On a bitterly cold December evening, just a few weeks ago, if you were wearing a certain kind of laminate around your neck, you could have slipped through a dark stage door at the nefarious corner of  Taylor and Market in San Francisco, and found yourself backstage at the Warfield Theatre, where three of the Reyes Brothers – Andre, Nicolas and Canut, and two of their cousins, Tonino and Paco Baliardo – would have greeted you with warm hugs and invited you to sit down and sup with them at their large round dinner table. This was a very special dinner of sorts because they were being joined on this tour on stage for the first time by members of a third generation of this family of musicians–Michael Baliardo, Tonino’s son, and George Reyes, Nicolas’ son.

They were a handsome and elegant group of men: fathers, sons, uncles and cousins chatting animatedly, primarily in French, with, quite possibly, a little Calo being tossed about here and there in conversation. Calo, or Spanish Romani, is a dialect that originated in Spain and is spoken by the Gitanos, blending native Romani vocabulary with Spanish grammar. The round table was covered with a white tablecloth and they were eating a delicious dinner of tilapia and lemon herbed chicken, salads and profiteroles, drinking sweet iced tea, laughing and joking and offering their guests wine and food. Casually, the diners excused themselves from the table and moments later began to go upstairs to perform to a packed theatre where the excited crowd of over 2000 fans erupted in cheers.

In the third decade of the 20th Century during the Spanish Civil War, a group of Catalonian gypsies afraid for their wives and children fled Spain for France. In a recent interview, Nicolas Reyes explained the decision: “The Gypsy people were not allowed to take part in the fight, other than being shot at, so the best way to stay alive was to run away from Spain.” Most of these gypsy families settled in the Camargue region, where they live now, between Marseille, Arles and Montpellier. The Reyes family joined a Gypsy encampment at Arles in 1936, and they sang as they worked odd jobs, did horse trading, harvested grapes and gathered scrap metal. In the evenings they brought out their guitars and the traditional songs and sang at Sunday village gatherings while the women danced in the safe and intimate caravan circles. They improvised with guitar players, Palmas (clapped rhythms which are derived from their Spanish heritage), and singers around the campfires of their adopted home. “They still do that, even now,” Said Josquin Des Pres, who grew up in San Tropez and has known the Reyes and Baliardos for decades.

Des Pres, an award-winning record producer and songwriter here in Southern California, said that it was in the Fifties, during a traditional Gypsy pilgrimage–”Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” in the Camargue–that their unique flamenco singing and guitar strumming gained mainstream notice. Ricardo Baliardo, or “Manitas de Plata” (Little Hands of Silver) was being feted by artists from the area including Pablo Picasso, Cocteau and Salvador Dali; his nephew, Jose Reyes, quickly became renowned as the best flamenco singer in France and was accompanied by his uncle, Manitas de Plata, who is still considered one of the best guitarists in history. Picasso is said to have exclaimed of Baliardo’s playing in Arles in 1964, “that man is of greater worth than I am!” He proceeded then to draw on the guitar.

The style of their music, “Flamenco Puro” was so popular that their fame spread worldwide and they had fans like Charlie Chaplin and Brigitte Bardot to name a few. Jose Reyes and Ricardo Baliardo performed to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall in December of 1965. Manitas’ brother Hippolyte Baliardo, a well known Rumba guitar player, invited his sons to become the members of Los Baliardos Players. In the Sixties and early Seventies, after he left Manitas, Des Pres said, “Jose Reyes, with Plata and Baliardo, who was an uncle, formed a group called ‘Los Reyes’, which means “The Kings,” which included four of his five sons, (Andre was too young at the time), and Chico Bouchikhi, who was married to one of Jose’s daughters”.

In 1979, the patriarch Jose Reyes died, and the Reyes Brothers formed a union with their cousins, the Baliardos. This group was a more modern fusion of the music they had played in their family for generations. There are eight members of the Gipsy Kings but you’ll see six on the stage because they rotate on tour. Some like to travel more than the others. Nicolas Reyes, the main singer, Canut and Andre performed on stage at the Warfield that night, and at the new Conga Room in Los Angeles, on New Year’s Eve; the two other Reyes brothers Patchai and Paul remained home with their families. They still live in the Camargue region when they are not on tour and are devoted to their wives and children. The Baliardo Brothers–Paco, Tonino and Diego–are guitar wizards. All of them have played together since they were young and prefer to compose and play their own music. Their music is derived from a form of flamenco, a sort of rumba: “Rumba Flamenca, which is easier to dance to,” said Patty Weiss, who has played violin with the Gipsy Kings on some of their North America tours, including here in LA at the Greek Theater.

Their songs are mostly about love and travelling and having a good time and are sung in a mixture of French, Spanish and their own gypsy dialect, Calo.

“They learn to play a guitar as soon as they are born,” said Des Pres of the Reyes and Baliardo families. “There is a Gypsy legend which says that when an old Gypsy singer or guitarist is ready to die, he will sing or play for a pregnant woman. Then that baby will get his talent. Many times when the Gypsy Kings are on tours, at the end of the show, they will put one of their younger children on stage. They all know the strum.”

The crowd at the Warfield demanded two encores and the concert ended with standing ovations from the audience.

“I was pleasantly surprised at how well they did. Drums and bass guitar are not traditional gypsy instruments. Their sons did really really well tonight, “Des Pres told their manager, Michel Crupel, that night after the concert when everyone was getting ready to go to the Four Seasons. “For gypsies, as an ever oppressed and pursued community, our children have a particular importance.” Nicolas Reyes has said in many interviews, “Children are Kings!”

Popularity: 13% [?]

On the eve of legendary Romanian group Fanfare Ciocarlia’s Melbourne appearance, Dan Rule looks at the motivations behind our fascination with Gypsy music.

THE story behind Fanfare Ciocarlia’s rise to prominence is the stuff of myth. Hailing from a line of Roma farming families in the tiny north-eastern Romanian village of Zece Prajini, until 1996 the 12-piece ensemble had played no stage larger than a local wedding, baptism or funeral. Twelve years on, their frenetic brass sound – born from traditional Roma melodies and the brass bands of the Turkish military, which had occupied the region at the start of the 19th century – is one of the drawcards of the world music circuit.

“They were unlike anything we had ever come across, just letting the music flow out from themselves, completely different to trained musicians in Western music,” says Helmut Neumann, one of the group’s label managers at German imprint Asphalt Tango Records.

“It’s very human and very emotional – so honest that you can’t leave it. You are automatically attracted by it.”

But according to Neumann, who discovered the group with business partner Henry Ernst in 1996, there was no great fable to Fanfare Ciocarlia’s unearthing. It was pure chance.

“We were both living in Leipzig, which is a city of about half a million in East Germany, so until the ’90s the East was our only possibility for travel,” he says, talking on behalf of the group (who don’t speak English) on the eve of its Australian tour, which will take in next week’s Gypsy Queens and Kings concert at Hamer Hall as part of the Arts Centre’s Mix It Up series.

“We had gotten to know Romania very well,” he continues. “But it was just good luck that Henry entered the village where Fanfare Ciocarlia were living. Very quickly Henry made the decision to bring them to Germany and France to do a tour. We thought of it as a one-off because we were so fascinated by the music – it was not thought of in a professional way. Financially it was a disaster.”

The archetypal image of the Gypsy – boundless, anchorless and free – is instilled with romanticism and mystique. But the Roma’s signifiers are still the source of both reverence and derision in the West. While their cultural product, from the great Django Reinhardt to the pop chart-ready sound of the Gipsy Kings, has been happily consumed, as a people they have been held at arm’s length by a Europe still fixating typecasts of the thief and the mystic.

Today, the Roma remain one of the most persecuted communities in Europe. Discrimination abounds across the continent. Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni sparked outrage in mid-2008 when he announced that government agencies had begun fingerprinting the country’s 150,000-strong Roma population in a proposed bid to curb the crime rate. Meanwhile, according to reports in international affairs magazine Monocle, Roma children are being routinely dumped in the worst-performing schools across Eastern Europe and are 10 times more likely to be erroneously classified as intellectually disabled.

According to Neumann, this “heavy” lineage engenders the music of Fanfare Ciocarlia and other Gypsy artists. He frames their sound in the context of a kind of activism and adaptation. “They’ve dealt with long travels, persecution and racism all the time, because they have basically been considered as outlaws, not involved in any society,” he says.

“But somehow they’ve adapted to each society in which they arrive, so the question then becomes: what is their own culture? What is their way to express their own culture? Because they have been adapting so many of the local things wherever they settle, there aren’t many things of their own left. I think one of the last ways they have to live their own culture is through music, and there’s a real pride in that.”

Billed as “an epic celebration of Gypsy life”, the Queens and Kings project seems to embody these ideas of both expression and fusion of culture. Along with Fanfare Ciocarlia, the concert features Gypsy vocalists and musicians from throughout Europe, including twice Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Macedonian Gypsy Queen Esma Redzepova, Hungarian master-vocalist Mitsou, 21-year-old Romanian star Florentina Sandu, Bulgarian songwriter Jony Iliev and Perpignan guitar trio Kaloome, and blends several disparate Gypsy styles and stories.

“It’s the common way of performing music, but it’s not common music,” says Neumann.

“The Gypsy music is very human and not about reading music from a page. It’s more about feel and emotion and the stories of life, and I think that’s why audiences relate so much.”

Indeed, Roma music has survived longer than most in a world music market constantly on the prowl for something new. But is our fascination really connected to the tales of the Roma, or is their visage simply more exploitable?

World music observers, such as veteran Melbourne broadcaster, journalist and DJ Kate Welsman, tend to the latter. It’s the exotic and the quixotic, rather than our sense of empathy, that draws us to Gypsy music, she says.

“I’d like to think that there’s this understanding and compassion for what they’ve been through, but I think the reality is quite different. I think the notion of Gypsy or Roma has been so romanticised that it’s basically become all about layers of beads and big frilly skirts and hitting the road.

“Meanwhile, the reality is that these people are still persecuted and hated throughout Europe.”

But Welsman, who also curated Africa (the first concert in the Mix It Up series) and will be DJing under her Systa BB moniker in support of Gypsy Queens and Kings, also sees the music’s appeal in terms of it’s sonic relationship to rock.

“Some of the tones that are used in Gypsy or Balkan music and the timings are very, very different, and there’s a shrillness and a big bass that comes through, so much so that people relate to it almost as punk,” she says.

“Anything is possible with this music. You don’t have to do a particular style and there’s constant dancing and there’s an energy to it.”

It’s what Neumann hopes the audience will take away from what promises to be a typically frenzied set from Fanfare Ciocarlia and their guests at Hamer Hall. “With this music, it’s definitely about experiencing it firsthand,” he says. “There’s a magic to it.”

And according to Neumann, the songs will ring on for years to come. “You know, the world music community, they just want new, new, new exotic things all the time. It’s something we’ve really had to fight against.

“We took Fanfare Ciocarlia from a far-flung corner of Eastern Europe and brought them to the rest of the world because we loved their music. And it is our responsibility to help them travel the world and play their music for as long as they want.”

Mix It Up: The Gypsy Queens and Kings is at Hamer Hall, the Arts Centre, Sunday, January 18, at 5pm (free pre-show activities from 3pm). Tickets $79 premium/$63 adult/$34 concession: theartscentre.com.au, 1300 136 166 and ticketmaster outlets.

Popularity: 5% [?]