Customer Reviews

Blues for Transylvania

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If you buy this album you are in for a treat
for your ears and your mind.

A Hungarian friend of mine took me with her
to hear Muzikas while I was in the Twin Cities
last month and the group was on tour. The
music was a revelation to me.

I am half-Hungarian but had never heard Hungarian
folk music before, except perhaps through classical
music composers who adapted folk songs for their work.

My friend has heard Muzsikas perform before many
times, some of those times in Hungary. I'm very
glad she brought me along to hear them at
the Cedar Cultural Center.

It was like I had been ushered into a new musical
world. During intermission I bought two of their CDs.
For the rest of my stay, as I drove around the Twin
Cities area I played the CDs
constantly in my rental car, trying to comprehend
what made the music so unusual and haunting.

The Blues for Transylvania is the more intriguing of the two
albums I bought, partly because it contains music from
the Jews who used to live in the Carpathian mountains in
Transylvania. The Jews are gone from there. Many, of course,
were killed by the Nazis, and others emigrated.

Muzsikas went to Transylvanian weddings, funerals,
dances, and collected the music that was left behind.

The bass player announced that in the Carpathians
there is none of the noise pollution as the
rest of us know it in our lives. Only perhaps the occasional
sound of "a bear screaming in the forest."

With all that silence to fill, the music the Jews
in Carpathians created sounds almost Chinese I don't
have the training or the right vocabulary for talking
about music but the intentional discordancies,
the varied meters, the unusual instruments, and the
sound of Marta Sebestyen's voice all cast a spell
on me. It was alien, but also familiar at the same
time. Sure I've heard lots of fiddles and
and lots of reels in Irish, Welsh, and
American country music. And even though Muzsikas
was playing fiddles and playing reels,
there were none of the familiar conventions I've
grown used to. Just when I thought they would play
to the end of a musical line, they would cut it
short. The bass player not only laid down the
bass line, but in some songs played the melody.
It was surprising in many ways.

Even the instruments were unpredictable.
At one point they produced an instrument that
looked like a short bass, and explained that
it is played by percussion. The
strings are hit instead of stroked--with the
exception of one string that is plucked.

The varieties of musical experience . . ..

And the words. I envy my friend who was able to
understand the words. I had to pour over the liner notes
to find that they sang about romantic horse
thieves, unfaithful lovers, and a cold marriage
bed . . ..

Every song on this album is excellent. I enjoyed this one more than the Bartok album. Wish this group would have recorded more together and in this style.

I originally bought this CD because my wife had grandparents from Transylvania, and I thought she might like it. Now she can't pry it out of my hands! It is some of the best folk music I've ever heard, and the woman singer is simply extraordinary. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, it's a bit like gypsy music and a bit like balkan or Greek folk music, but really, it's in a class of its own. The title is entirely appropriate, it really is Transylvanian Blues. If you even think you might like it, believe me, you should get it. Wonderful.