Cooking up a unique stew of traditional Euro-Turkish Gypsy music, seasoned liberally with jazz and funk, requires a demanding skill set, bandleader Ismail Lumanovski said.
"The genre of music we're playing has a lot of traditional elements melodically," Lumanovski said recently by phone from his New York City home. "But, harmonically, it's highly sophisticated, in the way that we try to (incorporate) jazz, funk, fusion, rock and techno.
"In order for someone to play in our band," Lumanovski said, "the person has to understand the traditional music very well, from the Balkans and Turkey. And then, all of us are educated in a way so we bring that music to another level."
The All-Stars will bring this unusual mix of musical styles to Franklin & Marshall College's Barshinger Center on Friday, Feb. 17.
Lumanovski, a Juilliard-educated clarinetist equally comfortable playing classical pieces and the blistering riffs of jazz and Balkan folk tunes, explained that Romany/Gypsy music is as varied as the countries in which the Romany have lived.
"The Romany people came from India, and they went through all these countries, all these cultures," Lumanovski said. "Romany music in Turkey is different from Romany music in Macedonia," he said, and from that in Russia or Spain.
"[Our] songs are original. We compose them," Lumanovski said. "But they are highly inspired by traditional folk music from the Balkans — which is Macedonian, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Serbian — and Turkey," Lumanovski said.
Born into a Turkish family of musicians in Macedonia, Lumanovski, 27, began playing the clarinet when he was 8. His father was a folk singer, and his home was often filled with the local masters of Gypsy music.
"I know the psychology of that music," Lumanovski said. "I know how the people think. … They carry the music with them. They are connected with the music on the emotional level."
Lumanovski came to the United States to study, culminating with graduate work at Juilliard in classical performance.
The All-Stars' genesis can be traced back to the first New York Gypsy Festival, organized in 2005 by club owner Serdar Ilhan, now the All-Stars' manager.
Lumanovski found himself playing a gig with Greek-born bass player Panagiotis Andreou.
"When we started playing, something else happened," Lumanovski said. "There was this emotional connection between me and him that happened. … And then our manager saw this incredible energy.
"We could understand each other because we knew the traditional music very well, because we grew up with the local masters."
Eventually, Turkish-born Tamer Pinarbasi brought his kanun — a Turkish zitherlike instrument — to the party.
"He's a kanun maverick," Lumanovski said. "He's one of the innovators of a new style of playing the kanun."
In the Middle East, the kanun is traditionally played with metal picks on two fingers, Lumanovski explained. But Pinarbasi plays with his fingernails, and with all 10 of his fingers. This allows for "a lot of harmony, a lot of different expressions."
The final additions to the band were Engin Gunaydin, a jazz drummer whose family members were folk musicians in Turkey, and Jason Lindner, an American jazz-fusion keyboard player whom Lumanovski credits with adding interesting "sound experiments" to the band's repertoire.
This five-man lineup has been together about two years, Lumanovski said.
At Franklin & Marshall, concertgoers can watch these musicians' fingers fly through songs from the band's just-released instrumental CD, "Romantech," for which Lumanovski and Pinarbasi wrote most of the songs.
"Romantech" features complex numbers — many of them five to eight minutes long — including "E-Z Pass," a Lumanovski composition.
The song "is in eleven-eight (time). It's a very complex rhythm," Lumanovski said. "I am highly inspired by the traditional Macedonian-Bulgarian kind of music. It's very fast, and it flows, in a way, and never stops.
"That's why we, as a group, named it 'E-Z Pass,'\!p" he said. "Because you don't have to stop."
All of the band members perform with other musicians, Lumanovski said.
However, "in the past year, we have been working more and more together. We have been preparing the CD for a year and a half." The band has toured in the Midwest and in cities across Turkey.
The All-Stars will continue to tour and play together, finding new ways of fusing the modern and the traditional, the rock and the Romany.
"We're taking music from all over the world and we're creating a new Gypsy language," Lumanovski said. "This is a new Gypsy-Romany music that comes from New York."
The New York Gypsy All-Stars will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17, at Franklin & Marshall College's Barshinger Center for Musical Arts. For ticket information, visit fandm.edu/box-office or call 358-4858.
