Mahala Raï Banda
My musical taste is quite broad. Basically, I like almost any kind of music as long as it's well played, authentic and soulful. So, my CD collection [and my iPod] offer a vast variety of styles and grooves... However, one genre I always love and collect is gipsy(*) music of all kinds and origins. Sometimes, I'm really not in the mood for it, but usually, I can't stop listening to the unique voices of Monika 'Mitsou' Juhasz Miczura or Vera Bila, I love Egyptian or Turkish gipsy music as well as all the great Eastern European groups and artists such as Ando Drom, Лойко, Bratsch, I Gitanos, Taraf de Haïdouks, Parno Graszt, Esma Redzepova. Basically, I like gipsy tunes from everywhere, from Tekameli [France/Spain] to Musafir from the desert of Rajasthan, India.
Last week, I found a nice CD which - if I wouldn't have found it - someday, I would have produced it myself. ;-) It's an interesting fusion of Romanian gipsy tunes and intense brass music, modernized and funkified to a catching dance music: Mahala Raï Banda [literally: Noble Band from the Ghettos].
'Mahala' are the gipsy ghetto suburbs of Bukarest, Romania. And this is the home of one part of the musicians of Mahala Raï Banda: they are young musicians who belong to a family close to the group Taraf de Haïdouks. They originally came from the small village Clejane [also the home of Nicolae Neacsu] and later settled down in the 'Mahala' near Bukarest. By playing music at weddings, they obviously managed to avoid or escape gang life and drugs. Living in a city, they were in touch with various musical influences. This group of young musicians are joined by another group of musicians of gipsy origin, but from a very different background: They are retired Moldavian soldiers who since age 14 have spent all of their lives playing at military or governmental events in the Romanian army. Their technical perfection [military style] together with the inspiration and power of the young gipsy wedding musicians creates a fascinating and unique, catching sound.
WATCH THIS CLIP to understand what kind of groove I'm talking about. It's a short clip showing Mahala Raï Banda playing 'Mahalageasca' at a party after a child has been baptised. [.MPG format, 83 MB, the server may be slower than your connection... you may right-click the link, download the file and watch it later]
The debut CD shows various shades of the repertoire of the band... some tracks are more traditional, others show strong influence of HipHop, Ska and other styles. The CD title is 'Mahala Raï Banda', available under the label 'Crammed' and ASIN code B0006332ZG.
(*) I don't know if the word 'gipsy' is politically correct. In German, the corresponding word 'Zigeuner' is considered as incorrect. However, the words to replace it are either inaccurate or just wrong: Here, 'Zigeuner'/gipsy is mostly replaced by 'Roma' and 'Sinti' which are the two biggest tribes or groups of gipsies in Europe. But using those names, smaller groups as the Calé, Manusch, Joneschti, Boschi, Polatschia or the Sikligars are not included and discriminated. The other politically correct expression in Germany and Switzerland names gipsies with the acronym MEM = 'mobile ethnic minorities' which is more neutral, but in my opinion also very wrong: most of nowadays' gipsies live in the same place for a lifetime and are less mobile than an average European who travels several times a year. I know gipsy people who live in a suburb of a French city near my place, in a big gipsy community of several thousand people and most of them have never ever left their neighbourhood. Of course, they are referring to themselves as 'tsiganes' and not MEM.