[FA Worldmusic] The New Bohemians - Robert Christgau piece from Salon on Ny Gypsy Festival

[Bill Bragin]

Now that he's not writing for the Voice, it's interesting to see Christgau's
piece, unfettered by capsule summary limits.  And a nice, detailed take on a
terrific festival.





		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

		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 Haodouks (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 Haodouks 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
<http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2006/10/29/gypsy_music> ). 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. Haodouks 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 Haodouks,
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
<http://www.franklondon.com/brotherhood.html>  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.



		-- By Robert Christgau


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