We first heard of Taraf de Haidouks a few years ago. They played a gig at one of our favorite local venues, the Center for Cultural Exchange, now under new ownership as One Longfellow Square. Alas, they played less than a week after Les Yeux Noirs, another Rom band. Tickets for the first show were much more affordable than those for the second, so we opted in favor of Les Yeaux Noirs (see our live review here, and thus skipped the Tarafs. But, they sounded sufficiently interesting to prompt us to begin a quest for their recordings. Counting the just-arrived Maskarada, we now have seven of their CDs.
A large Romanian Rom band, Taraf de Haidouks (roughly translated, ‘Band of Brigands’) came into being in 1989, right around the time Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceaucescu was executed for crimes against the state. Most of the members of the band are from Clejani, a community well-known for its Roma musicians. Their work is recorded and distributed by Crammed Discs, a Brussels-based company that is quite relentless in its pursuit of interesting music from all over the world.
While most of their music is relentlessly upbeat to the point of being frenetic, Maskarada marks a slight departure from the Tarafs’ usual offerings. What makes this CD such a standout is the direction the band members took in pursuing their cultural origins. According to the liner notes, they wanted to show how several late nineteenth and early twentieth century classical composers incorporated Rom sensibilities into their work by playing their own distinctive arrangements of selected pieces-then composing their own pieces to show how they (the Tarafs) incorporated the sensibilities of these composers into their work. No wonder the CD is called Maskarada (Masquerade)!
With a run time of just a shade under an hour, this CD features fourteen tracks, all but three instrumental. Two are by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, well-known for incorporating Eastern European folk tunes into his compositions. (Read Robert Tilendis’s masterful omnibus review of some of Bartok’s recorded works). Two are by Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, who also favored folk motifs in his work, including the popular ‘Sabre Dance’ from the ballet ‘Gayane.’ I immediately recognized two of the other tracks as classical works I often heard in my childhood: ‘Danza Ritual del Fuego,’ written by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and ‘In a Persian Market,’ written by Albert Ketelbey, an English composer caught up in the Orientalist movement. ‘Asturias,’ by another Spaniard, Isaac Albeniz, provided the haunting melody that opens the Doors song, ‘Spanish Caravan.’ Hungarian Joseph Kosma’s ‘Les Portes de la Nuit’ includes the melody most of us would recognize as ‘Autumn Leaves.’ Alas, there are no track-specific liner notes to enhance the listener’s appreciation of the origins of these pieces or to explain why the band selected them.
I don’t want to suggest that these are covers in the usual, somewhat derogatory sense of that word. The Tarafs are the genuine article, sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the very indigenous musicians who no doubt inspired the writing of some of these popular classics, and their renderings of the tunes are rich and complex, full of fast rhythms and the mix of instruments for which the Tarafs are justly famous. While the tunes and songs on this CD are somewhat more refined than those on their previous releases, the Tarafs certainly haven’t abandoned their wall of sound approach. The promotional photo from the Maskarada tour shows twelve musicians, all men, with violins, accordions, cello, bass, clarinet and cimbalom-the same photo appears on the centerfold of the liner notes. There are actually fourteen performers on this CD, including two ‘special guests’: Sebastien Giniaux on guitar and cello, and Stela Dumitru on cimbalom and vocals.
For reasons impossible for me to explain, this CD is not currently available from the major US net retailers-we bought our copy from Amazon.co.uk. It’s a fascinating introduction to a talented group of neo-traditional musicians, or a worthwhile addition to any collection of their work that you might already have!
(Crammed Discs, 2007)
