Brothers beguile with Gypsy sound

By Joseph Dalton

There's something seductive about a man who plays the violin. After all, the devil is often pictured with the fiddle.

Les Yeux Noirs, the Gypsy band that played at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Saturday night, is led by two young French brothers, Eric and Olivier Slabiak, who are both violinists. They bring a stylish and contemporary touch to music that's mostly traditional in feel, if not in origin.

Attired more like a rock band than a folk ensemble, the Slabiaks were backed by electric guitar and bass, drums and a cello. They also sing, mostly in Yiddish, and make music that is lively and infectious drawing on folk material from Romania, Hungary, Russia and Armenia. While their playing is flashy, the overall effect is rather sultry. They seem to own the music, to have known it from their youth and yet they present it in arrangements that are modern and varied.

An early number evoked the image of a Greek wedding with a circle of men singing and dancing in celebration. In several uptempo numbers, the music would halt while the six men on stage shouted a rhythmic phrase in French, and then the music commenced again.

The Slabiaks usually played and sang in unison, though each sang a ballad or two and took numerous violin solos. Guitarist Pascal Rondeau also had several vocal solos. Some new colors and textures came from occasional and subtle electronic effects on one of the brother's instrument. In one piece, it had a hazy, almost grungy sound, but later a sour quality, almost like an oboe.

As violinists, the Slabiaks don't seem to be virtuosos, but they are more-than-proficient show men. At one brief point in the first half, they engaged in a kind of Eastern European version of dueling banjos. Their finale was a prolonged face-off, part competitive and part comic, that ended with them playing together on the same instrument. A neat trick.

Their banter with the audience was made all the more charming by their accents, but never more so than when they tried to teach a Yiddish folk song, "As The Rebbe Danced," to the eager audience. As they tried to teach the words, it wasn't always clear when the Frenchman switched form English to Yiddish, but he nevertheless praised each garbled response the audience gave. The laughs that ensued, as well as the rhythmic laughter in the song, transcended languages and cultures. For that matter, so did the whole program.