Romantech (2012)
10 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify
Eastern European Romani dance music usually brings to mind powerful brass bands, frenetic fiddles or comically trotting cimbalom. The New York Gypsy All Stars take it in a very different direction.
While they keep Balkan Romani music at the core of their style, they look for connections in many directions. That way they find links in the Turkish and Greek music of their band members, and even further afield with sounds from India and Latin America. The two most prominent instruments of the quintet – Macedonian clarinet and Turkish kanun – are an unusual but ingenious paring, able between them to bend around the whole width of styles that this international exploration takes them through.
What really makes this ensemble special though, is the ‘New York’ right there in their name. They’re not just undertaking dry musical research into the roots and shoots of Romani music throughout Europe and beyond, they are a thoroughly modern and thoroughly cosmopolitan band. That means taking cues from jazz and rock, and a vardo-full of funk. Because as well as the wailing clarinet (played by Ismail Lumanovski from the Liquid Clarinets project) and tinkling kanun, it is the keyboards and bass that give the band their driving edge and add a specific acidity that they bring like no other group.
Where most presentations of Romani music on the world stage root the music in its people’s history, its folk traditions and its quirkiest aspects, the New York Gypsy All Stars prove that not only is this sort of music very much alive, but that it is also very much a part of and in tune with the plugged-in and international lives of the 2010s – and onwards.
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