Thursday, August 13, 2020

Clejani and other favourite Romany songs

High time to go back to Central Romania. Today I will take you to Clejani, a small village outside Bucharest, and more precisely, to the Romany quarters. I remember when many years ago I visited this village to learn some more music from the Taraf De Haidouks fiddle player Caliu. You met this band a few days ago already.

The directions how to get to Clejani were something like the following: ‘Walk through the fields until you come to a brook, cross over and walk through more fields to the right…'

Anyway, A farmer found me walking round lost, and brought me to a road, where I was invited to jump on a Romany horse Carriage, who brought me to Caliu’s house…

Lets listen to Caliu, improvising around Romanian folk dances, whilst enjoying a little village tour of Clejani:

I think this is a good spot to contribute some of my own music to that journey: Kibori is a weel-known Gypsy song from Romanian regions, and one of my long-term-favourite performance pieces. Here we performed it with my group Tatcho Drom in the Chipping Norton Theatre:

In general I avoid those polished folk orchestra performances, but this following one I love, it’s really cute and driving: 


Lets indulge into another trade, which makes Romany in Romania special: Already in Harry Potter we heard of the Romanian witches. Here some insight into their magic and craft:

From witches to weddings, which actually will be the natural outcome of some couples brought together by love-potions brewed by the witches: Here a Romanian wedding song which touches my heart. It is not what one would expect to hear at a Romanian wedding. I’m glad I found this version with all those lovely images: 

Lets conclude today with some related learning for yourselves. I was taught this wedding dance by Caliu, who you heard above. However, my learning was not as smoothly presented as here in my tutorial:




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