KAL / (Asphalt-Tango)

7

My resident layman is indifferent to a lot of the music on this list, but when I told him that I was going to include Kal, his face perked up and he said, “Good choice.” The Ristic brothers made this album because they say—or, rather, Dragan, the more articulate brother, says—they were distressed by the way young Serbian Roma were ignoring their traditional instruments and turning to Euro-keyboards and westernized electro-pop. They wanted to show people that you could hold onto your folk music and yet sound modern. In buzzword parlance, they wanted to make the old melodies accessible. Their album blends folk with everything from hip-hop to tango. If you’re looking for one disc that sums up the direction that Gypsy Music has been taking and is steered not by outsiders but by the Roma themselves, then this is it.