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Written in Folk Roots issue 146/147, 1995

GHEORGHE ZAMFIR
The Beautiful Sound Of The Pan Pipes
Music Club MCCD 202 (1995)

In the 60s and early 70s Gheorghe Zamfir was involved in some of the most exquisite recordings to come out of Romania. Most of them were for the Electrecord label, sometimes licensed to non-Romanian labels such as Arion. Well worth CD re-release would be, for example, Electrecord STM-EPE 01329, Gheorghe Zamfir Si Virtuosii Säi, extraordinarily skilled and beautiful playing from not just Zamfir but such virtuosi as violinist Efta Botoca and taragot/clarinet players Dorin Cuibariu and Pavel Cebzan.
      As a result of exposure first in France, then elsewhere via concerts, TV and later the (rather beautiful) hit Doina De Jale (Light Of Experience) and the soundtrack to the film Picnic At Hanging Rock, Zamfir and his panpipes became sucked into the western MOR marketing machine. In absorbing him its insensitive A & R people drained much of the life out of what he did. There were recordings of standards, recordings with syrupy western orchestral backing, most of them aimed at the mid-price racks.
      So now along comes a mid-price CD reissue of some stuff from the 70s which might appear to be a welcome reassessment of a great musician. It isn’t - it’s more of that same ignorant marketing. About half the tracks here do feature Romanian instruments, including the cimbalom which imparts that surging, quivering tension under the soaring slow tunes and smacks the fast ones along (though there aren’t many fast sections in these “eleven haunting melodies”); the other half, including a particularly non-soaring version of The Light Of Experience, are accompanied by Nicolaf Licaret on church organ, an instrument which, here at least, completely fails to deliver the vibrant tension these tunes need to float over.
      And the booklet - “eight-page”, “featuring extensive liner notes” - amounts to nothing more than guff and the reminiscences of Phonogram’s then Product Manager, including two mentions of Zamfir’s “infectious grin” and parallels with the way they “broke” Demis Roussos. No musicians or instruments are named apart from Licaret and the organ, nor recording details except that the tracks were “recorded in his home territory between 1966 and 1977”. There’s no information as to Zamfir’s current condition, be he alive or dead, but he’s spoken of in the past tense.
      One quote sums up the attitude: “Gheorghe appears to have required the guidance of his Dutch record company. He wasn’t a dynamic, commercially-minded performer at all”. Strange, then, that he managed to make those fine recordings for Electrecord as soloist and band-leader before even meeting his multinational A & R saviours.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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