Taraf de Haïdouks: back to the roots

Benjamin Tollet
© Agenda Magazine
12/02/2015
(© Damien Gard)

Even though several members of the original line-up have passed away, Taraf de Haïdouks is still one of eastern Europe’s finest Gypsy bands. The group, from Clejani in Romania, will celebrate its 25th birthday by presenting its new album, Of Lovers, Gamblers and Parachute Skirts, at the Ancienne Belgique. “It’s a return to our roots, a tribute to the music of the past.”

Following the release of their first album in 1991 and their appearance in Tony Gatlif’s celebrated film Latcho Drom, Taraf de Haïdouks established themselves as an emblematic group that symbolised the vitality of eastern European Gypsy music. The group was founded 25 years ago by a Belgian, Stéphane Karo, who brought together a number of musicians who, until then, had performed in a variety of line-ups at key events in the life of their village: baptisms, weddings, funerals, and harvests.

Karo was travelling in Romania when he discovered the talent and the enormous potential of these musicians. “My own family is Hungarian and I love Gypsy music,” Karo recalls. “I came across them on a disc recorded by two ethnomusicologists and when I saw them on the spot, I knew: these guys are going to be big when they get out of here. But, at the time, because of the dictatorship, that was impossible. As it happened, a few months later, the people rose up against Ceausescu.”

With the Romanian revolution and the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989, Karo returned to Romania to form a band with the best musicians in the village. Taraf de Haïdouks was born and Karo organised the first tour outside Romania in July 1990. “Before the fall of Ceausescu, there was a wave of support for Romania in response to the policy of systematisation. The Villages Roumains campaign encouraged the twinning of Belgian and Romanian villages in order to put pressure on Ceausescu, who was demolishing individual houses in order to put people into blocks, comparable to state collectivisation in Russia.”

Frenzy
Karo got in touch with the Belgian villages in question to see whether they would be willing to host a Taraf concert. And that’s how the group’s first international tour – six dates in Belgium – happened. “I had to borrow money to buy airline tickets. They all stayed with me: we were together for fifteen days and it was crazy, chaotic at home, between the musicians and people who were interested. It was crowded day and night. It was really nice, but I was left with a debt more or less equivalent to what I had to pay out for the air fares.”

It wasn’t an easy beginning, but it did open doors for the group’s return the following year to play at a number of European festivals, including WOMAD. “People had never heard eastern music played like that. Romania isn’t in the Balkans: they are a Latin people who play music that is influenced by Eastern and Greek music.” They became a big hit.

Playing for three days in a row
Of necessity, Karo became Taraf’s producer and artistic adviser. “The group took off, up, up, up until it reached a peak. The last few years have been pretty difficult, with the deaths of several musicians. Crammed [the Brussels label that has brought out all of Taraf’s albums - BT] asked me to recreate the atmosphere of the first album. I went back to Clejani to recruit young musicians from among the children of those who had died. And we set out to make a record that would be like the really early days of Taraf.”
Back to the roots, in other words, to a time when musicians weren’t very organised and used to play at ceremonies and weddings. “The music was less polished, less arranged. The musicians often had to play for three days in a row: they had to keep things going and get people moving. It was very rustic and kind of impromptu.”

You can hear the results on the new album, Of Lovers, Gamblers and Parachute Skirts. A sort of retrospective of your career? “No, not at all: retrospective, that sounds like the end of the group. We just want to reproduce the atmosphere of the early days. We went looking for young people who knew how to play the repertoire of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s and we got back to ‘how people played at the time’. Because music is always changing. It’s like a car: you always want to add something new – there’s no getting away from that. This album is a tribute to the music of the past.”

Rock ‘n’ roll
Taraf’s characteristic sound couldn’t be further away from the music heard constantly on Romanian radio and at Romanian festivities these days: manele, a kind of pop that mixes Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian influences with an electronic beat and hip hop. “It’s a bit like American hip hop, but more eastern, with words that are kind of basic and often vulgar. There’s a new hit every week and they sell like hot cakes. We have escaped from that, thanks above all to the old people who are still there. Musically, we are closer to the old-style music that Romanians used to listen to a generation or two ago. But that doesn’t make the work any easier in Romania, as the bands have been replaced at weddings by a drum machine and a keyboard or by a DJ who has all the music in his repertoire.”

So why not modernise? “That would make no sense at all,” in Karo’s opinion. “You have to bear in mind, too, the personalities of some of the members of Taraf, who are like characters out of a novel. They emerged from two schools: music and the theatre. Their personalities took shape at the same time as their playing. I prefer to keep alive the rustic school and keep the group’s distinctive character, without tinkering with it and going for quick success. Our sound is more distinguished: that’s why we’re called the princes of Gypsy music. People call us rock ‘n’ roll too, but that’s more because of the characters and personalities of the musicians, who are anti-everything. They’re not very civilisable; you never know what to expect from them. And that’s why they don’t do interviews.”

TARAF DE HAÏDOUKS • 15/2, 20.00, €23, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be

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