Balkanization!Gypsy music—old, new, and borrowed.

The growing popularity of Gypsy music is bringing a flood of old records out of musty vaults and onto CD for the first time. One of the best recent reissues is this collection of recordings from the '60s and '70s by Romica Puceanu, an extraordinary Romanian Gypsy vocalist who sang cantece de mahala, the cafe songs of the Bucharest suburbs, which merged Turkish Gypsy rhythms with lovelorn Romany lyrics. The Gore Brothers' septet—featuring accordions, violins, and a Hungarian hammered dulcimer called the cimbalom—play with crispness and restraint, leaving abundant spaces to be filled by Puceanu's singing. She has a startling voice: clear, powerful in both upper and lower registers, with a tone that variously resembles a horn or a violin. Bucharest's cafe intellectuals called Puceanu "the Romanian Billie Holiday"; the warble in her voice may remind listeners of Edith Piaf. Like both those greats, Puceanu is a specialist in pathos, with an expressive flair characteristic of great Gypsy vocalists—you don't have to understand a single lyric to get caught up in her long, languid, sighing lines.