I, ashamedly, know next to nothing about Romania, except for drinking some wine from there, and even less about the spectacular singer, Romica Puceanu. I do know that this is a great album.
“Sounds from a Bygone Age, Vol. 2” (Romica Puceanu & the Gore Brothers)
The wiki entry only says:
Romica Puceanu (1928 - 1996) was a Romanian Gypsy singer and interpreter of cântec de pahar, a style of Romanian doina with Gypsy and Turkish influences.
Yes, I can hear both. Plus a soulful, expressive voice. If you want to listen to a few mp3s of her (haven't listened to them yet, but am downloading some now), this page has several, albeit without ID3 tags, so you'll have to add them yourself.
From the liner notes of Sounds from a Bygone Age, the instruments are apparently: violin, double bass, cymbalom, kobza, accordion, plus vocals. Ms. Puceanu was a favorite of the famous Gore Brothers band because
she sang one hundred per cent Lautari music and enjoyed improvising. Puceanu was a lively, funny woman, who never turned up at the studio without her teapot - filled with cognac. When one of the sound engineers noticed during a studio take that she was holding her words the wrong way up and mentioned this to her, Romica replied: “Would I have ever sung with these men (the Gore Brothers) if I could read?”. ... The recordings with the Gore Brothers still represent the traditional “raw” withdrawn sound of the old taraf*. The arrangements are clear and minimalist, creating space befitting Puceanu's sparkling voice....And it wasn't only Bucharest intellectuals who saw in Romica Puceanu the “Billie Holiday of the East”.
Yes, and there is even a photo of Ms. Puceanu with a gardenia in her hair on the back cover.
Highly recommended (if you are at all partial to music to drink wine to).
oh, suggested by Robert Christgau, of the Village Voice, who wrote:
Puceanu was indeed beloved in Bucharest, and playing her album twice proves she deserved to be. To call her the Gypsy Holiday or Piaf is to diminish her individuality: She's more virtuosic than either without showing off, and less pained whatever the cultural baggage of her appointed repertoire. Led by the two cousins who discovered her, the band is her other half—clean, swift, and economical—with Aurel Gore's violin determining the tone, Victor Gore's accordion dominating the coloration, and some cymbalom whiz or other tearing up the background.
*(taraf is a Turkish word designating a group of musicians)
Tags: music
