ROMANIAN TRAVELS
Sometime after the formation of the band, Sarah
mentioned that she was planning on returning to
Eastern Europe that following summer, and that anyone
who felt like coming was welcome to tag along. The
prospect of hearing those melodies as they were MEANT
to be played was a bit intimidating to all of us at
first, but one by one we decided to go ahead and do
it. This lead to numerous planning meetings that
degraded into drunken arguments about what countries
had the best home made liquor, plans to make money
playing on the street, and the solemn promise that we
would, in fact, buy our plane tickets well in advance
to save ourselves money (the best laid plans of mice
and women . . . )
Having bought our plane tickets at the last
possible moment our less than extravagant budgets
would allow, Sarah and Aaron met Sxip in Prague after
his performance run in England, where we discovered
that busking was, in fact, more difficult there than
here in New York. Forgoing the tourist traps and the
urban decay of the cities, we began our travels
through Hungary and Romania, attending a series of
European folk dance and music festivals, each one more
geographically isolated and musically inspiring than
the last. Here we took music lessons from gypsies,
made hours of field recordings, danced the nights away
with people who's passion for music whipped them into
a frenzy, and drank gallons upon gallons of palinka (a
particularly potent Transylvanian moonshine, that
doubles as an industrial solvent)
One festival in particular, in the csavas region
of Romanian Transylvannia, was an experience we'll not
soon forget. Having travelled backwards through the
history of transportation (plane to bus to car to
train to horse drawn cart to feet), Kaia finally met
up with us, along with our good friend Robin Aigner,
and there was much rejoicing and drinking of polinka.
Upon hearing that we knew some traditional American
music, our Hungarian host family, Ochie and Imola,
insisted that we immediately play some old time
country music for them. Not being ones to dissapoint,
we banged out some Hank Williams, and an instant bond
was forged.
This led to us performing more American music as a
sort of cultural exchange - this time in the main
performance space, after the Szászcsávás Gypsy band,
and for the entire town! Rehearsing for this show in
corn fields on the edge of an isolated mountain town
brought our own musical heritage into focus more than
it ever had before, while singing songs like "Cluck
old hen" for people who actually raised chickens made
much more sense than it ever did in New York.
Later that night, in the only bar in town, we
played our own set of mutated gypsy tunes for the
people that inspired them, and they returned in kind,
playing the most twisted version of "Oh Suzannah" you
will ever hear. It's not such a big planet, is it?
