For those of you reading and about to read, I salute you! I also, however, wish to use this space as a method by which I can both conjure and convey my reactions and observations to the music that flits into my life, remains for a while, and then gets shunted on to my external hard drive for use as either bragging rights or as ooey-gooey creme filling for my iPod. I'm not just going to salute people who are reading and about to read...sorry if I fired flechettes into any of your soap-spheres.
I'd like to begin this (hopefully extensive) survey of my rigorous listening habits with a few much-needed quips about what I've affectionately dubbed the 'music of my soul', among other things. It comes the closest to manifesting the aspects of instrumental musicianship, harmonic and spontaneous complexity, sharp/nervy freneticism, and down-home, almost raucous positivity that I have come to embrace in the musicks that shall one day populate this last.fm page to no end. For now, however, (as of 10:45 on the morning of Tuesday, August 1, for those of you perusing into the past) they are the only artist that has been scrobbled on my computer machine and will most likely occupy at least a top 10 niche, if not higher, on my listens for quite some time.
Fanfare Ciocărlia, I salute you and your caffeinated cacophony!
Radio Pascani was my first holistic Ciocarlia listen (first REAL listen was
Born to Be Wild courtesy of 'Borat') and I'll admit that I was stumped by the research that I had performed on the group and the manner in which that research conflicted with what my ears were telling me. They are a group composed exclusively of blown winds and percussion...this is what I gleaned from various Internet sources, and I'm prone to believe what I hear on the Internets when it comes to appreciable media. It hasn't failed me yet in this aspect...not even the infamously unreliable Wikipedia has reduced me to blubbering. Their instrumental makeup severs their similarities with groups like
Taraf de Haïdouks or the
Kocani Orkestar...the aforementioned groups' numbers include such additions as squeezeboxes, fiddles, and upright basses.
Why, then, on
Radio Pascani during the track entitled
Sirba De La Zece Prajini does the whining, shrill tone of a high-octave fiddle pierce above the mixture of blatting offbeats and nimble trumpets? How come they just defied what every other website and album review knows to be true of their musicians?
It wasn't until after repeated listens that the epiphany that forever ingrained Fanfare Ciocarlia into my aural soul was achieved--that 'fiddle' was an
E-flat clarinet.
I was stricken with an immense desire to simultaneously seek private lessons from the (unfortunately deceased) clarinetist of the ensemble and strangle his painstakingly trained throat for being able to keep in pace with (and sometimes outmaneuver!) the blazing fury of the Ciocarlia trumpets. And I thought klezmer clarinetists were the shit...this schlemiel could articulate circles around any of them! Slur-two's like you wouldn't believe...I have to implement them into my practice schedule immediately.
For those of you reading, check out 'Sirba de la Zece Prajini' when the clarinetist breaks off from the tune's triplet rhythms in order to take short solo diversions in sixteenth notes.
Sixteenth notes...those diversions were what made me think that he was, perhaps, playing a fiddle. You might have made the same mistake as well...the scratch of the bow against the strings is even audible in the way that he articulates notes throughout the tune!
I always use 'Sirba de la Zece Prajini' as an introductory number for folks to whom I've raved vocally about Fanfare Ciocarlia. Some people have asked me the fiddle question before and I love clarifying it to them by playing other tracks from
Radio Pascani so that they can hear the unmistakeable but brief chalumeau exclamations as well as the squeak of a bright reed that give away the true instrument. Curran's and Casey's reactions, in particular, always make me chuckle. As soon as my face unfolded into an almost maniacal grin as soon as the clarinetist started to strut his stuff, Curran started stringing various expletives together during the solos in 'Sirba de la Zece Prajini' while Casey asked me if I had screwed around with high-speed dubbing.
Lyric baritone solos atop a dense and heavy-handed brass accompaniment interspersed among the omnipresent duel between equal-footed trumpet and sax/clarinet...that's Ciocarlia's fleet-footed essence in a nutshell. Their introductions to their various doinas, of course, ladle out a thick soup of rich sax, clarinet, and trumpet solos atop an endearingly out-of-tune long-toning brass section. The first description, however, is indicative of much of their output. Unless (huzzah!) they ditch the trumpets for all-out saxophone antics like what
Iag Bari delivers in some of my favorites like
Banatzeana and
So Te Kerau?. I've formally decided that I cannot feed any trees from six feet under without having learned how to play
Tiganeasca from
Baro Biao before that time...it's imperative!
I don't even know how many times I've had to use the Alt-Tab combination to hurriedly switch back over to Microsoft Excel and a soporifically good time crunching numbers in some spreadsheet that means nothing to me every time somebody has walked past my cubicle on the main corridor that snakes through the length of my office. And if any other hallway was a road that led to a quiet suburban neighborhood, the open, wood-floored hallway that runs literally right next to my cubicle would be the churlishly noisy interstate highway that connects every last one of those hushed lanes. It really doesn't help, either, that whatever I'm doing faces out to the hallway for every rudely inclined black-BMW-driver in a suit tailor-made for an asshole to see and silently ridicule because it's not sitting in a posh, thousand-square-foot office overlooking either a courtyard or some other underling's smaller office.
Therefore, at the behest of my superiors who most likely wouldn't appreciate it if I drove responsibly up to a traffic light with 'Sirba de la Zece Prajini' boiling out from my inched-down windows, I must cease this intellectually stimulating musical exploration in favor of jungle creature button-pushing. Joy.
And remember, please: don't screw around when you go camping and get the park authority to "let one of their rangers go" on account of some trouble that you caused.
Only you can prevent forest fires.
Cheers!
Kocani Orkestar
