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Written in Folk Roots issue 186, 1998

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Rough Guide To The Music of Eastern Europe
World Music Network RGNET 1024 CD (1998)

The role of these World Music Network compilations is probably rather to draw the newcomer into new musical territories than to truly explore, but the back of the pack does feature a press quote: “...these discs delve right into the heart and soul of the region they explore.” Well, some in the series do that more than others, and many are worthwhile and useful, but this one, while as usual containing very listenable music, has problems.
      It’s apparently intended “to accompany the Rough Guides To Romania and Hungary”, and it might have done better had it stuck to that area rather than attempting the impossible - to encompass in 15 tracks the whole of that huge, hard to define, musically rich and diverse area known in the West by the culturally insensitive blanket term, left over from the Cold War, “Eastern Europe”.
      What we have here is a cast of performers most of whom tour regularly on the world music circuit, and recordings which are virtually all widely available on west European labels. There’s Márta Sebestyén, Taraf de Haïdouks, Trio Bulgarka, Ivo Papasov, Nikola Parov (who also appears in Zsarátnok), Vízöntö, Kálmán Balogh, Mark Pashku (this from Topic’s Folk Music of Albania), the Horo Orchestra, The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices Choir, Apparatschik, Kocani Orkestar, Ferus Mustafov, and Poland's Trebunia Family Band.
      OK, perhaps there’s a case for an introductory sampler of what’s to be found in western shops, but neither in content nor in its minimal booklet notes (eight of the fourteen pages are devoted to adverts) is this a guide to the music, popular or traditional, of the region or even a part of it, and it perpetuates a very unbalanced perspective. There is a preponderance of tracks from Bulgaria and Hungary, one from each of Romania, Poland, Albania and Apparatschik’s invented island of Machorka Tabakistan, and a couple from Macedonia. Nothing at all from Russia as such, nor from any of the many countries and peoples recently or still within its borders and west of the Urals (even their names virtually unknown in the West), or from the Baltic States, Belarus, Moldova, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the countries formerly in Yugoslavia... There’s a vast amount of remarkable music in these regions, and commercial recordings even exist of some of it on vinyl or cassette but few on CD; some master tapes are even mouldering and being lost through lack of funds. Surely a sampler sweepingly titled The Music of Eastern Europe, truly “delving right into the heart and soul”, would make a few of these more accessible to western ears.


© 1998 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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