This just in from a friend who thought it was worth sharing.  He's right.
Istanbul's Sulukule, the world's oldest Gypsy settlement, known for its music & dance clubs, is being demolished by developers to make way for gentrification. If you have ever been entranced by the sound of Turkish Roma clarinet, read this and weep.

Good-bye, Gypsies: The Loss of 1,000 Years

Let's get some of the PR out of the way.  Yes, he is currently on tour, and yes, he has a new recording out called "Alkohol." BUY IT. It rocks, it has soul.  What more could you want?

Without question the most successful musician to come out of Sarajevo, Goran Bregovic has brought the sound of the Balkans to millions, first from his soundtracks for such films as Emir Kusturica's "Time of the Gypsy" and "Underground," followed by a plethora of collaborations with top flight musicians as disparate as Iggy Pop and Sezen Akcu, (remember "Prawy do Lewego" with Polish diva Kayah?) and more recently by touring with his "Wedding and Funeral Band."  His music is special to me, just because it touched me deeply during the days after 9/11. It seemed to reach out and say "I know how you are feeling." So I was a teeny bit nervous meeting him. I needn't have worried.  We laughed a lot! Maybe I should have brought along a bottle of Slivovitz.

The video for Jeremija was filmed at the Guca Brass Festival and Competition in Serbia, and if you want to know more about that giddy event, check out our documentary "Guca".

And speaking of Balkan Brass, we have to mention that it's getting to be quite the hip club thang, pushed by Deejay Shantel across the water (as in:Disko Partizani) and other mixmasters this side of the pond as well. --And right here in NYC we have our own Zlatne Uste Brass Band, that can pump it out with the best of them.

I first heard Tamer Pinarbasi play the kanun on our video for Amnesty International "The Price of Silence." Andres Levin, the producer, had him record the first layer of "world music" onto the existing basic track from Aterciopelados. As soon as I heard the results, I was entranced. Tamer just laid down one good take after another, plus it was all tasty stuff.  Later, when I was taping my first blog installment I caught Tamer playing again, with the New York Gypsy Allstars.  This time I was struck by his technique and velocity. He played some great solos, and even his backup (which I sometimes think is as much the measure of a musician as the solos) was great. So I contacted him and last week he gave me a quick interview and performance at our office before running off to a gig in Brooklyn.

I must say I got a bit hypnotized just looking at the kanun and at Tamer's hands...hope you do too!

On April 21, 2009 I went to see "The Lost Fingers", a trio from Canada who do Django-esque covers of 80's hits. The guys were amiable as you'll see in my hyper interview... they took my needling in good stride.

I confess I have a low tolerance for an evening's worth of even a master like Birelli LaGrene, but these guys put on a good show. Tight tight tight, and great arrangements. Plus they all sing, the backup harmonies are excellent (accurate falsettos) and they don't take themselves all that seriously. Highlights were a fabulous cover of "Belleville Rendez-vous," and Kool and the Gang's "Fresh, Exciting."

But of course, I still have to ask (since I think it is open to debate) is Gypsy Jazz really world music?  I know, I know, he's got his own chapter in the "Rough Guide to World Music," but we'll never know how Django's being a gypsy influenced the music he made. And yes, by now there are thousands of Roma out there who claim the music as their own. But there are equally as many gadjé who play le jazz hot.  Feel free to weigh in on this one, folks.

This is Day One: the first installment of Link TV's World Music Blog coming to you from Link's New York City office.
I just got a hand-me-down Flip camera and I'm loving it.  Sure, the zoom stinks, and it has a nervous breakdown in a dark rock club, but really, it's a valiant little thing, and it's also great to be able to just take it out of my purse and capture the moment.  And NYC is full of amazing musicians I've been wanting to interview or to talk to about their music, so WATCH THIS SPACE. I'm also inviting y'all to write in and make this a two way conversation. Hey, I don't want to have to float the whole boat!

04.11.09
I went to the "preview" of the NY Gypsy Festival and caught the first few hours - take a look.

It went on till 4 AM, but hey, I've got a day job, so I just couldn't stay for the whole thing.  You can catch an insightful evaluation of the total event on the Lucid Culture blog.

And my co-worker Deepak Unnikrishnan had this summation:
"Call me clichéd but I fell hard for the dark ambience, the palm readers and certain over-the-top touches of the event. But frankly, none of the props would have meant a thing if the musicians weren’t anything but outstanding. At one point it wouldn’t have surprised me if I looked at my shoes, saw smoke, and smelled burnt rubber from all the dancing." He stayed till they were putting the chairs on the tables.

Like I said, this was a preview of a series of Gypsy festivals to come, so there will be more!

I'm going to a Gypsy Festival at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, on Saturday, and we'll see if my little flip camera can capture some of the event. It's going to be quite the gathering, with Turkish clarinetist Selim Sesler setting the tone for some wild and wooly music, fortune tellers, and some trumpet madness from Frank London of the Klezmatics. (He has several extra-curricular projects, and Roma musicians figure prominently in some of them.)

Speaking of Gypsy music, a few years ago I was given a DVD of a great little video of the Hungarian violinist Roby Lakatos. He claims descent from the great Janos Bihari, the gypsy musician that had royalty in thrall in the 18th century, and was known as the king of the Gypsy violinists. Well, Lakatos certianly has plenty of flash, and the video was cool enough for me to want to show it on the channel. But the record label was laconic to say the least and was not interested in tracking down video for me. So it never made it to Link TV.  Then, out of curiosity, I looked on YouTube and voilá! There it was. So here it is, if you are curious. Of course, my DVD is better quality……!

We’re showing some fascinating music documentaries this week, and all of them deal in some way with cross-cultural influences. “Gilles Apap: Renegade Fiddler” spotlights a brilliant but controversial classical violinist whose musical interests are too eclectic to be contained by the western written tradition alone. “The Pied Piper of Hutzovina” focuses on the meeting point between “traditional” Russian Gypsy music and Punk. “Fangafrika” takes us to a huge hip hop festival in Burkina Faso, where that quintessentially American synthesis (rap) is being synthesized yet again. “Guca” introduces us to the brass band repertoire of the Balkans, a joyous offspring of the Turkish Janissary bands that accompanied the Ottoman troops so many generations ago. And as if to bookend our survey, “Brasileirinho” is about choro music, the cross between the western classical tradition, African improvisation and rhythms, and the saudade of Portuguese folk music. While we are sometimes daunted by the monolithic and jaded pop music of our time, it is incredibly refreshing to dip into these hybrids, and to know that music itself is always capable of infinite combinations, and that musicians will ever remain open to that process.