Romano Drom



Romano Drom reflects as well the tradition and the modernity of the oláh gipsy music. The power of their traditional music is in the voices and vocal games but also the use of romani language as their mother tongue. The basic olah gipsy songs are arranged by Antal Kovács who also composes new songs, mostly based on traditional melodies, and lived experiences. Romano Drom's music is characterized for its masculine energy and sincerity and it is probably the only group who has succeeded in integrating a powerful instrumentation, which gives us a sound colour never reached in this music before. Guitars, percussions, accordion, violin, and double bass groove together...until we have the feeling this music was always part of us.

Romano Drom means "gypsy road" in romani language, dissidents of the group Ando Drom, their first album "Déta Dévla" was released in Hungary in 1999. The second album "Ando Foro" (In the city) came out in November 2001 on the French Label daqui and is distributed by Harmonia Mundi. Their last album "Ande Lindri" (In Dream) came out in october 2003 on the same Label, and the group is actually preparing a new one coming out in the fall 2006.

Romano Drom Snapshot on the musicians...
Anti (Antal Kovács Jr), Solo and rythmic guitar, voice
He started music at 10 years old in a children's group, which later became Ando Drom. He started his carreer by dancing, then played mandolin and sang, took over the tambura and finally the guitar. Foundator of the group with his father, he does all the arrangments, composes words and music of Romano Drom. He uses Tsollar, Lovar, Beash and Romanian melodies, to create an original and personnal repertoir, influenced by his passion for spanish music, but also his interrest for arab music and even Jazz.

Joco (József Balogh), Voice, guitar
He started playing music alone, waiting for the group that would suite him. His meeting with Anti is the result of a dream, and the beguinning of a warmth collaboration


www.romanodrom.com

 

BENGAS


DŽA music (DŽA means go)
BENGAS goes with the Romany-music of the whole world.
The group formed in autumn 2001 in Prague Instrumental cast of BENGAS consist from four spanish half accustic guitars, bassguitars, percus instruments and drummersDuring last 6 years BENGAS performed in many hall in Prague, in Bohemia, Moravia even in abroad.

Milan Migel Horvát - acc. guitar, song
Robert Marcín - acc. guitar, song
František Fery Cervenák - acc. guitar, song
Martin Sivák - bassguitar, song
Radek Sivák - percussion
Lucas Trojan - drums – in last years played with Undrop, Manu Chao and perform before Oasis
The group co-operate with the oldest Romany-folklore dance group PERUM
in Europe and with GIPSY KINGS

www.bengas.net

 

BABA ZULA



With its specifically unique sound created by melding traditional Turkish musical instruments with electronic elements, Baba Zula has brought a brand new dimension to Turkish Folk Music. Baba Zula's music is basically an amalgamation of recorded natural sounds with both traditional and modern acoustic and electronic musical instruments, a culmination of disparate electronic effects. Starting out by improvisations, later fixed into musical elements which make up their music such as theme, tune, style and sound, reached through recordings and rehearsals, the group has carried this method of "defined improvisation" into concerts, movies, theatrical plays, use of video, slides and films, prepared by the additional members who have joined forces with the core group in its live performances.

Levent Akman (kasik, bendir, def, konga)
Murat Ertel (Baglama and other strings, teremin, vocal)
Emre Onel (darbuka, sampler, vocal) .

 


THE NEW YORK GYPSY ALL-STARS BAND


The young Macedonian / Turkish clarinet virtuoso Ismail Lumanovski follows up his unforgettable performance with the Clarinet All- Stars during the NY Gypsy Festival with another all-star session of jazz-inflected Turkish, Balkan and Mediterranean Romani (Gypsy) songs, The All-Stars showcases some of NY's finest musicians including Tamer Pinarbasi from Turkey on kunun, Panogiotis Andreu from Greece on bass; Seido Salifoski from Macedonia on percussion/darbouka and Jordan Person from Philadelphia on drums, who have performed with such world music icons as Turkish clarinet master Husnu Senendirici, and Bulgarian masters Ivo Popasov and Yuri Yanakov. The group is the brainchild of Serdar Ilhan, producer of the New York Gypsy Festival, which offers a broad perspective on various styles of Gypsy music and dance against the backdrop of New York City which, being the crossroads of many cultures, is essentially Gypsy at heart

Ismail Lumanovski - Clarinet (Mecadonia)
Seido Salifoski - Darbuka (Macedonia)
Panagiotis Andreou - Bass (Greece)
Tamer Pinarbasi - Kanun (Turkey)
Jordan Pearlman - Drum (US)



BALKAN BEAT BOX

Balkan Beat Box is steeped with an intense lifetime of research into their own non-Western roots as well as other cultures. A quasi-circus event, BBB performs with a core of 6 musicians, collaborating with artists from Bulgaria, Morocco, Spain, Israel, and Turkey who draw on a variety of styles from around the world. Every event keeps the audience guessing what the next surprise will be.

BBB makes connections that politics often keep separate. Jewish, Gypsy, Arabic, and American are united by hip hop beats and dancehall toasts. BBB’s musical hitch-hiking continues as they mix things up with dub and electronics, juxtaposed with ancient Moroccan and Mediterranean melodies. The band’s uncategorizable sound gives equal weight to soulful acoustic timbres and digital rhythms creating a uniquely organic sound with electronic elements.

“Gypsy is the definition of a soul, not a color or place. It’s a take on life.” – Tamir Muskat in SPIN, Jan. 2007

“A magnificent mash-up melding music from every conceivable corner of the globe and its history." – Chicago Sun Times

Ori Kaplan, Tamir Muskat, Itamar Zeigler, Tomer Yosef, Eyal Talmudi, Peter Hass, Dana Leong, Uri Kinrod, Jeremiah Loockwood, Ben Handler

www.balkanbeatbox.com

 


BEIRUT




Beirut, ‘Gulag Orkestar’
Few popular musicians have been punished for their precocity. George Harrison was 19 when "Love Me Do" debuted on the British charts; Michael Jackson notched four No. 1 singles before reaching his teens. But those boys were preoccupied with ABCs and holding hands. Nineteen-year-old Albuquerque, N.M., native Zach Condon, who records as Beirut, has developed a somewhat less age-appropriate obsession: Balkan brass-band music. His songs have names like "Mount Wroclai," "Prenzlauerberg" and "Bratislava,” and they're adorned with ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels and accordions—everything, it seems, but guitars. The risk pays off. Sure, "Gulag Orkestar"'s mournful ballads and creaky marches aren't "authentic" per se—they’re as much Magnetic Fields as Boban Markovic. But here's to making the Old World new. (In stores now)
—Andrew Romano

17 HIPPIES

12 years can be long or short. You can walk around the world three times or spend 10000 Euros We have been around for ten years now. A name without a programme. More an attempt to find out if what we do could be a hit…. or doomed to failure. After the first few glittering years we have slowly lost the image of an oddly assorted funny band.

The history of our band and its members is almost a chronicle of Berlin music life since the Eighties. We started off with acoustic unplugged concerts in changing line-ups including up to twenty musicians. Today there are thirteen of us on stage: double bass, banjo, ukulele and guitar give a rhythmic base, the melodious pattern is supplied by violins, cello, accordion, clarinet, trumpet and trombone.


Our idea from the word go was to mix traditional music from Eastern Europe, France and America with our own Berlin background. Against the backdrop of anglo-american pop music we started looking for our own traditions. As time went by, more and more original compositions and various songs with texts in German, English and French were written.

Apart from playing live concerts and producing CDs, we have written film music, cooperated with other musicians and got involved in sideline projects. The HARDCORE TROBADOURS are a joint project with the band Hurlements d’Léo from Bordeaux, and the „17 Hippies play…“-edition features musicians who we think are great: the latest brand new thing is the CD “17 Hipiies play guitar” with Tom Waits-guitarist Marc Ribot and Element of Crime-guitarist Jakob Ilja playing electronic guitars.

Our tenth anniversary two years ago was celebrated by presenting our first DVD! This documentation shows incredible anecdotes and all the differing characters… The concert was filmed live on stage at the Kesselhaus of the Kulturbrauerei – a place we feel very much attached to. Jan and Randa did a perfect job in filming and compiling the DVD, and we are proud and grateful to have such a fantastic summary of the band history in our hands!

 

VIVA PATSHIVA

Viva Patshiva creates a new musical subcountry, somewhere between Transylvania and New York City, where you'll hear the ethereal voice of Chemda, the evocative violin of Jesse Kotansky, the gravelly comic genius of Lloyd Floyd, the immortal howl of Spread Eagle's Ray West, the velvety croon of Raven Solano, and the soaring flights of Mikey McCue, held together by a tight dance rock Gypsy rhythm section.
is stellar unit grew out of the improv comic rock band The Sacred Clowns, which mixed the daring musicians and fearless comedians of New York City's Lower East Side to mount legendary performance spectacles in the late 90s. Everything changed in 2001 and a core group of performers began to develop a full length Rock Opera that combined an over-the-top performance style with the emotionally charged melodies and dance steps of the Gypsies of Hungary and Transylvania to tell a story about love and sadness and triumph over the sadness of love.

Reasons To Live tells the story of a depressed Gypsy girl who lives under a highway overpass in Queens with a crazy Gypsy band. Two men are in love with her: a rich motivational speaker who falls for her exotic dance act at the Pump Room strip club, and a working class hero who runs the deli near the Gypsy camp. Filled with unforgettable love songs, drinking songs, dance songs, fight songs and breakup songs, Reasons To Live is a full-length Rock Opera with tight syncopated dance numbers, told in a fast-paced comic style.

 

ZLATNE USTE

Zlatne Uste (Golden Lips) is an internationally known group of American-born musicians playing traditional music of the Balkans, primarily representing Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Romany (Gypsy) traditions. Four-time invited guest at the Dragachevo Brass Festival in Gucha, Serbia, the 12-piece band is among the foremost presenters of traditional Balkan dance music in the United States. From kolos to Kusturica, experience the rich sounds of driving Balkan brass!

Belle Birchfield - baritone truba
Morgan Clark - baritone truba
Marian Eines - alto saxophone, vocals
Sarah Ferholt - truba
Catherine Foster - clarinet, truba, vocals
Michael Ginsburg - truba
Tamberlaine Harris - truba
Emerson Hawley - bass truba
Jerry Kisslinger - snare drum, tupan
Dan Kollar - bubanj, tupan
Matt Moran - tupan, snare drum, dumbek
Seido Salifoski - snare drum, tupan
Matthew Smith - baritone truba, trombone
Gary Zema - baritone horn

 

 

 

Luminescent Orchestrii

Romanian gypsy melodies, punk frenzy, salty tangos, hard rocking klezmer, haunting Balkan harmony, hip-hop beats and Appalachian fiddle, all eaten and spit out by three violins, resophonic guitar, bullhorn harmonica and guitarron. The members of Luminescent Orchestrii come from different backgrounds and scenes in New York City and share a love of the music that people all over the world listen to while drinking, dancing and weeping.

Rima Fand - violin
Julie Carney - violin
Sarah Alden - violin
Aaron Goldsmith - Guitarron
Sxip Shirey - resophonic guitar, bullhorn harmonicas melodica

www.lumii.org

 

Zagnut Orkestar

Called "Rollicking!" "Rousing!" & "Rowdy!" by NYC area newspapers, Brooklyn-based 6-piece Zagnut Orkestar plays the music of the Roma (gypsy), Macedonian, Serbian, Albanian, Greek and Bulgarian people of Eastern Europe. Their music is upbeat, funky, edgy and above all, great for dancing, both in odd and even meters.

Jodi Hewat - Singer
Greg Squared - Sax
Ben Holmes - Trumpet
Jessica Lurie - Sax
Matthew Fass - Accordion
Jeanette Lewicki - Accordion
George Rush - Tuba
Timothy Quigley - Drums

www.zagnutcirkus.com
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Romashka

Romashka draws its repertoire primarily from Romanian and Russian Gypsies. The musicians have traipsed around Eastern Europe and the Eastern European enclaves of NYC collecting and imbibing local folk music and culture. Romashka has roused crowds from BAM CafÈ to the Bulgarian Bar, from weddings to late-night house parties that have shaken the walls and drawn the cops."Romashka" is Russian for "daisy." Next to raucous dance numbers you will also find aching, world-weary love songs, as sweet and unexpected as a flower in a parking lot.

Inna Barmash - vocals
Jake Shulman-Ment - violin
Jeff Perlman - clarinet & saxophone
Ben Holmes - trumpet
Stevhen Iancu - accordion
Joey Weisenberg - guitar
Ron Caswell - tuba
Timothy Quigley - drums & percussion

www.romashka.net

 

Globe Sonic Sound System

Featuring top DJs on the global music scene, GlobeSonic was founded in 2000 by Fabian Alsultany. An international dreamscape weaving the music of the ancients with modern sensibility, the collective (Alsultany, Acidophilus & Derek Beres) has toured globally with some of today's most important and innovative artists. Canvasing Asia, Arabia, Africa, Latin America, India, the Caribbean and Balkans, GlobeSonic parties have become legendary in the breadth of music and the ease of transition these DJs make between country, culture and continent. Comprised of three well-seasoned professionals involved in numerous facets of America's international music industry, they are proving the world is at the touch of everyone's fingertips...and hips.

www.globesonic.com

 

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