlaws"). In 1996, German producer and
future Asphalt Tango head Henry Ernst assembled the Fanfare Ciocarlia
brass band in another Romanian village, and Crammed responded by
signing Macedonia's Kocani Orkestar (and then wresting the name from
trumpeter Naat Veliov). Bulgarian clarinet master Ivo Papasov,
Macedonian sax king Ferus Mustafov, and Boban Markovic's Serbian brass
band are other major Gypsy-Balkan noisemakers.

Noise is key here. In the Taraf de Haïdouks model, vocals are
subsumed in breakneck momentum, strange-tempered melody and sounds that
seem extreme from the instruments you recognize and weird from the ones
you don't -- especially the cymbalom, a miraculous hammered dulcimer
whose rippling sound morphs toward balafon low and mandolin high
(listen to a sampler of Gypsy music here).
Gypsy brass is far ruder, aggregating modern and traditional trumpets
and trubas and trombones and whatever into blowing that is messily
melodic at one end and anarchically propulsive at the other --
dancing-on-the-tables music for that special moment when you're finding
it hard enough not to collapse to the floor. Horns drive squalling
dissonances and frantic drum and tuba rhythms whose funk makes
hip-hop's seem tame, because at least you've gotten used to hip-hop's
Africanness.

Until Nonesuch dropped the first U.S. Haïdouks album in 1999,
I'd
always found Gypsy music floridly hyperromantic; until I heard Boban
Markovic's swozzled, cacophonous, lyrical, sometimes virtuosic "Boban I
Marko" five years later, my distaste for massed brass extended all the
way from Stan Kenton to Ray Barretto. But it was really Ukrainian-born,
NYC-based Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello, a Gypsy-gadje meld that
turned into the most exciting new alt-rock band in the world once Hutz
learned to write songs, who drew me to this year's New York Gypsy
Festival -- Gogol Bordello climaxed last year's inaugural edition, and
Hutz hosted 2006's finale. As it turned out, the Gypsy Festival,
stretched this year by Turkish-born promoter-restaurateur Serdar Ilhan
from Sept. 25 to Oct. 8, wasn't strong on the stuff I was there for,
only as it turned out, that didn't matter.

As Ilhan emphasized by showcasing Russia and Italy, Seattle and
Brooklyn (not to mention the "Gipsy Kings 'New Generation'" at an
ill-attended big-ticket gig), Gypsy music comes from all over. Music
has been as much a Roma trade as metal smithing and horse dealing, and
while gadje exaggerate Roma vagabondage, musicians do need to be
mobile. But though I hated a few acts and heard more than enough of
several others, Gypsy music is at such a fascinating point that I don't
regret a groan or wince. I ended up more convinced than ever that,
varied though Gypsy music is, its Balkan variants represent a special
case. That's because, as Bosnia and Kosovo taught us, Muslims aren't
immigrants in Eastern Europe. Gypsies' religious beliefs vary. But
because the Roma are syncretists, Balkan Gypsy music sounds
Islamo-Christian in a way even flamenco, which began in Moorish Spain,
does not. For gadje it's mainly some new kind of party. But that party
is inextricable from insane 13/8 meters and a tune stock that owes much
to centuries of Ottoman domination.

After an insufferable full-length warm-up by Cafe Antarsia, an
American theater-music troupe given to lyrics like "I'm just a wayward
bramble/ My love is my guitar," the Serbian septet Kal opened the
festival at Joe's Pub in the Public Theater on Sept. 25. Kal share
their violin-accordion-guitar instrumentation with Gogol Bordello and
showed as little interest in authenticity -- at one point their leader,
Dragan Ristic, a Roma schoolteacher's son turned theatrical impresario
turned bandleader, announced "a sad song" just before they launched
into a double-time trifle called "Frutti Tutti." But they were much
more mild, playful, and culturally representative about it, and it was
fine. The pink-skinned, good-humored Ristic conveyed more savoir-faire
with a cocked eyebrow than Cafe Antarsia could stuff into an entire
songpoem. Though he wasn't an ace guitarist, he had a great time at it,
notably with some Muddy Waters slide powered out not as a reference but
as a common resource, just like the Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan speed
syllabics. Islamo-Christian, no doubt. In clear English, he told us
that he dealt in Romasomes, which were something like chromosomes:
"Small social things all around us."

Kal were livelier than their Asphalt Tango album and embodied the
contradictions of authenticity. Ristic is an educated Roma activist who
formed Kal not just because he loves music, although it's a good thing
he does, but also because he has a politico-cultural program. He comes
to that program more naturally than Cafe Antarsia because he's Balkan
and Roma himself, but more self-consciously than Moscow's
theater-rooted Kolpakov Trio, old-fashioned preservationists featured
at the finale who have long been staples of the gadje folk circuit --
and much more self-consciously than Taraf de Haïdouks, still
unheralded
in their homeland, or Fanfare Ciocarlia, also fabricated by a gadje
record man. I found little correlation between authenticity and quality
at this chaotic bazaar.

Purer than Kal, but no more or less gripping, were Taraf Costel
Vasilescu at NYU's Skirball Center Sept. 30, led by the Romanian
trumpeter who graces superb 30- and 40-year-old Asphalt Tango reissues
by Ion Petre Stoican and Romica Puceanu. Standing quietly aside,
Vasilescu proved the least demonstrative player in a septet that had
amassed some breathtaking avoirdupois in its old age: trumpet,
clarinet, guitar and vocals, accordion and vocals, violin, swinging
double bass, and the only cymbalom to surface in two weeks. But one
trumpet doesn't equal Gypsy brass. Instead, the taraf's sound was
defined by bassist Marin Marinescu as Gypsy swing, a strikingly
original example of a consciously post-Django groove-cum-subgenre that
often seems the sole province of tribute bands.

Three true Gypsy brass bands with nary a Gypsy among them did
midweek shows at M1-5, a roomy red Tribeca bar with a tiny 12-by-16
stage: Hungry March Band, Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars, and
Zlatne Uste. Metaphorically, all three hail from Brooklyn -- lower-case
bohemian Brooklyn, not immigrant Brooklyn. Opening for Gogol Bordello
at last year's festival, Hungry March deployed approximately 23 brass
and drum players plus seven dancers to enact a dazzling not-for-profit
spectacle (how much cab fare do you think each musician takes home?) in
which frenetic cheerleading spurs on more or less unison blasts that
part to admit jazzish solos. Here, 18 or so plus two dancers still
couldn't quite squeeze onto the stage, and though the young Korean
Archie Shepp fan in the crocheted cap wailed impressively both times,
the downsizing undercut Hungry March's attempt to combine the orgiastic
abandon of Gypsy brass with individualism American-style. Zlatne Uste,
who since 1983 have played "folk music from the brass music traditions
of the Balkans" on old-fashioned rotary-valve flugelhorns they call by
the Slavic term "trubas," harbor far homier ambitions. Playing to a
core of fans who circle-danced without surcease, they were sweet as
people and musicians, and no doubt their tunes sink in -- "Caje
Sukarije" was a catchy closer that sounds fine on their "In the Center
of the Village." But up against faster, trickier, harsher, crazier
Fanfare, Kocani and Markovic CDs, that album seems anodyne, and the
performance barely hit second gear.

Moonlighting Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London got his own dance
circle, which included a gray-haired woman who appeared to be the
mother of one of his musicians. London is a free thinker who in 2002
concocted a theory
of brass bands involving Babel and Freemasonry that he renounces on
2005's highly recommended "Carnival Conspiracy," the wildest, wooziest,
and most eclectic of the many attempts by Jewish musicians to reclaim
their national as well as cultural roots while giving it up to their
fellow outcasts. (Balkan Beat Box, runners-up to Gogol Bordello in the
Gypsy rock sweepstakes, is led by two Israeli expats.) The All-Stars
shift around a lot; a show last January made room for a Brazilian
percussion club and a Hasidic women's chorus. This version featured two
trumpets, two clarinets, a saxophone, a trombone, a young trap drummer
who arrived on time, an older bass drummer who was late, and the lithe
tuba of Ron Caswell, who cannily avoided the New Orleans usages favored
by Hungry March Band. The 90-minute set was ramshackle -- London loves
loose. But the 20-minute opener relaunched the theme whenever it
wandered, the Balkan-not-klezmer number roared back after a jazzy sax
solo, and Caswell kept things non-swangin'.

London, who studied with jazz luminary Jaki Byard, favors the
politically incorrect term "Oriental" to designate the groove he's
after -- a groove where threes and twos are juxtaposed, rather than
superimposed as in African-inflected musics. And though I reserve the
right to renounce the theory next week, my immersion convinced me that
the Balkan-Gypsy synthesis is most powerful at its least African --
which also means its least American. Not to deny that Vasilescu's
bassist is the making of that taraf. Nor that borrowings from all the
crucial African-American horn players are inevitable. Nor that many
experts disagree, notably Garth Cartwright, who studs a dashing,
fact-packed report on Balkan Gypsy music called "Princes Amongst Men"
with epigraphs from African- American musicians and speculates that
"Afro-Roma communities in Louisiana" helped create New Orleans jazz.
Which is conceivable. But which doesn't mean Caswell belonged on the
downbeat he stayed off.

Proof came with the confusing and exciting Oct. 3 clarinet summit at
Joe's Pub. I envisioned some surrogate Gypsy brass, a blowing session
pitting Bulgarian-born, Bronx-based Yuri Yunakov's rough-hewn tenor sax
against two guys I'd never heard of, 30-year-old Turk Husnu
Senlendirici and 22-year-old Macedonian Ismail Lumanovski, I instead
spent two and a half hours listening to four separate sets featuring
bands whose shifting personnel I never got straight; although three of
them featured a 16-year-old Macedonian synth whiz named Muhammad, an
Arab-looking kid in a long gelled crew cut whose Casio could do the
fake flutes of Algerian rai and whose Korg was a piano. Lumanovski and
Senlendirici proved spectacular players who had listened hard to
Coltrane and Dolphy -- especially Lumanovski, his sound very soprano
sax, lots of burr and flutter and overtone where Senlendirici was
cleaner and more flutelike. Sometimes the format got samey, structured
like, say, the state-and-blow jazz sets of Argentinian Coltrane devotee
Gato Barbieri. But the clarinetists had more chops than Barbieri, and
Yunakov, who didn't, simply took the music R&B. A gruff, friendly
bear with an ex-boxer's gut, he has a robust, muscular sound and packs
a lot of power when he improvises. Later, he used saxophone technology
to outloud Lumanovski, and later than that he described Senlendirici as
"the greatest clarinet player in the world."

The format was a jazz format, but the Gypsy brass format is too, and
Gypsy brass is Oriental. So was this. Borrowings from crucial
African-American horn players are healthy, but the melodic incline of
the material was Eastern European, which by then I could I.D. sometimes
as specifically Roma but which also went all the way "Middle Eastern,"
tunes that evoked muezzins and bellydancers. I should also mention
Hasan Isik on kanun, a zither from Turkey that looked like a small
cymbalom. And then there were the rhythms. Three different trap
drummers sat in, the last and most accomplished an American named
Jordan Pearlman who I found too jazzy. My favorite was Yunakov's guy, a
squat, middle-aged, dark- skinned powerhouse with two small extra drums
toward the top of his kit. ("I don't know the name, Yuri brought him
last minute," e- mailed promoter Ilhan, who thinks he's Macedonian.) He
didn't swing at all, just banged out the meters with relish and
panache, especially when Yunakov announced, "Now I need to play 9/8 --
it's a Gypsy style, a Balkan style." It was he who took over for the
final blow-out, when Yunakov honked and Senlenderici got dirty and
Lumanovski smiled and held his boyish own amid melodies that evoked
jazz not a whit. Just some new kind of party.

Great music rarely changes the world. It just exemplifies what a
good world might be like. None of the acts at Hutz's farewell party
Sunday grooved me much. But in addition to being a great bandleader,
Hutz is a great DJ, and between sets suddenly my little knot of jawing
gadje noticed what he was playing. Was that bhangra, all the way from
the ancestral Punjab? Followed by a female village folk dance? Followed
by a teched-up Django remix? And was that a ska over that baritone
truba line? Small social things all around us, and they all sounded
wonderful. What a wonderful world it could be.

Carter O`Brien

the mawkish "rumba flamenca" of France's answer to Air Supply, the Gipsy Kings.

ooh, harsh comparison! :shock:

a

great post

czecko

Carter O`Brien wrote:

the mawkish "rumba flamenca" of France's answer to Air Supply, the Gipsy Kings.

ooh, harsh comparison! :shock:

I saw the Gipsi Kings a few years ago at Radio City. I have a hard time believing that Air Supply could've gotten a majority of the audience up and shaking the way GK did. Even though I can't say I'm a huge fan, they definitely deliver live. And the fact that their cover of Hotel California is used for the "Jesus" scene in The Big Lebowski automatically qualifies them for greatness in my book. However, Christgau usually looks at things through his gritty Downtown glasses and this jab he takes doesn't surprise me. I doubt he would have many nice things to say about alot of the big guys in the Gypsy Jazz circles. His loss.

I've also seen Gogol Bordello, back in the day at CBGBs. What's funny is his band really tries to do the same thing as the Gipsi Kings, but in a ruder, more racous, and more irreverent manner. There are no Stochelos or Romanes to be found here, It's punk rock. They create a frenzy of noise and provide an Eastern European-type atmosphere to get people to get up and go nuts... Or watch their frontman (Hutz) go nuts. The night I saw them he kicked in the bass drum, stuck his head in and continued singing while the drummer carried on. He also broke 3 microphones and smashed himself in the head with a glass. It's a good time, especially if you're wasted, and I think their show is very well done. It's probably even better now. From what I remember all of the instruments save for a regular drum kit are traditional and the music is also traditional sounding, but very frenzied. Like gypsies channeling Iggy and the Stooges or FEAR. The stage show outside of Hutz is also good; dancers (hot) and all kinds of silliness going on. It's very entertaining. Did I mention that it helps if you drink heavily?

Of course this type of stuff isn't for everyone and I don't even know if they are as crazy as they used to be. They play bigger places now and probably have to behave a bit more, but I would imagine the energy is the same. I would recommend seeing them for the experience if anyone is inclined. You won't be blown away by their diminished scales but there's a good chance you'll wake up naked in another city covered in chili or cake batter