- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -



- Back to Reviews Introduction page -


Written in fRoots issue 217, 2001


BESH O DROM
Macsó Hímzés
Fonó FA-082-2 (2000)

ÖKRÖS ENSEMBLE
I Left My Sweet Homeland
Rounder 82161-5163--2 (2001)

Large, energetic Hungarian band Besh o droM seems to have drawn a lot of interest on its UK gigs in 2000, including London and Glastonbury, where it featured its “Besh o droM Space” line-up which includes a DJ and sampling. There’s only one track in that expanded format here, but the band itself on this showing, a splendid flight of wildness and joyous exuberance that rarely pauses for breath, is already plenty high-energy without Space’s slight techno-tweaks.
      It draws on Gypsy, Serbian, Macedonian, Turkish, Albanian, Greek and Middle Eastern traditions, and feel is of a collision between a Gypsy brass/reeds band and a frantic Balkan wedding band, with occasional vocals from singer Ágnes Szalóki. Her stylistic centre is in Hungarian tradition, but the band rarely plays Hungarian music. Nor is it actually a Gypsy band, the only member raised in Gypsy tradition being accordionist/violinist Róbi Farkas.
      The band, which continues to expand and evolve, first came together in 1999, a bunch of Budapest-based Hungarians playing, on reeds, brass, violin, guitar, cimbalom, accordion, oud, ney, kaval, bass and percussion music that excites them, not learnt at their father’s knee but picked up here and there and from records, is yet further proof of the power of middle and eastern European and Gypsy music to spread and metamorphose, gathering up whatever sticks to it to make modern wide-audience music of dazzling drive and colour.
      The name, sounding Romany and chosen jokily for that reason, actually comes from the Hungarian expression “Besodrom a cigit” - “I’m rolling a cigarette”, according to an interview given by formerly Israel-resident co-founder Gergö Barcza to the Sziget festival website. It turned out to be also a fortuitously appropriate Romany expression meaning something like “Ride on the road” and also “Let’s go”. (Lucky it didn’t mean “All Roma are tossers”).

      Very fine too, but very different in sound and raison d’ętre, is the Ökrös Folk Music Ensemble album. The five-piece led by fiddler Csaba Ökrös, consisting of two or three violins, viola, drum and double bass or guitar, is concerned with a specific musical region, that of Transylvania, and with continuing its traditional music and musical skills as they dwindle in the villages. Aladár Csiszár, a Hungarian Roma violinist from Székelyföld, guests on one track, an eight minute set of some of the tunes he’s played much of his life. The sleevenotes present the Ökrös Ensemble as concerned with “preservation”, but that perhaps implies that this would be dry, difficult stuff, which it isn’t; it’s subtle, varied and fresh-sounding music from a very skilful band, joined as on the previous album by the great Hungarian Gypsy cimbalom player Kálmán Balogh. That last album also featured vocals from Ágnes Szalóki, now with Besh o droM. This time the singer is the excellent Ágnes Herczku, who in tone and style is strikingly reminiscent of Márta Sebestyén.
www.fonorecords.hu



© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 


You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
 CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 


For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL


- Back to Reviews Introduction page -