The new bohemians

At a recent festival, the next generation of Gypsy musicians proves the hard-to-pin-down sound has found new life.

By Robert Christgau

Read more: Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment Features

Photos: nygypsyfest.com

Left to right, Frank London, Eugene Hutz and Ismail Lumanovski

Oct. 29, 2006 | Purity is always a misleading ideal. With the Gypsies, or Roma, an outcast people who've survived by syncretic adaptation since they left India a millennium ago, it's an impossible chimera. Charles Keil, one of many to search hard before concluding that "the real Gypsy music" is a myth, quotes a Kosovo musician: "We do not care whether it is Turkish, Serbian or Albanian. We just play it livelier." Such commonalities as "natural" singing, idiomatic phrasing, behind-the-beat attack, and minor chords don't distinguish it drastically from all the other folkish musics that stick it to Western classical strictures. And the counterclaim that Gypsies don't play their music for gadje, non-Gypsies, merely renders the "real" stuff a tree falling in the forest for gadje who follow various Gypsy musics whether they're pure or not.

Until recently the gadje's choices boiled down to melodramatic, multicultural flamenco, the truncated jazz tradition of Django Reinhardt and then, for too long oh Lord, the mawkish "rumba flamenca" of France's answer to Air Supply, the Gipsy Kings. The only visible export from Eastern Europe, where most Roma live, was gentrified folk Hungarian restaurant music. But post-Soviet Union, a few Western European record labels invaded Eastern Europe and changed this. In 1990 Stephane Karo and Michael Winter of Belgium's Crammed Discs trekked to the Romanian backwater of Clejani to assemble the violin-and-accordion-based Taraf de Haïdouks (Turkish for "band," French for "of," Roma for "outlaws"). In 1996, German producer and future Asphalt Tango head Henry Ernst assembled the Fanfare Ciocarlia brass band in another Romanian village, and Crammed responded by signing Macedonia's Kocani Orkestar (and then wresting the name from trumpeter Naat Veliov). Bulgarian clarinet master Ivo Papasov, Macedonian sax king Ferus Mustafov, and Boban Markovic's Serbian brass band are other major Gypsy-Balkan noisemakers.

Noise is key here. In the Taraf de Haïdouks model, vocals are subsumed in breakneck momentum, strange-tempered melody and sounds that seem extreme from the instruments you recognize and weird from the ones you don't -- especially the cymbalom, a miraculous hammered dulcimer whose rippling sound morphs toward balafon low and mandolin high (listen to a sampler of Gypsy music here). Gypsy brass is far ruder, aggregating modern and traditional trumpets and trubas and trombones and whatever into blowing that is messily melodic at one end and anarchically propulsive at the other -- dancing-on-the-tables music for that special moment when you're finding it hard enough not to collapse to the floor. Horns drive squalling dissonances and frantic drum and tuba rhythms whose funk makes hip-hop's seem tame, because at least you've gotten used to hip-hop's Africanness.

Until Nonesuch dropped the first U.S. Haïdouks album in 1999, I'd always found Gypsy music floridly hyperromantic; until I heard Boban Markovic's swozzled, cacophonous, lyrical, sometimes virtuosic "Boban I Marko" five years later, my distaste for massed brass extended all the way from Stan Kenton to Ray Barretto. But it was really Ukrainian-born, NYC-based Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello, a Gypsy-gadje meld that turned into the most exciting new alt-rock band in the world once Hutz learned to write songs, who drew me to this year's New York Gypsy Festival -- Gogol Bordello climaxed last year's inaugural edition, and Hutz hosted 2006's finale. As it turned out, the Gypsy Festival, stretched this year by Turkish-born promoter-restaurateur Serdar Ilhan from Sept. 25 to Oct. 8, wasn't strong on the stuff I was there for, only as it turned out, that didn't matter.

Next page: Romasomes: "Small social things all around us"