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Written in Folk Roots issue 146/147, 1995

KÁLMÁN BALOGH & THE GIPSY CIMBALOM BAND
Kálmán Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band
Music & Words MWCD 4009 (1995)

If you’ve seen a brilliant Gipsy cimbalom player with Vasmalom, Muzsikás, Zsarátnok, Mákvirag or a whole list of other Hungarian bands, you’ve seen Kálmán Balogh. Here he is in a storming live set leading a 6-piece band comprising violins, guitar, bass and trumpet, with some exuberant rhythmic vocal utterances and occasional verses of song.
      Normally a live album as tight as this is recorded over a series of gigs, but this one all comes from The Night of Gipsies at 1994’s Amsterdam Melkweg festival. In Gipsy material from across Europe - Hungary, Romania, Greece, Spain, Transylvania, Turkey - the cimbalom scampers, the fiddles drive and soar, and Ferenc Kovacs’ trumpet, unusual in this sort of line-up but perfectly suited to it, suggests links with mariachi, son and jazz, where it ties in with the references in the fiddling to another great European gipsy music, hot-club swing. Gipsy (and of course also, Jewish) musicians run like a nervous system through European music, and it’s no surprise when, in Hora De La Bim-Bim & Sirba this band unites hora and sirba with that other great pan-European form, rock’n’roll. Dazzling playing and fun throughout, right through to Sándor Budai’s classic gipsy violin lark and police-siren impressions in Pacsirta.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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