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The Gypsies Are Coming! ...So, Who Are the Gypsies?
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Gypsy singer-songwriter Dotschy Reinhardt
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. Many of Dotschy’s 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.
The Drom Gypsy Festival opens on Wednesday night with Turkish group Baba Zula, pioneers of a style they call “oriental dub.” In addition to a Gypsy drummer who plays the darbouka, a singer who plucks the lute-like saz, and a percussionist who moves between wooden spoons and electronic samples, the group includes a Japanese belly dancer and an artist who paints, live on stage.
Although only one member of this group is Romany, Baba Zula pays tribute to the Gypsy influence in Middle Eastern music. Says Turkish singer and saz player Murat Ertel, who grew up listening to his mother’s collection of belly dancing records, “Gypsy music is nomad music, and we’re all nomads.”
That spirit pervades much of the Droma Gypsy Festival this year. Acts in the lineup range from Romanian cabaret singer Sanda Weigl to Italian tambourine virtuoso Alessandra Belloni. The music runs the gambit from the electronic dance beats of the French Watcha Clan, to the Macedonian Romany dance music of Romski Boji. Klezmer musicians share the bill with Indian wedding bands and a Balkan brass group is followed by Mexican polkas and a Belgian D.J. Taken together, the lineup may sound like the World Beat Woodstock of Avenue A. Taken individually, the performers are impressive. In every sense, the Drom Gypsy Festival promises to be a wild and wonderful trip.
As they say in Romany, latcho drom—good luck on the road!
Related story by Nadine Bedford:
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