A Hawk and a Hacksaw perform on street corners, for fun and spare
change, all around the globe. You’ll
find them plying this trade
throughout Spain, Hungary, and Romania. Their vibrant music, heavy on
strains of accordion and violin, reflects a variety of cultures,
particularly folk traditions of Eastern Europe.
Just don’t call them “Gypsies.”
“We are not a Gypsy band,” emphasizes founder Jeremy Barnes. “Gypsy
music is music played by Gypsies, and the sound of Gypsy music depends
on where they live.” And Barnes and his partner, violinist Heather
Trost, don’t meet the basic criteria. “Neither of us is Roma.”
Still, there are parallels. The tangled roots of the Gypsies begin
in the Indian subcontinent, roughly a thousand years ago, then progress
through ancient Persia, Armenia, and on to Western Europe. Since
leaving home at age 18, Barnes has resided in France, England, Poland,
Hungary, and throughout the U.S., including Denver, Chicago, New York,
Athens, and Albuquerque.
For the last year and a half, the band have called Budapest home.
They even shared co-billing with Hungarian quartet Hun Hangár
Ensemble on their fourth album, released last year, which downplayed
original compositions in favor of traditional Balkan melodies. “I had
to take everything I had learned from working in a Western musical
project and forget it,” says Barnes.
Like the true Gypsies, Barnes’s musical aesthetic has evolved as a
consequence of his nomadic existence. Only, his early epiphanies were
conducted in a tour van, not a caravan. “In 1996, I began playing with
Neutral Milk Hotel,” says Barnes, who contributed drums and organ to
the seminal In the Aeroplane over the Sea. “On tour we used to
listen to Bulgarian women’s choirs. I had never heard anything like
it.”
A year later, he was living in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, south of
Wicker Park. It was there, in a thrift store, that he discovered a used
LP by Dumitru Farca¸s. “The cover was so nice. Dumitru is in a
field with his instrument, cuddling a baby goat.” The instrument turned
out to be a tárogató, a reed instrument similar to the
clarinet and saxophone, and the goat lover one of its leading
virtuosos.
“I put the record on and was completely blown away,” he says. “From
then on, Romanian music became an obsession for me.”
A decade later, the multi-instrumentalist would find himself making
The Way the Wind Blows, the third AHAAH full-length, in a remote
Moldovan village, assisted by Balkan brass ensemble Fanfare Ciocarlia.
Critics praised the disc, anointing it “irreverent world music for
punks,” “first-class folk,” and—here comes that word
again—”bittersweet Gypsy-soul.”
Such eclectic labeling is a dilemma shared by another close
colleague of AHAAH, Zach Condon of Beirut. Both Barnes and Trost
performed on Beirut’s 2006 breakout Gulag Orkestar, and Condon
returned the favor by playing trumpet on The Way the Wind Blows.
Yet, Barnes dispels lazy comparisons between the two groups, as well as
with other rock acts dipping into Eastern European musical traditions:
DeVotchKa, Barbez, Gogol Bordello. “To my ear, DeVotchKa’s folk
elements seem to be more Western European, a mixture of Italian folk
music with a heavy dose of Coldplay,” he observes. “Beirut also seems
more French to me.”
He is equally articulate about why North American listeners seem
increasingly fascinated by such acts of late. In Barnes’s opinion, many
fundamentals of Balkan and Eastern European music—”like playing
songs in asymmetrical rhythms such as five, seven, and eleven, and
using Turkish and Oriental ornaments in the melodies”—sound fresh
and unconventional to Westerners weaned on pop music’s square time
signatures and major/minor tonality. And as a veteran percussionist, he
says, “I love the absence of a traditional drum set.”
Barnes has also, remarkably, made playing accordion seem cool. Or at
least enjoyable. “Sometimes younger American people, even emo kids, see
us and then come up and say things like, ‘My grandpa used to play
accordion and it was so nice to hear it again.'”
The instrument boasts less esoteric charms, too. It allows an
individual to play melody, chords, and bass lines simultaneously. It
also fits easily into an airplane overhead compartment, and, weighing
around 15 pounds, is easy to carry. “When busking, it is always
important to be able to run if needed,” Barnes admits. Hey, you don’t
have to be a Gypsy to get hassled by the law.
