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Written in fRoots issue 237, 2003

EARTH-WHEEL-SKY BAND
Rroma Art
X-Produkció XP-011 (2001)

Rroma Adagio, the opening track of this, appeared on Srbija: Sounds Global, the highly recommended 2000 compilation that opens a window on Serbia’s vivid new-roots musics. The uplifting Romany sound of yearning fiddle, groaning bowed bass, skittering cimbalom – then swingy guitar soloing moving to animal bells, whispered chanting, a woman’s voice, before the second track lurches into up tempo more Middle Eastern sounds with a vigorous Central European Romany declamatory male vocal over darabukka, bowed strings and what might be guitar but sounds like electric bouzouki.
      In Chai Shukari a serene presumably keyboard pad preludes an urgent 7/8 of fiddle over bass, guitar and percussion with urgent half-spoken vocal. On Baro Drumo a tense, relentlessly thrumming rocky figure is the foundation for a wild fiddle workout. Guest Boban Marković’s fruity trumpet, sounding more like a flügelhorn, strides in for a solo before more high-urgency scampering, pause-for-breath interludes of interesting metallic percussion, deep drones and liquid-drop sounds, and passionate vocal-led numbers such as the big, pounding, slithering Nadia.
      Serbian Romany band Earth-Wheel-Sky was formed in 1981 in Novi Sad, main city of the agricultural Vojvodina region north-west of Belgrade, by Vince Olah, long-active proponent of Romany music who is also a member of Boris Kovač’s innovative LaDaABa band.
      Rroma Art’s sleeve (a perfectly serviceable multi-fold slip case, but so efficiently thin it gets lost on the shelf between the clunky jewel-cases) doesn’t inform much, but it does say that the current five-member E-W-S line-up comprises, along with Olah, musicians who have long played with another leading Serbian musician and innovator, Felix Lajko, and lists the instrumentation only as Olah’s guitar and fiddle with Varga Karlo’s fiddle, Michael Kurina’s cimbalom, Robert Ambrus’ percussion and Ferenc Kurina’s double bass. No mention of the occasional keyboard pads, nor of who does the singing, but presumably that’s Olah; it’s certainly not the headscarfed lady with the pipe whose characterful face graces the cover.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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