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Written in
fRoots
issue 282, 2006
MAGYARPALATKAI BANDA
Wedding At Magyarpalatka In 1984
FolkEurópa FECD 021 (2006)
ÁDÁMOSI BANDA
Wedding At Sövényfalva in 1980
FolkEurópa FECD 025 (2006)
JÓZSEF LUNKA
Péterlaka Band Leader
FolkEurópa FECD 024 (2006)
FolkEurópa brings us three more releases of the field recordings made in the
late 1970s and early 80s by Antal Fekete among the mixed Hungarian, Romanian and
Roma populations in the Transylvanian part of Romania, where he had to work
surreptitiously under Ceausescu-regime duress.
Wedding At Magyarpalatka In 1984 is the
second CD of his recordings of one of the leading Roma bands of the
Transylvanian Heath area, based, as were several dozen other Roma musicians, in
Magyarpalatka, about thirty kilometres from Cluj. The Magyarpalatkai Banda is a
quintet, comprising tense, scampering twin fiddles and chugging twin kontras and
bass, but the core line-up of such bands was a trio; around 1940 it began
doubling up on fiddles and kontras, apparently to diminish the strain on
musicians when playing a two or three day wedding celebration. The current
generation still plays today, and still includes bassist Márton Kovács, but
these are recordings of the 1984 version, in which the fiddlers were Márton and
Béla Kodoba. At a wedding Fekete usually had to follow the band with a hand-held
mic as they moved around, and his equipment wasn’t state of the art, so there’s
no studio gloss to the recordings, but plenty of atmosphere and the animating
vitality that kept the band in work.
The Ádámos band, about which there seems to be
less information available to booklet note writers András Lelkes and Endre
Liber, was of the Kis-Küküllő region and had a line-up of single violin and
kontra with cimbalom, double bass and accordion. The recording, made at a
wedding at Sövényfalva in 1980, is rather mushy in sound, largely because of the
accordion chording and crowd hubbub, so the cimbalom is generally barely
audible; prímás József Kozák’s violin, playing the tunes, cuts through OK,
though, and a good dancing time was clearly being had, with some communal
singing-along.
The recordings of József Lunka of Magyarpéterlaka
in the upper Maros region seem to be have been made in a house, perhaps his, and
so are upfront and as clear as Fekete’s recording equipment would allow. A very
fine prímás with a light, melodic touch and spot-on tuning, he plays accompanied
on several tracks just by his son Albert on kontra, adding a cimbalom for some
more and a bass for the final few, and two male singers deliver three
unaccompanied songs. The recordings were made in the four years before he died
in 1982, but he was only in his early sixties and still very much on top of his
art. This CD is recommended as a window on the musicianly heart of
Transylvania’s fiddle music, which became the mother-lode of Hungary’s urban
youth dance-house movement and has influenced fiddlers much further afield.
www.folkeuropa.hu
© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
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