Mahala Rai Banda
When Belgian musician and producer Michel Winter travelled
to Romania in 1990 to pick up gypsy musicians for the first ever touring lautari
band Taraf de Haidouks, he certainly wasn't aware that his snowball will turn
into an avalanche. WOMAD audiences were learning about exciting unknown music
from the other end of Europe - and many of them got hooked forever. But in
their homeland, Romanian gypsy musicians remained cut off in their ghettos:
for Taraf, it took 10 years of international touring to gave their first concert
in Romania in a tiny Bucharest theatre. But neglect from local audiences doesn't
mean lack of vitality. The gypsy community is flaming with new ideas: the
traditional instruments cymbalom and violin ale coupled with Turkish rhythms
of darbuka, Gypsy music draws on oriental flavour, village
musicians are encouraged to play with city dance bands.
The
brightest hope in this vibrant yet strangely obscured musical landscape is
Mahala Rai Banda, a discovery made by the same team that
gave you Taraf de Haidouks and Kocani Orkestar.
Currently, Banda are finishing their debut CD and taking off for a tour. Michel
Winter from the Divano Production explains what
it's all about:
Mahala is the common name gypsies use to designate the areas
where they form the majority of the population, and which sometimes develop
into small towns.
Rai is a word of Arab origin borrowed by the Rom populations
which travelled through Persia then Egypt and whose migration ended in Romania
in the plain of Walachia. These generations of gypsy musicians (lautari) are
considered to be a sort of aristocracy among gypsies and the term rai designates
someone whose authority or know-how is recognised by all.
Banda designates an orchestra composed of various instruments
(violin, trumpet, saxophone, cymbalom, percussion instruments, accordion.)
which belongs to no particular genre. It is neither a fanfare nor a folk band,
but can be either according to circumstance. Traditional music from the countryside
meets the radically modernist style of gypsy music from Bucharest, oriental
ornamentation, modern rhythms and the more complex rhythms from the Balkans,
and harmonies from the Banat of Moldavia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania and Turkey.
Through its music, Mahala Rai Banda combines the oral culture
of the gypsy lautari musicians and the rigour of the military fanfares in
which the older members of the group originally played.
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