by Mike Telin

The story of how Fanfare Ciocărlia, a Gypsy brass band from the isolated village of Zece Prăjini in northeastern Romania, came to be a driving force on world music stages around the globe is one for the silver screen. In 1996 Henry Ernst, a German traditional music enthusiast found himself near the village re-fueling his car. “I had a chat with a farmer who asked me why I was in Romania,” Ernst recalled during a recent interview. “I told him that I liked traditional Romanian music, and he said ‘if you like that, you should go to the next village a few kilometers away and you’ll find Gypsies with a brass music tradition.’ It sounded interesting to me so I said ‘Why not? Let’s go.’” [Read more…]