Music Cassette details

Music for String Ensembles: The Folk Musicians of Clejani -
Lãutarii din Clejani

(Cassette C-001)

Musicians:
Ilie Iorga - voice
Dumitru Baicu 'Cacurica' - voice, small cymbalum
Nicolae Neascu 'Culai' - voice, violin
Constantin Sandu 'Dinu' - voice, small cymbalum
Marin Sandu - accordion, voice, double bass
Gheorghe Anghel 'Caliu' - violin
Gheorghe Falcaru 'Fluierici' - recorder
Florea Parvan - double bass

Epic songs, love songs and long songs, the Haidouks have them all, and have been playing them for centuries.

The lãutari

'The lãutari of Clejani are perhaps the most inspired and fervent of all folk musicians in Romania. The exuberant, musical style of their native southern region has certainly stimulated them in this respect. We must also take into consideration the fact that the village is an old "music school" of Muntenia which trains its disciples by requiring their total implication in the art of their choice: sound, dance, gesture, pantomime. But it would be unfair to ignore their superb endowment. The traits they all have in common are imagination and impetuosity. Each musician, however, has his own distinct personality, inclinations, aptitudes, qualities and performances.

Nicolae Neacsu (nicknamed "Culai") is very bright, shrewd, sensitive, stylish, and a great comedian. His voice is rather feeble, slightly veiled by age and nicotine, but its marvelous inflections leave their mark in the most magnificent ballads to be heard at Clejani. On violin his instrumental improvisations are breathtaking. He is the embodiment of the most archaic musical style of the village.

Dumitru Baicu, called "Cacuricã", settled in Clejani after marriage. An honest and shrewd, affectionate and bickering, sincere and hypocritical man, this fascinating character is a combination of all the good and bad qualities of the inhabitants of Clejani. He plays cymbalom, but is also a brilliant singer. His style and repertory, with their urban propensity, differ from the others'. He excels in love songs and is an unparalleled animator of peasant weddings.

Ilie Iorga lives in a nearby village, Mârsa. He is older, therefore calm, tolerant and predictable. Despite that, he reveals surprising pathos in the love songs he sings in his still powerful, flexible, and refined voice, plentifully ornamented. He is a great "storyteller", whose repertory of "old songs" can only compare to Neacsu's.

Gheorghe Anghel, nicknamed "Caliu", is a young man, slim and well-bred like an Indian prince, which does not prevent him from being at the same time quick-tempered and hard to get along with. An inspired improviser, he masters perfectly well the "classical" style and repertory of the village, but he decidedly prefers more modern music, such as "pan-Balkan" or "Gypsy", which now can be heard in almost all Romanian villages. As many musicians from his generation, he does not perform vocal music. Instead, he accompanies, with his violin, the vocalists in the taraf, and he does this with a lot of imagination and virtuosity.

Gheorghe Fãlcaru, dubbed "Fluierici", is an original man, even in such a non-conformist village as Clejani. Son of a Gypsy bear leader of Moldavia, he was adopted by the village since he was a little child. He is nervous, emotionally unstable, both tender and violent. He plays especially the flute, which is quite unusual for a Gypsy. He masters his instrument to such a degree that he can produce almost any tonality, much to the amazement of peasant pipers who happen to listen. He loves to improvise on themes taken from Indian soaps. His double bass acts are very appreciated by his colleagues for their precision and dynamism.

GBP 5.99

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Music for String Ensembles: The Folk Musicians of Clejani -
Lãutarii din Clejani

(Cassette C-001)

This symbol  indicates an mp3 sound clip for that track. Click on the symbol and wait for the clip to start. For more information click here. Tracks

Side A

1. Love song; Ieu az' noapte ce-am patit (What Happened to me Last Night) and Dance Tune: Sarba (12'36")

2. Epic Song: Miu Haiducul (Miu the Outlaw) and a Suite of Dance Tunes (16'10")

Side B

1. Old Ballad: Lisandra of Piara (11'30")

2. Folk dance (with hollers and dance steps): Hora Nutii (2'52")

3. Love song: Forest Green Forest (4'10")

4. Epic Song: Toma Dalimos (11'06")

Approx Duration (59'00")

Courtesy of Speranta Radulescu

How come the lãutari of Clejani became famous under the ensemble name of Haiducii (Eng. outlaws)? Good luck and hazard played equally important roles. In 1986, Laurent Aubert, a Swiss ethnomusicologist, listened to their music in Bucharest and became enthusiastic: he put them on a record released in France (Musique des Tsiganes de Valachie: les lãutari de Clejani, Ocora, C 559036, Paris, 1988). Upon the release of the record, Aubert invited the musicians on a tour to Geneva and Paris. Their first exit to Europe gave these extremely vivacious and imaginative Gypsies the occasion to go through a series of miraculous adventures (funnily recounted by Speranþa Rãdulescu in her book Hopa, tropa, Europa / "Hop-and-Trot Around Europe", Bucharest, Peasant Museum, 1992).
The Paris record must have had some success, because in 1990 Stéphane Karo, a Belgian musician of indisputable artistic intuition, went to Clejani with a proposal for a tour in the West. A year later, in March 1991, the Peasant Museum in Bucharest recorded a major part of their repertory and organized a show which occasioned a happy revelation of the Clejani phenomenon to the intellectual elite of the capital city. Soon after, Stéphane Karo came back and, as we all know, made them the stars known under the name of Haidouks.
The music on this record (partially edited in Romania on a cassette in 1992) is slightly different from the music that used to be played in the Haidouks ensemble concerts. This is because naturally - perhaps inevitably - the producer of a record is bound to express his own personality in the selection criteria with which he operates. First of all, in this case he gave precedence to pieces originated in the more "archaic" and "rural" layer (characteristics that are obviously relative), i.e. ballads, love songs and improvised dance tunes. In addition, he opted for the musicians with the most unpolished timbres and vocal/instrumental styles, and the least swayed by modernization. Finally, he singled out interpretations of traditional, small-size tarafs. His approach is, in fact, slightly archaizing; nevertheless, he assumes it without any complex, since from his point of view it has two advantages: it opens the way to Clejani masterpieces, and valorizes the Gypsy lãutari who sing at Vlasca weddings just as they used to be, before their appearance - a thing hard to explain even by themselves - on the most famous stages of Europe.

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