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Written in fRoots issue 218/219, 2001

TARAF DE HAÏDOUKS
Band of Gypsies
Crammed Discs CRAW 24 (2001)

After over a thousand shows abroad, establishing in major venues worldwide a mighty reputation for fast, furious musical brilliance, collaborations with such as the Kronos Quartet, film roles, fashion modelling, and robust social graces that are likely to have shortened by several years the lives of their long-suffering Belgian managers, in December 2000 the thirteen-member Gypsy band of the Romanian village of Clejani finally got to play their first concerts in the capital of their own country.
      Not a welcome-home in Bucharest’s biggest concert hall, fêted as major national cultural exports, but three nights as virtual unknowns in a small crumbling concert hall that nearly refused to present a band of unrespected Gypsies, even one accompanied by a ten-person film crew, recording crew, record company and management people and a couple of dozen invited journalists and photographers from around the world, plus musical guests the Macedonian Gypsy brass band Koçani Orkestar, Turkish darabuka-player Tarik Tuysuzoglu and Bulgarian clarinettist Filip Simeonov. The news of such foreign attention does seem to have stirred up some local press interest, though.
      The CD comprises previously unrecorded material from those concerts or taped in the same period in Bucharest studios. It opens with 77-year-old Neculae Neacsu leading Dance of the Firemen, in which he uses the novelty-number technique of vibrating the lowest fiddle string by dragging his fingers down a single rosined bow-hair tied to it, producing a rasping, croaking note. In this he’s accompanied just by cimbalom, accordion and double bass; as usual in a T de H show, not all members of the band - up to four fiddlers, three accordionists, three cimbalom players, flute-player and bassist plus vocals - play on everything (indeed it’s not unknown at festivals for those not currently on stage to be found making busking raids elsewhere on the site), and in fact in this recording the full Taraf line-up only comes together for the final track, recorded not in Bucharest but in a Paris studio.
      The guests appear, effectively and well integrated, on just three or four tracks each of an excellently-recorded fourteen-track set whose all-carrying pace and zip is rich with light and shade, variety of melodic form and mightily energetic, impeccably skilful playing and arranging in which there’s space for individual personalities to assert. And no corny trotting out of standards, this; being such an attraction on the world-music scene has exposed these musicians to all kinds of new discoveries and possibilities some of which, in the grand tradition of Gypsy music, they absorb and process into their own music. Not grossly, just little leanings and hints here and there in the flow.
      Marc Hollander’s liner notes colourfully diarise those few days in Bucharest and Clejani, and his descriptions of the incidents, images, and personalities ought to be a set text in any study of the paradoxes, sub-texts and undercurrents of world music.


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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