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Circus of Sound
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Times Online UK, Circus of Sound >>
-by Jon Lusk
It starts like a funeral but ends like a wedding. Romania’s “speed demons of Gypsy brass” set off on 90 minutes of mayhem with a deep, blasting fanfare. The stocky silhouettes of the tuba and horn players are nearly motionless as Oprica Ivancea swaggers onstage, blowing a sinuous Eastern-flavoured sax solo. A trumpeter appears, and suddenly an oompah beat kick-starts the roaring, pumping 11-man juggernaut that will propel a twentysomething crowd into wild dancing. Two more trumpeters, another saxophonist and the big bass drummer appear, each stoking the rhythm towards a stampede. Welcome to the circus of sound that is Fanfare Ciocarlia.
On a warm spring night in Brussels, they are headlining Balkan Trafik, a festival of Gypsy and other wild, rootsy music virtually unknown outside the Balkans until a decade ago. However, the story of Gypsy (or Roma) music goes back a millennium to when their ancestors left northwest India, passing through, and sometimes stopping, in much of West Asia and Europe. Despite popular misconceptions, the vast majority of Gypsies now live settled lives, and have done for generations.
Even so, something of the old nomadic ways lives on in the globe-trotting lifestyles of today’s Gypsy musicians. Fanfare Ciocarlia (“Fan-far-ay choc-aaliyah”) haven’t been this busy since the “golden age” of the 1960s and 1970s, when Oprica’s late father Ioan and his colleagues made a good living on the wedding circuit without leaving Romania. But in 1996, when a young German sound engineer called Henri Ernst “discovered” the musicians living in rustic obscurity in Zece Prajini, a village in the rolling hills of northeastern Romania, they were virtually out of work. The country was still recovering from the collapse of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and hardly anyone could afford to employ large groups.
Instead, smaller, cheaper bands played Western-orientated music. When Ernst and his business partner Helmut Neumann proposed they resurrect the old fanfare brass band style and tour it abroad, the musicians were sceptical. “They said, ‘You are crazy! Who wants to listen to our music in the West?’ ” recalls Neumann, who acts as translator when I meet the players – most of them sturdy, olive-skinned men with big bellies, rough hands and warm smiles.
“At the beginning we were surprised,” says Radulescu Lazar, the trumpeter and singer. “We didn’t expect such success.” He is pleased to have seen their village transformed as a result. Band members have built houses with running water and indoor lavatories and what they say is the world’s first Gypsy church.
They have now made five albums in a style that marries the might of former Habsburg and Turkish military bands with a dash of Jewish klezmer on riotous wedding dance tunes. And once again the children of Zece Prajini are honking and parping on wind instruments, hoping to become the next generation of stars.
Maybe overseas approval is even thawing Romanian prejudice towards their Gypsy minority – at perhaps 2.5 million, the world’s largest. The band’s first show in the Romanian capital happened only last December. “It still exists, the racism,” says Lazar. “That’s why I was surprised by such a positive reaction to our gig in Bucharest.”
You can hear Fanfare play a hilarious, barely recognisable version of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild in the recent Boratfilm. They knew nothing of the biker anthem before Sacha Baron Cohen, a fan, commissioned it, and seem happy with their involvement – even if the film’s use of the Romanian Gypsy village of Glod as a stand-in for Kazakhstan has been more controversial. Many Romanians were angered but the trumpeter Mario Bulgaru says: “I considered it as just a stupid joke.”
Still, it’s not just film-makers who are looking for a bit of Gypsy colour. Over the past couple of years a rash of Western, nonRoma musicians have made a success of dabbling in Gypsy music. The US indie band Beirut and the thrash metallers Gogol Bordello have jumped on the Gypsy bandwagon.
Fanfare Ciocarlia sometimes wonder about the consequences of playing music that’s become so fashionable. Neumann says: “They are always complaining about attending Gypsy festivals and not meeting Gypsies! Everybody’s doing Gypsy music but not Gypsies.”
That shouldn’t be an issue for Fanfare’s next UK show, at a festival of Gypsy music and film at the Barbican in London called The 1,000 Year Journey. Fanfare will be showcasing their latest album Queens and Kings (Asphalt Tango), which combines their breakneck brass barrage with leading Gypsy artists from France, Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania, several of whom will join them on stage.
“Firstly, there’s Esma Redzepova, the Queen of the Gypsies. She’s a unique voice from Macedonia,” says Ivancea, who also plays clarinet. “And we’ll be bringing Jony Iliev, the young star from Bulgaria. Then there’s Kaloome, from Perpignan. Maybe they’re the least famous, but you can’t get the whole Gypsy community together and leave the Catalans out.” The show will also feature the Hungarian diva Mitsou, and the more strident young Romanian singer Florentina Sandu.
Seeing Redzepova and her dazzling five-piece ensemble tearing through their fiendish Macedonian time signatures – unheard of in Romania – on another stage at Balkan Trafik underlined what a challenge this Gypsy summit will be. The Roma language they all share (with small variations in dialect) has helped to conquer their musical differences. It worked a treat in Brussels, and the London gig promises to be a blast. 05/19/07 >> go there
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