Artist Bio:
You can search on a map, but you won't find Zece Prajini (literally "ten fields"), the Romanian home of Fanfare Ciocarlia. It's a tiny village of some four hundred people, situated by the secluded border with Moldavia, a place no one had even heard of until the frantic brass sound of Fanfare Ciocarlia hit world music. The 12-piece ensemble of wind, horns, and percussion, all Romanies (Gypsies), led an isolated existence until 1995, part-time musicians playing for weddings and parties (sometimes for 30 hours at a stretch) in the region around their home, an orkestar (band) without any formal name.
But their world changed when a German named Henry Ernst, who was travelling through Romania, happened across the village—and the group. Staggered by the overpowering, supercharged sound he heard, Ernst returned to Germany and booked some shows there for the band he named Fanfare Ciocarlia. The group's steamroller of sound was unlike anything people had heard before, very different from the Gypsy string bands that had proved so popular.
Fanfare Ciocarlia's roots were in the brass bands of the Turkish military, a force that had occupied so many Balkan countries at the beginning of the 19th century and left its mark on many aspects of the culture, not least musically. From there traditions had been handed down in families, with aggregations of everything from tubas (Fanfare Ciocarlia has two of them) to clarinets. The Gypsies fitted the brass instruments to their music, making them dance the horos and ruseascas, playing in complex time signatures at a jaw-dropping pace. The band's debut CD, 1998's Radio Pascani, came out to universal acclaim and it helped kick off a much wider interest in Balkan brass bands.
The music of Fanfare Ciocarlia pulls not only from the band's homeland but also rhythms from Turkey, Bulgaria and Macedonia to make a complete Balkan stew, which was shown to full effect on the group's second disc, 1999's Baro Baio: World Wide Wedding. The third record, Iag Bari, brought in Dan Armeanca, a Romanian singer, and Bulgarian vocalists Voices Angelite to offer darker moods and take on some new colors, and the CD showed Fanfare Ciocarlia to be virtuosos even outside its own specialty.
The band's first DVD, Gypsy Brass Legends: The Story of the Band (2004), was a documentary on the group as well as a live concert. Having established itself as one of the Balkans' greatest brass exponents, Fanfare Ciocarlia started to look beyond Europe for its next release, Gili Garabdi, which posed the music question: What if Gypsy musicians had emigrated to America and helped start jazz? With playful takes on Duke Ellington and "The James Bond Theme," the 2005 album was a stunner, strongly rooted at home (with several guests artists) yet capturing a truly international feel. It was enough to garner Fanfare Ciocarlia the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Europe in 2006. —Chris Nickson
