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Written in fRoots issue 193, 1999

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Flammes Du Cœur - Gypsy Queens
Network 32.843 (1999)

Network’s acclaimed double CD Road of the Gypsies presented gypsy music from Rajasthan to Spain, and this new double, again in one of those book-sized long packs, gives a more in-depth focus, a substantial part of it new-recorded, on six female singers: Esme Redžepova and Džansever from Macedonia (recorded in Skopje), flamenco singer La Macanita (recorded in Seville, plus a couple of tracks from her album on Nuevos Medios), Gabi Luncă and Romica Puceanu (who died in a car accident in 1996) from Romania (their tracks licensed from Romanian label Electrecord), and Budapest band Ando Drom’s singer Mitsou in a duet with violinist Lájos Kathy Horváth and on tracks taken from Network albums by Ando Drom and by Paris band Bratsch.
      The title is apt; there’s a regal command and poise about all of them, particularly the first five - rich voices, passionate and vibrant but also with the sad reflectiveness of maturity - while Mitsou has more of the striving of youth in her reedier, tight-throated tone.
      Esme Redžepova, whose joyful image fills the front cover, has a band of clarinets, accordions, trumpet, keyboards, darabuka and drums, drawn mainly from among the forty-seven orphans and street children that she and her late partner, mentor and bandleader Stevo Teodosievsky adopted, while the Romanians’ bands feature pulsing or skittering cimbalom, liquid accordion and ecstatic fiddles interweaving with their supremely controlled, hovering ornamented vocals. Džansever, though born in Macedonia and returning there for this recording, has had her main success in Turkey and the Near East and her style is the most Arabic-sounding here, spaciously keening and soaring over oud, guitar, bass, drumkit, darabuka, clarinet and slithering violin. La Macanita’s flamenco, accompanied only by guitarist Moraito and palmas, is fiery and personal, not the over-neat formulaic type sometimes found in dance-led stage shows.
      They all have the mark of the diva, that embracing, skilful and forthright public communication that draws on private wellsprings of powerful and sometimes painful experience.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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