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Written in fRoots issue 325, 2010
 

TCHA LIMBERGER’S KALOTASZEG TRIO
A Hajnali Csillag Ragyog
Lejazzetal LJCD11 (2009)

Brilliantly played, great-toned Transylvanian fiddle, brács and double bass music with the old sound, from the region of Kalotaszeg where Hungarian, Roma and Romanian musics blend in a strong local tradition, in a just-right recording.
      Fast szaporak, legényes, învârtita and csárdás, slow lyrical keserves and hajnali, fiddling of perfect rich, evocative tone, with on some tracks the fiddler’s fine soaring, plaintive tenor voice, over the surging bowing of brács and double bass. There’s more to it than that, though. Brács player Tóni Rudi and bassist Berki Viktor were accompanists to the late Rom fiddle master from Kalotaszeg, Neti Sandor. In the Kalotaszeg Trio they play with a musician at the height of his skills and of extraordinary ability and quite a history.
      Tcha Limberger was born, blind, into a Roma musician family in Belgium. Diverted from a desire to be a flamenco singer to playing first clarinet then guitar in the family band Orchestra De Piottos, in which guitarist Fapy Lafertin also played. He continued in Django Reinhardt’s Belgian Roma territory, joining Lafertin in well-known manouche band Waso as rhythm guitarist. At the age of seventeen he took up the violin, and after forming the band Romani with his father Vivi, Waso clarinettist Koen de Cauter and others, six years later went to Budapest to study classical and Roma fiddling. Having learned Hungarian, a difficult task in itself, and to play Magyar nota, he followed his enthusiasms into the traditional music of Transylvania.
      Throughout Hungarian-speaking territories there are summer masterclasses where one can learn the local musical and dance traditions, and he found his musical home when he went to the one in Kalotaszentkirály, where he was very well accepted and encouraged by the local musicians including Neti Sandor.
      Transylvanian music played by a person of Belgian origin may seem ‘inauthentic’, but this is absolutely the real thing, alive in the present day and absolutely top-class. Not just in playing but in quality of recording, which was made in the old school hall of Magyarókereke in Kalotaszeg by South Wales’s own not inconsiderable guitarist Dylan Fowler and released by Lejazzetal, the London label run by Dave Kelbie, himself a well-known rhythm guitarist of long association with Fapy Lafertin, John Etheridge and others.
      A good long listen, too, at over 72 enjoyable minutes.

      www.lejazzetal.com


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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