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Written in fRoots issue 337, 2011


SÖNDÖRGÖ
Tamburising – Lost Music Of The Balkans
World Village 450017 (2010)

The tambura is a fretted instrument found in the Balkans, where its progenitors arrived centuries ago from the direction of Iran and Turkey. In Bulgaria and Macedonia it’s largely a solo or song-accompanying instrument, but in former Yugoslavia in the mid 19th century tambura bands arose, causing the development and evolution of a range of different sized instruments, all played with plectrums. The small lead tamburas usually have a teardrop-shaped soundbox while the larger, accompanying ones have become guitar-shaped, and the bass looks something like a double bass but with frets and a flat bridge.
     Tambura bands multiplied, with some expanding to big arranged orchestras attached to cities or national radios, but over recent decades their number has been diminishing, the gigging bands depressingly often replaced at festivities and on Adriatic holiday hotel terraces by duos dribbling pop-schlock on keyboards and sequencers.
     Söndörgö, though, is bucking the trend. It’s a hot tambura quintet, with the ability to switch to equally smart kaval, accordion, frula, clarinet, sax, trumpet, derbuka and tapan. Hungarian Serbs from the town of Szentendre north of Budapest, four of the band, the Eredics brothers, are the sons of Kálmán Eredics, bassist with well-known Hungarian Serbian tambura band Vujicsics.
     The band was mighty impressive at May’s Hangvetö-directed “World Music From Home” showcase concert at Budapest’s Palace of Arts, and appears in London in late June. The CD, recorded in Serbian tambura heartland in Novi Sad, gives a good sense of their capabilities. They’re joined on some tracks by leading elder tambura player Jószef Kovács, and for couple of songs each by the very strong female singer Kátya Tompos, who was a highlight of the Budapest concert, and the larynx-straining ecstatic male vocals of Roma singer Antal Kovács from the band Romano Drom.
     The material is mostly Serbian, some of it Roma, with an occasional touch of the influence of Croatian tambura bands, moving to Macedonian and the non-tambura instruments for the final three tracks. The earlier part of the album is largely played, with masterly fluency, on the tamburas, but the band’s Salamon Eredics also delivers a snappy lead on frula, the wooden whistle, for one of the several kolos (tunes for the ever-popular Serbian circle-dance), and on accordion leads a Serbian song tune that fades in and out, slightly oddly but as a contrasting insert between tambura tracks.

www.worldvillagemusic.com, www.sondorgo.com

© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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