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.