o knocking the lineage of traditional African music so much pop and rock of the last fifty years has been informed by, but isn’t it weird how Balkan music—traditional Gypsy, Jewish, and Romanian styles—gets shafted in the hand-me-down game? Famed guitarist Django Reinhardt is somewhat of an anomaly in jazz, which is still mostly viewed as a black-then-white music (like most of pop’s offspring). Listening to Afropop shows you where the shifting polyrhythms of Timbaland and the Neptunes came from, but the melodies in those styles are mostly bright, major-key splashes of primary color. Modern pop is loaded with eerie minor-key nuances: the piano in “…Baby One More Time,” or countless hip-hop songs scored like mafia films with swelling European strings. Even classical-obsessed metal can often be traced to the frantic fiddling of East European style, arguably the first style so rigorously obsessed with speed.

In the last few years, indie-rockers like Beirut (who even named their debut Gulag Orkestar) have embraced the sound literally in the wake of exposure from movie soundtracks (Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, Everything is Illuminated) and visible proponents of cultural revival (the annual New York Gypsy Festival, Madonna choosing Gogol Bordello members to back her on “La Isla Bonita” at Live Earth earlier this year). Tom Waits has mined the sound of empty-pocket accordions all the way back to “Singapore,” but only now are net hypes like Man Man and the Decemberists spinning indie gold from it. More subtly, is that a “Hava Nagila” riff Eminem stole for 2001’s discoprank “Without Me?” Just as Fela Kuti’s prime was a good time to backtrack James Brown’s rhythmic constructions to Africa, now’s as good as any to see what, say, Ion Petre Stoican, would’ve made of rock ‘n roll.


Šaban Bajramovic

The Johnny Cash of modern Romani music, Bajramovic deserted the Serbian army “for love” and wound up singing in a band during the five-year military prison stint that followed, melting down cultures and references—Sinatra, Armstrong, even Spanish tunes—into the hyperactive wedding music later that eventually came to unite sounds from Yugoslavia to Romania under the “Gypsy” catchall.

Supposedly twenty albums and “about seven hundred songs” in since 1964, only 2002’s Santana-styled statement of purpose A Gypsy Legend is available in America. Legend assumedly serves as a viable career overview, revving from the high-speed, brass-punctuated “Jasmina” (which, to American ears, brings to mind Tilly and the Wall’s “Bad Education”) to the slower mourner’s tango “Pelno Me Sam” (ditto for Clem Snide’s “Something Beautiful”).


Fanfare Ciocarlia

These brass warlords take the White Stripes approach at their live shows, blistering through sometimes 200 bpm-tempo squealers without sheet music or set lists with the occasional stray horn blat, though you’d never know it from the layered, carefully orchestrated music alone, which is as tight as thrash metal. The members’ experience in military marching bands and triple-thick tuba arrangement gives them a fatter sound than most Gypsy brass.

On 2007’s Queens and Kings, a few tracks (especially the flamenco-linking “Cuando Tu Volveras”) approach the chant-catchiness of Manu Chao’s West Euro-world benchmark Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, albeit slipperier. In addition to frantically shuffled drumming, Fanfare employs a bigger Latin influence than most Gypsy groups, building “Duj Duj” around onomatopoeia voice-scat percussion and salsa-like riffs. Fellow sympathizers of the frenetic, Basement Jaxx even sampled them for a track on last year’s Crazy Itch Radio.


Kocani Orkestar

Speaking of tubas, the self-described “funkiest exponents of the Balkan brass band style,” employ a gassy four of them. Kocani Orkestar scored a spot on the Borat soundtrack after their cheeky debut Alone At My Wedding established them in 2002. Even more fanfare-like than Cioc?rlia, their sound is brass-and-drum in totality, but more than anyone else on this list employs their stylistic shifts via compositions instead of arrangements or layering.

They announce themselves racing on “Siki, Siki Baba,” and slow to a doomed Dixieland elegy on “Bayram ¿ek'eri.” The jazzy, barebones sound gives remixers an advantage that otherwise packed-to-the-hinges Balkan brass doesn’t have, making them a unique fit for the Electric Gypsyland compilation. While any genre mixed down and appropriated for techno is no longer a shock, any kind of joint venture with Animal Collective certainly is.


Boban Markovic Orkestar

Let’s be realistic, even enthralled neophytes won’t much be able to tell the difference between the Boban Markovic and Kocani orkestars, even less the difference between Boban’s Boban I Marko and Promise. But Markovic has a pedigree: an award-winning, seventeen-year veteran of Serbia’s premier Balkan brass band, and he himself something of a Sonny Rollins in the genre. This makes for a more traditional audience; more plaques on the wall than Nouvelle Vague remixes, and therefore probably the quintessential “orkestar” in the most traditional sense.

His music is no less friendly to rock-schooled ears however; the fantastic “Latino” sounds more like a James Bond theme than anyone’s idea of classical. And once you’re acquainted, his trumpet lines are smoother, tubas punchier, and rhythm section taking on a steel-pan Jamaican quality to make echo-chamber titan Tchad Blake jealous. Credit his producers for the crispness if you’d like, but they’re not the ones who notated his ensemble’s thrilling harmonized passages.


Taraf de Haïdouks

Turning Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys moniker on its head, this Romanian collective nee “Band of Outlaws,” were first discovered in a slightly different configuration by an ethnomusicologist (right, in the Balkan nations, ethnomusicologists are the A&R scouts) and their official formation was almost a celebratory reaction towards the 1989 execution of twenty-year genocidal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceau?escu.

The band’s prominent feature is the cimbalom, the metallic, spaghetti western-sounding dulcimer also utilized on Ion Petre Stoican’s essential lone recording (reissued last year as Songs from a Bygone Age, Vol. 1 but their albums add stomp and depth. The percussion solos on “A I Turk,” and the rapid-fire, near-punk “Rustem” are more than a little rock-like, and for some reason, Johnny Depp really, really likes them. But what’s important is that they made the real Band of Gypsies.


The Klezmatics / Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars

The whirling dervish violin act doesn’t end on one side of the globe; try and keep up with Lorin Sklamberg’s bunched-up landslide delivery on “Man in a Hat,” which is half in English. The Yiddish traditionalist-modernist Klezmatics are more gang than ensemble, as their brand of klezmer associates smoother with boozy marches and hoe-downs in clapping 4/4 than any kind of slow-sipped sacred Kiddush. But they have a twinkling solemn side (try the romantic “Romanian Fantasy”) that got them in good with Woody Guthrie’s estate and had their way with not one, but two Mermaid Avenues of their own, American folk be damned. Wilco would never mutate a crawling Jewfro-funk like “(Do the) Latke Flip-Flop.”

Brass man London indulges his own boozy side with his so-called “klezmer conservatory band” on his own albums, which befit a honking sideman whose back pages include Ben Folds Five, LL Cool J, John Cale and Jon Spencer. His own titles, such as “Another Glass of Wine to Give Succor to My Ailing Existence,” almost match early Klezmatics in their lascivious stride if not variety or dimension.


DeVotchKa

Damn Americans were bound to creep in for a piece of the pie. Can’t just leave well alone, can they? And oh, that insufferable capitalization. At least these indie-plus-exotica dabblers have a backstory: named coyly for “little girl” in nadsat speak from A Clockwork Orange, they soundtracked burlesque shows for years, including that of Dita von Teese, before a string of increasingly noticed albums and finally a Grammy nomination for atmospheric excursions on the score to Little Miss Sunshine.

But they’re no Gipsy Kings; once mistook “The Enemy Guns” for System of a Down. Multi-instrumentalist and frontman Nick Urata’s faux-operatic delivery amidst swirls of violin surprisingly made for a great “Venus in Furs” on 2006’s breakthrough covers EP Curse Your Little Heart.


Gogol Bordello

This writer’s primarily a rock and roller, so forgive me for my complacent ways. Guitars will always be the pinnacle of expression for me, so much as I admire all of these artists and their importance in a big slice of the world, I’ll take me a greasy ol’ New York guitar slaughternaut over sit-down craft and composition any day. Fortunately, Gogol’s more than that, and not the novelty band you’d read about (or seen in the “Wonderlust King” video). They’re a vision crashing headfirst into a bigger vision; decades and monuments of culture atomically bombed into one mustachioed homunculus with glowing shrapnel poking out his ass.

Their synthesizer of accordion, fiddle, sometimes sax and eeeeeeeelectric guitar is also home to the wisest ethno-rock tropes since Shane McGowan found a bottle. The recent flux of U.S. immigration controversy was final step in turning 2005’s wildly entertaining and only fractionally noticed Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike into a Nevermind the Bollocks for the post-Berlin wall age. And that step was merely cultural, their bread and butter. The music was already there.


Balkan Beat Box

Sick of Eugene Hütz’s showbiz-sealed attraction to pop structure (riff, verse, chorus, repeat), perpetual sidemen Ori Kaplan and Tamir Muskat moved out onto their own to create the metamorphic soundscapes they prefer, and would clock RJD2 ratings if those soundscapes were anything but Yiddish sax lines laid under cheesy cheerleader chants, bilingual rapping and the requisite Beasties drum machine madness.

BBB’s post-everything attitude on their two records is refreshing even if they don’t unify (or even anti-unify) like Beck (used to anyway). They want to be a collagist like Manu Chao or Rachid Taha according to their bio, but their awkward clatter is nobler in its adolescent tinkering than any mastery of form. I don’t think formal old Boban Markovic would be into it, but Šaban Bajramovic would probably appreciate their carefree rebelliousness.


Golem!

Matisyahu’s more interesting labelmates Golem! spin American-removed Jewish music much tougher than the Klezmatics, with furious drum breakdowns galore and more subtly deployed horns and accordion that breathe with the sort of distance between sounds you could see a band like Arcade Fire suggesting down the line. The roominess makes for leaner, faster bursts than anyone else working the genre; dense cacophony would be too slow-footed for these dybbuks, who flail like a lean bluegrass trio, despite twice as many members as they sound like.

The male-female trade-off vocals (in Hebrew) actually manage an aura of theatricality that tops DeVotchKa in stage spectacle. One of their rare English lines is a non-sequitir about picking hipsters’ pockets on the L train and I can’t even make up how randomly that appears. Play last year’s fiery Fresh Off Boat and put in a word with Ms. Von Teese.

Further Reading

Lindsey Thomas, “Gypsy Rock: Scene of the Year,” Spin, January 2007.
Šaban Bajramovic, Biography, Šaban Bajramovic.
Robert Christgau, The New Bohemians, Salon.
Christian Hoard, DeVotchKa: The Best Little Grammy-Nominated Band You’ve Never Heard Of, Rolling Stone.
Christian Hoard, Gogol a-Go-Go, Village Voice.

Bluffer’s Discography:
The Klezmatics: Jews with Horns (1995)
The Klezmatics: Possessed (1997)
Taraf de Haïdouks: Taraf de Haïdouks (1999)
Taraf de Haïdouks: Band of Gypsies (2001)
Kocani Orkestar: Alone At My Wedding (2002)
Šaban Bajramovic: A Gypsy Legend (2002)
Boban Markovic Orkestar: Boban I Marko (2003)
DeVotchKa: Una Volta (2003)
Gogol Bordello vs. Tamir Muskat: J.U.F. (Jewish-Ukrainishe Freundschaft) (2004)
Various: The Rough Guide to Gypsy Swing (2004)
DeVotchKa: How It Ends (2004)
Gogol Bordello: East Infection (2005)
Various: Everything is Illuminated Original Soundtrack (2005)
Various: Little Miss Sunshine Original Soundtrack (2005)
Gogol Bordello: Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (2005)
Various: The Rough Guide to the Music of the Balkan Gypsies (2005)
Balkan Beat Box: Balkan Beat Box (2005)
Frank London's Klezmer Brass Allstars: Carnival Conspiracy (2005)
Various: Borat Original Soundtrack (2006)
Beirut: Gulag Orkestar (2006)
Golem!: Fresh Off Boat (2006)
DeVotchKa: Curse Your Little Heart (2006)
Boban Markovic Orkestar: Promise (2006)
Taraf de Haïdouks: The Continuing Adventures of Taraf de Haïdouks (2006)
Ion Petre Stoican: Songs from a Bygone Age, Vol. 1 (2006)
Various: The Rough Guide to Planet Rock (2006)
Romica Puceanu & The Gore Brothers: Songs from a Bygone Age, Vol. 2 (2006)
Beirut: Lon Gisland (2007)
Balkan Beat Box: Nu Med (2007)
Gogol Bordello: Super Taranta! (2007)
Fanfare Ciocarlia: Queens & Kings (2007)