Live Hungarian Music in Chicago...

If you follow this little blog you may know it was named after a Gypsy Punk band from the Ukraine that Cathy was following. With a little bit of success, $100 rock and roll haircuts and Coca-Cola commercials they lost some of the original attraction but a window to Eastern European music had been opened and a steady collection of Gypsy music, European Brass Band music, Jewish music and of course the punk stuff had taken up a large share of the self space in the music room. This past weekend at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago we got to see the Hungarian Folk Group Sondrogon. 

Sondrogon plays tambruitza music. It's Southern Slavic music in the Serbian tradition. It has what I would call an "Eastern" sound. The name of the country is associated with the Huns who migrated to the area from central Asia. Lots of harmonic minor scales, an instrument that around here we call the "blow for the snake" and djembe/ Turkish style drum. Here's there instruments set up before the gig. I have been accused of bring too many instruments to the show before. Each man here played at least 2 and sometimes 4 different things. I'm not taking that crap anymore.        

Great little concert hall. Totally acoustic with a mic only used for speaking between songs. It was a 4pm in the afternoon show, a perfect time to bring Wallace our grandson who is 19 months. He sat enthralled by the music for a solid hour before he got a bit squirmy.  

The group is three brothers, a cousin and their best friend. Here is a shot of the blow for the snake player. The instrument like this I own is Indian with some unusual to Western ears dissonances. This was more melodic and this guy also played a flute type whistle thing that with the bands furious tempos required circular breathing and red faces from the woodwind players. Never having seen this style of music in person we had only listened on cd and the brisk tempos often led us to wonder if they were electronically sped up. They are not. These guys play fast.    

As I say a lot of instrument switching, sometimes in the same song. 

The stringed instruments other than the string bass seemed to have 6, 5 or 4 strings and they looked like they had some kind of picks quite different than what we see on an average Saturday night at the VFW dance in East Texas. 

I think you can see his pick stuck in the strings. I'd like to know more as we are atypical around here, mostly using thumb picks and I have sometimes used a felt uke pick on bass. 

Loved the drumming. 

Need new music? Check out Sondrogon.