Bela Lakatos & The Gypsy Youth Project - Introducing/World Music Network

This is the latest release from the World Music Network’s Introducing label, with a mandate to bring ‘undiscovered music into the public arena.’ Bela Lakatos & GYP offer an antidote to the so-called ‘restaurant’ gypsy music performed for tourists and propagated until the 1980s by the state-owned Hungaroton label. This is rural Hungarian Roma music collected and passionately interpreted by group of young Romany speakers – simple songs of hardship and heartache, bitter poverty and repentant drunkards, predominantly delivered in multi-part vocals with basic percussion and guitar accompaniment. For those accustomed to their Roma all frantic sawing and hell bent for leather, it’s a real corrective. If you buy one gypsy CD this year, get the Borat soundtrack; then perform an act of easy penance by picking up Bela Lakatos & The Gypsy Youth Project.