The Times --Gypsy article

stubla

Interesting little article in todays Times--including a nice mention for L'Esprit Manouche!!...as well as a forthcoming book of some interest

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/ ... 44,00.html

Stu

MichaelHorowitz

Hi Stu,

For those of us too lazy to register with the Times web site, could you cut and paste the article here?

thanks!

'm

langleydjango

It's not actaully laziness, it's the fact that they seem to want a cash subsciption to look at their paper. I want to read the article but not enough to subscribe for a year.

thrip

Here you go:


Gypsies stole my heart
By Philip Oltermann
The swirling rhythms and hot passions of Roma music have this writer under their spell

The story goes that Miles Davis, visiting Belgrade long before the most recent Balkan wars, was made to listen to a recording of a gypsy brass orchestra. “I didn’t know a trumpet could sound like that,” was the baffled response of the celebrated trumpet player.

Years of political conflict in the Balkans followed, and Davis’s discovery was buried underneath the fog of war. But today, as the traditional folk music of the Eastern European gypsy communities emerges from the shadow of oppressive nationalist regimes, the American jazzman’s reaction is echoed once more by Western musicians and music aficionados.




Gypsy, or Roma, music is best understood not as a genre but as a sort of virus, carried into Europe from India, given to constant flux and change. The way it takes hold varies by country: in Serbia, Moldova and Macedonia it is played by large, stomping brass ensembles. In Romania it takes on klezmer influences and is shaped by the ragged sound of fiddles and accordions. In Belgium and France, Roma play gypsy swing, in Spain it’s flamenco à la Gypsy Kings.

In Britain there is a lone festival dedicated to the guitar-based variety of Roma music, the International Gypsy Guitar Festival held at the end of July in Gossington, Gloucestershire, and one event held purely in the spirit of Django Reinhardt’s jazzy interpretation, L’Esprit Manouche, which takes place in Birmingham, on July 9 and 10.

Both events have started to draw in an unexpected variety of crowds. Dave Alexander, the director of L’Esprit Manouche, recalls trying to drag his 16-year old nephew, a hip-hop DJ, along to the first festival. “He was completely overwhelmed by the music. Since then he has started bringing along his friends — most of them now play in gypsy swing bands themselves.”

Gypsy music is not for folk purists — Roma musicians are plagiarists. Film soundtracks find their way into the repertoire, as do Cuban mambo, Turkish pop songs and Abba medleys. It is no surprise that a lot of Eastern European music has shown itself easily compatible with modern genres.

Out next month on the World Music Network label, for example, is an album called Urban Gypsy by the Romanian Shukar Collective, traditional Ursari bear-taming music, reworked with drum’n’bass and hip-hop production. In Germany, the former DJ Stefan Hantel started hiring Eastern European folk bands at club venues and found that young ravers got more excited with vodka and belly-dancing than drugs and techno.

But it is not just young musicians who are benefiting from a new interest in the sounds from the East. The members of Fanfare Ciocarlia, pictured, have spent most of their lives playing at weddings, funerals or restaurants around Balkan villages. Now, with many of them in their fifties, they have a new album out in Britain and tour large European concert venues. By custom, they play their instruments amid the audience at the end of each concert — who happily slap euro bills on the musicians’ sweaty foreheads.

The music journalist Garth Cartwright was fascinated by the gypsy phenomenon. He tracked down most of his favourite Roma musicians on a long trip to Eastern Europe in 2003 and has recorded his Hunter S. Thompson-esque escapades in Princes Among Men: Travels with Gypsy Musicians, to be published in June.

Cartwright reckons there may be gypsy links to the birth of jazz. Yet while jazz and its musical cousin, blues, went on to shape the pop and rock of today, gypsy music remains largely confined to the shelves of world music specialists. Where jazz can articulate myriad nuanced emotions, to the uninitiated a gypsy folk song can merely sound brashly hedonistic.

It is worth noting that gypsy folk music, much like jazz, found its voice as a reaction to suffering: up until the 1860s many Roma had been slaves of the Ottoman Empire.

Will Romanian bands like Fanfare Ciocarlia or Taraf de Haidouks hit the pop charts? Given the British aversion to pop music not sung in English and our somewhat stiff lower hip when it comes to belly-dancing, it seems unlikely.

And yet there is hope. Damon Albarn did wonders for the folk musicians of West Africa with his Mali Music album. The current chart favourites the Kaiser Chiefs could well do some ambassadorial work for the East: they have been a surprise hit in Russia, and their much-hyped debut album Employment was influenced by Eastern European drinking songs.

So what is the magic of Roma music? Jeremy Barnes, an American musician who, under the moniker A Hawk and a Hacksaw, has recently released Darkness at Noon, an innovative folk record that pairs soulful introspection with the boldness of Ottoman brass, sums it up well: “Eastern European music has not just got an emotional intensity, but also a kind of spiritual, celestial quality that I don’t hear anywhere else except for maybe John Coltrane at his most intense.”


Fanfare Ciocarlia: Gili Garabdi — Ancient Secrets of Gypsy Brass (Asphalt Tango Records) Shukar Collective: Urban Gypsy (World Music Collective) is out on May 23; A Hawk and a Hacksaw: Darkness at Noon (Leaf); Princes Among Men is published by Serpent’s Tail on June; order at serpentstail.com

MichaelHorowitz

Thanks for posting that!

Intresting....Although, some of the Roma history is a little suspect. And...never, ever call a Manouche or Sinti "Roma." They hate that!

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Jack

For more of Garth Cartwright's book, and his take on the use of Roma v. Sinti v. Manouche et al:
http://www.journeyswithgypsies.com/forum.html

Best,
Jack.