On A Hawk and a Hacksaw's terrific new Cervantine, accordionist-percussionist Jeremy Barnes and violist-violinist Heather Trost have ditched the training wheels to show off what they've learned from the master Romany musicians they've rehearsed, recorded, toured, and drank with.
They spent nearly two years living in Budapest, Hungary, in 2007 and '08, and for the first time they're applying their education to original material: the album opens with Barnes's epic "No Rest for the Wicked," a multipart instrumental that shifts gears and styles like an eight-stage relay race. Its rhythms and melodies are all rooted in the eastern European music the couple have explored since they began playing together in 2004 (Barnes started the project on his own in '01), but the way they navigate among them—with stop-start transitions and craftily layered transitions—is all their own. They hold fast to the breakneck rhythms and jagged, swooping melodies of Hungary, Romania, and Turkey—strings saw and scrape, accordions pump and wheeze, brass puffs in pointillistic patterns, percussion clatters in off-kilter time signatures—but across the record they push and pull on those traditional sounds.
Shades of mariachi brass color the Balkan horn blasts on "Española Kolo" (the kolo is a circle dance from eastern Europe, and Española refers to a New Mexico town), a nod to an unlikely Mexican influence on Romany brass bands, which A Hawk and a Hacksaw's current bio claims arose because Mexican soap operas are shown on TV in eastern Europe. The group's repertoire extends to the Mediterranean with a couple of raucous rembetika numbers, "Mana Thelo Enan Andra" and "The Loser (Xeftilis)," both of which feature longtime touring member Chris Hladowski on bouzouki and his sister Stephanie on vocals (they're the core of the English band the Family Elan). Chris has played the bouzouki since he started working in AHAAH, but this is the first time they've tackled the style that introduced most Americans to the instrument.
The Hladowskis' presence notwithstanding, on Cervantine A Hawk and a Hacksaw rely largely on U.S. talent, the first time they've done so in a few records: trumpeter Samuel Johnson is from Chicago (he's part of Mucca Pazza), and tuba player Mark Weaver, hand percussionist Issa Malluf, and drummer Charles Papaya are all from New Mexico. Barnes recorded the album with former Chicagoan and Icy Demons bassist Griffin Rodriguez, who went to school with Barnes at DePaul and played with him in Bablicon, his first band after Neutral Milk Hotel, and they use lots of subtle and not-so-subtle tricks to give the music a surprisingly contemporary sound—they're not trying to pass off A Hawk and a Hacksaw as an unreconstructed Gypsy band. At the start of "At the Vulturul Negru" the music suddenly slows down, revealing itself to be "only" a tape, and then the "real" band jumps in; the opening cut uses instrumental layers from separate takes with radically different miking, so that you might hear a distant, fuzzy recording of a violin or accordion float in beneath a clean track of the same instrument. As good as Cervantine is, though, I can't help but feel that A Hawk and a Hacksaw's best work is still ahead of them—now that they've mastered their adopted language, I can't wait to hear them really start to play with it.
