The ecstatic folk music of Romania is coming to Dublin. Could this be the start of a fruitful cross-pollination, asks Jon Ihle.
There is a corridor of music - running from Istanbul and the southern Balkans, north through Romania and the western edge of the former Soviet Union and onwards to the Baltic states - where the shifting melodies of laughter and weeping stream from fiddles and clarinets over the asymmetric rhythms of snare drums and cymbalom.
This is gypsy territory, where for centuries lautari - itinerant Roma musicians - have travelled the countryside playing their distinctive repertoire with virtuosic flair, and its heartland is Romania. Now, as that country moves closer to Ireland and the EU's frontier moves east, one of the leading exponents of its contemporary gypsy music, Mahala Rai Banda, will be performing tomorrow at Tripod on Dublin's Harcourt Street. The show is a small celebration of Balkan styles, as the Romanian masters will be joined on the bill by two Irish-based klezmer acts: Nick Roth's Yurodny and the North Strand Klezmer Band.
Mahala Rai Banda (literally "noble band from the ghetto") is the real thing. The group combines the whirling ghetto gypsy styles of Bucharest with - curiously - the military exactitude of the legendary army brass bands of the surreal and terrible Ceausescu regime. But the roots of the band go deeper still, to Clejani, 40km south of Bucharest and the centre of gravity for gypsy music in Romania.
Clejani is where people traditionally come to hire musicians for weddings and other community celebrations, which are said to go on for days. Across the Balkans, small towns like this hold hiring festivals, where the countryside vibrates to the sound of horns as various groups and musicians pitch for work. Music is a family affair in Clejani and bands are generally pieced together from brothers, uncles, cousins and nephews. Mahala Rai Banda traces its family lineage to Clejani's Taraf de Haïdouks, perhaps the best-known gypsy band outside Romania, who were first brought to widespread attention in western Europe through the documentary No Man Is a Prophet in His Own Land in 2000.
Having moved from the countryside to the metropolis, though, Mahala Rai Banda have traded the traditional strings and accordion sound of their grandfathers for something a little more polished and a little more pop. But the characteristics of gypsy music come through loud and clear. The swaying rhythm has a push-pull effect that evokes a dancing couple, while the supercharged tempos threaten always to spin out of control. The oriental scales and modes convey emotional extremes veering from ecstatic joy and celebration to mourning and sadness, reflecting the wedding-and-funeral circuit where Roma musicians have traditionally found work.
What makes Mahala Rai Banda unique, though, is that grafted onto this is a section of decommissioned army brass players who learned their chops in Ceausescu's 30,000-strong army band. But with a background in the Roma community of Moldavia, the connection to Clejani's folk tradition in strong.
The support acts for this gig, Yurodny and North Strand Klezmer Band, are well chosen, since the gypsy world of Mahala Rai Banda and bands like them was also once the homeland for most of Europe's Jewish population. Contemporary klezmer's repertoire emerged in the 19th century from the culture of Jewish villages in what was then called Bessarabia, roughly the region between the Carpathian mountains in Romania and the Dniestr river at the eastern edge of Moldova.
While many klezmer melodies and song structures derive from the ancient liturgical music of the synagogue, it is a secular and instrumental form of entertainment - like gypsy music, heard most often at weddings and funerals. Because of this, klezmer musicians were traditionally regarded by religious authorities as somewhat less than kosher, despite their popularity at community events that otherwise had deeply religious aspects.
Worse, as far as the rabbis were concerned, their itinerant lifestyle brought them into contact with gentiles - and with Europe's other population of wandering outsiders, the Roma. Not surprisingly the klezmorim and lautari influenced each other to such an extent through this contact that today their styles are virtually indistinguishable. Both play the same sort of ecstatic tunes coloured from the same distinctive eastern palette at hyperactive tempos. The instrumentation of the bands on stage tomorrow night won't vary much and the high-octane playing will be common to them all.
For saxophonist Nick Roth, an English Jew who came to Ireland to study jazz with Ronan Guilfoyle, playing klezmer is both a personal journey into the roots of his own cultural identity and an exploration of the music's improvisational affinity with jazz. His earlier work with Hora and various incarnations of his ongoing Kai project attest to that. The North Strand Klezmer band are Dublin through and through, but with their identifiably Yiddish sound you would never guess.
Not since Andy Irvine brought the sounds of the Balkans back to Ireland more than 20 years ago has the country had such exposure to the accomplishments of this rich folk music tradition. Now that the eastern half of the continent is moving closer to us every year, young ambitious musicians here are picking up on what it has to offer and searching out new inspiration in sounds that have sustained other cultures for centuries. By matching a new generation of Irish musicians with masters from Romania, tomorrow night's performance should provide the context for a fruitful cross-pollination.
Mahala Rai Banda, North Strand Klezmer Band and Yurodny play Tripod on Harcourt Street, Dublin on Dec 3 at 7.30pm €22, 0818-719300