Nicolae Guta (full name Nicolae Lingurar) was born in Aninoasa, Hunedoara, Romania and he is one of the most famous Romanian “Manele” singers.

Biography and Career :

Nicolae Guta started to work for “CFR Romania – Petrosani” (The Romanian Train Transport Association) in a gipsy team workers, until all of them got fired.

He says they used to work hard with their hands because the gipsies from Romania don’t go to school too often… they have “the school of life”.

After his first job he worked for “Regia Apelor Petrosani” for 8 years. One of his partners helped him to get a high ranked and qualified position there.

Before making music Nicolae Guta used to work 8 hours a day but he didn’t like the job. Making music and singing to parties and weddings takes him a lot of time but this is the think he loves and he does with passion.

Immediately after 1989 when the Communism Empire disappeared Nicolae Guta started to sing party music which is called in Romania “Manele”.

His debut was in Timisoara’s restaurants and short time after he became the “King of Manele Music”

“Manele music” got more fans outside Romania and nowadays there are a lot of musicians that changed their styles to “Manele” because they are commercial.

Trivia :

- He’s got one brother named Samir, known for his Old-Iron Business in Romania
- Both of them have built big houses in Iscroni, Romania.
- Nicolae Guta was named “Tha King of Manele” in 2005 and his friend Adrian Copilul Minune “Adrian the Wonder Boy” was named “The Emperor of Manele“.

• The King of Manele has 2 daughters and 2 sons.

• Nicolae Guta has over 50 Manele Music Albums.

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SONIC REDUCER Sweet home Europa — be it central, eastern, or so southerly that you’re smack in the Amazon, shooting the rapids like Aguirre and grabbing inspiration from the jaguar guts of the jungle. Call the recent Balkan music invasion on virginal indie hearts and minds the stealth revenge of new, weird Old World sounds on arrogant Amerindie rockism — just listen to the brainy, brassy blast of Beirut or the fiddle-borne shakedowns of A Hawk and a Hacksaw or the gypsy, or Romany, mess-arounds of Brass Menazeri — I dare you not to jig. Yet the rip-roaring, marrow-slurping, living end of all fiddlin’-round roma punks are the longtime “Think Locally, Fuck Globally” champeens Gogol Bordello.

” But trust the man to set me straight on sloppy assumptions regarding that same music, especially regarding Gogol Bordello’s next album, which was influenced by Hütz’s move this year to Rio de Janeiro. Will the recording — about which, Hütz promises, “people are going to shit in their pants when they hear it, because we’re already shitting in our pants” — give off a heady, flowery whiff of tropicália, and sound like the Pogues and Os Mutantes in steel-cage match? 

“Forget that!” he retorts. “It’s like being in Spain and saying there’s only flamenco, or there’s nothing in Eastern Europe except polka. It’s what every tourist knows.” Hütz was initially lured to Brazil by a lady, but he says, “the next thing I knew there was a huge gypsy community to discover. Next thing I knew I was traveling through Brazil with Manu Chao and seeing the other side of it, and the next thing I knew I was calling my mom to send all my shit over.

“I love New York City and I always will,” Hütz continues. “It gave me everything, gave me understanding and initial recognition.  But I feel like the road is still calling me. It ain’t no time to settle.”

The allure of unexplored vistas could go a little way in explaining the appeal of Gogol and its brethren to New Worlders like ourselves. What fan girl or boy isn’t tempted to have their blasé, boring butt kicked by the very unironic, passionate Gogol Bordello — not for nothing is the band’s 2002 album titled Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony (Rubric) — which takes nothing for granted, and while it’s at it, takes no prisoners.

PLASTIC FANTASTIC Czech Republic underground OGs Plastic People of the Universe, who perform with promising Budapest band Little Cow this week in San Francisco at Slim’s, are all too familiar with incarceration. The group will also make a Q&A stop at the American Conservatory Theatre production of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ …

Larger-than-life Gogol vocalist Eugene Hütz adores the fact that Romany sounds are finding new audiences — “It clicked for me one day,” he says from New Orleans, “that gypsy music is going through exactly the revolution that reggae went through, from being a regional phenomenon to being a much larger music section in the store — much bigger visibility because if you’re not visible, you’re fucked.

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The Gypsies are coming. They’ll be camped out at Drom, a club on Avenue A, near Tompkins Square. Guitarists and dumbek players, brass bands and belly dancers, cabaret singers and ethno-mesh D.J.s are just a few of the many sorts of artists who will be performing there as part of the New York Droma Gypsy Festival from Wednesday, September 24th to Friday, October 3rd.

Organized by world music enthusiasts Ilhan Sendar and Mehmet Dede the Gypsy Festival is now in its fourth year. For the first time, it will be held solely at Drom, a hip yet intimate club, where the music doesn’t get lost in the din of the crowd.

So… what is a Gypsy, anyhow?

Contrary to popular misconception, being a Gypsy is neither a lifestyle choice nor a fashion statement but something you are born into. The Gypsies, or Roma—as most Gypsies call themselves—are an ethnic group whose roots can be traced back to 11th Century India.  A nomadic people from early on, they traveled west, through the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Americas. Wherever they went, they were given different names: Cigány in Hungary, Kalé in Finland, Gitanos in Spain. In England they were called Gypsies because the local population believed them to be Egyptians.

Bound together at first by a common culture and mother tongue, Gypsies who settled in different regions developed distinct cultures and dialects over time. No matter where they lived though Gypsies produced more than their share of brilliant musicians.

Roma violinists became legendary in Hungary and Romania, the Gitanos in Spain created flamenco—one of the world’s great musical traditions —and in France, during the 1930s, Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt created his own distinctive style, which became known as “Gypsy jazz.” No matter what their nationality or musical language, the best Gypsy artists have been known for bringing an extravagant sense of style and rare emotional power to their performances.

Today a young generation of Gypsies around the world continues to thrill audiences and expand musical frontiers. The Droma festival brings together some of these Roma performers–along with some non-Gypsy artists who’ve been inspired by Romany music–to create a week-long carnival for the eyes and ears.

One artist worth special note is Dotschy Reinhardt, a young Gypsy singer-songwriter and guitarist from Germany, making her New York debut this Sunday. Dotschy comes from the sprawling clan of Gypsy Jazz great Django Reinhardt. The Reinhardt family was once concentrated in Germany, Belgium and France but today they are dispersed all over the globe.

Dotschy grew up listening to jazz records—to Django, of course, but also to Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Wes Montgomery and Pat Martino. In her late teens, she fell in love with bossa nova, and her first album, Sprinkled Eyes (Galileo MC) is mostly an homage to that cool Brazilian beat that seems to float high above the sweaty jungles of human suffering. Unlike most jazz singers, Dotschy writes the majority of her own music and lyrics… often in Romany. Her voice has a warm, woody tone that suggests depths beyond the genre she is chiefly working in and she is possessed of a beauty and wit that promise a bright career.

So what is this relative of the Hot Gypsy Jazz king doing playing such cool, floaty riffs? Django fans and other Gypsy music lovers may well wonder.  Although nobody can see into the most secret part of an artist’s heart, perhaps part of the answer lies in the history of Dotschy’s family and her people.

Dotschy Reinhardt was born near the medieval city of Ravensburg in Southern Germany, a town of picturesque towers and gabled houses with red tiled roofs.  But Dotschy and her family–who are Sinti Gypsies–did not live in Ravensburg proper. They lived in Ummenwinkel, a small village ghetto for Gypsies, nearby.

The ghetto has been there for quite some time—long before Dotschy was born. During the early years of the Third Reich, the Germans built barracks in Ummenwinkle and forced the Sinti into them, “so that nobody would be in contact with the Gypsies,” as Dotschy puts it.

Later, after Hitler instituted his “Final Solution,” the Nazis shipped hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma to the death camps. In the Holocaust, more than half a million Gypsies died. Dotschy’s great-grandfather and many relatives were among them. Today, many Sinti still live in the place where the old barracks stood in Ummenwinkle–segregated, as Hitler intended, from the rest of society.

Dotschy grew up in this place, an heir to its stories of loss and suffering. She knows the history and she dedicated her first album to her parents and her grandmother, whom she calls, “the bravest woman I ever knew.”

But today Dotschy lives in Berlin. While she loves to return to Ummenwinkle to visit, she’s got a new life in the city and a new musical groove. And with a past like that, exhaling its sulfurous breath into your ear, who wouldn’t want to float awhile on bossa nova’s buoyant wings?  May her journey be a happy one, wherever she goes. Dotschy will be performing at Drom with her guitarist cousin Lancy Falta and two New York musicians.

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