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Written in fRoots issue 276, 2006
 

TRANSKAPELA
Sounds & Shadows
Konador CDKR 013 (2005)

DOBRANOTCH
Gagarin Chochek
Orange World OWCD 010 (2005)

Transkapela is a Polish klezmer band, but its approach is far from the urbanity of Kraków’s Kroke. The Warsaw quartet purveys its own version of the sort of klezmer that was played in the 19th and 20th centuries by itinerant bands playing for weddings and celebrations in the towns and villages of the Carpathians, picking up tunes from the countries on that long mountain chain that curves like a thousand-mile question mark from Slovakia to Serbia.
      It’s knowing and conscious, a recreation, but they play not at all academically; the sound is pleasingly ragged but right, violin or phonofiddle sawing or singing over a cello that chugs an inexorable bass line pulse and a non-pedal cimbalom with a ringing, clanging clatter rather than the impeccably controlled sound of urban Roma bands’ pedal cimbalom. In sirbas, horas, a krakowiak, a foxtrot, a waltz, a tango and more there’s plenty of variety of tempo and melody, and occasional brief contextualising inserts of field recordings made by on trips to Maramureş and Bukovina by one of the two fiddlers, Maciej Filipczuk.
      Hear samples at www.transkapela.com

      In a superficially similar vein, drawing on the traditional music of a range of Slavic countries in an energetic fiddle-led, cimbalom-clattering, chugging klezmer-centred music, is Dobranotch’s third album. Though on a Polish label, the band is based in St. Petersburg and began in the late ’90s as three Russians busking Irish music in France. Now the only original member is klezmer-influenced fiddler Mitya Khramtsov. He’s joined by a hot Moldovan chromatic button accordionist, a Lebanese daff and darbuka player and two more Russians on pumping tuba, rattling cimbalom and the boom-tish of cymbal-equipped bass drum.
      Their Yiddish, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Moldovan, Romanian and Russian material has mostly been picked up from people they’ve played with on their European travels. Dobranotch’s sound is wild, strong, crowd-gathering stuff, not careful studio synthesis nor copyism but a natural blend born of a lot of live playing, and as with Transkapela the spirit isn’t intimidated by the studio. This sounds like the sort of band who’ll be making music wherever they are, be it on a stage or in the street. In some ways transnational travelling bands like Dobranotch, while only fractionally Jewish, are the inheritors of the mantle of the old klezmers, though it’s likely that itinerant band membership will for these musicians be a phase rather than the lifetime career it was for the old players.
      Gagarin Chochek is distributed in the UK by Sterns.


© 2008 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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