The following short essay would not have been possible without the detailed and original journalism of Garth Cartwright, one of the few writers to truly shed a light on the incredible, varied music of the Romani diaspora and whose knowledge and words I’ve absorbed (and no doubt unconsciously regurgitated here) for many years. He has written many articles on the subject as well as the incredibly detailed book Princes Amongst Men, things I have read many times for many years- a bible for anyone wanting to explore this exceptionally rich and varied musical world.
This is a faded facsimile by comparison…
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How many people recall the name Nicolae Neacsu? How many people have heard the magic of his music… the power of his words? A diminishing few I fear. Nicolae Neacsu. It is a name that should hold weight but is already being lost to the wind.
Nicolae Neacsu.
Toothless and hobbling, his ears hanging off his head like tired leather, gripping his violin like a weapon; singing, lecturing, gesticulating, joyous, bitter, brilliant. Unknown by most and cherished by that dwindling few, Nicolae ‘Culai’ Neacsu was a lautar, from the cast of the lautari, descended from the court musicians of Wallachia, and, for his time, one of the last true guardians of an ancient Romanian storytelling tradition. But he can guard it no longer… Indeed, his feet have now not trod the earth for over two decades. Two decades! Where did they go? The days run away like wild horses over the hills, and so did his magical playing, an untamed, unstudied, naturally wild thing. Where did it go?
When I first heard of him, he was already a tired old man, living as he had always done in the small village of Clejani, in the Wallachian region south of Bucharest. 7 decades in so-called ‘Tsigania’, Nicolae Neacsu ended up leading a ragged rabble of musicians, who gained fame across Europe and eventually the world as Taraf de Haidouks, band of brigands. Neacsu was a fountain of folk tradition, his long life, marred by poverty, drawn heavily across his face. A prima violinist, he was also a sharp-tongued and authoritarian teacher, a vocalist of incredible pathos and expression and a folk historian who kept alive an otherwise lost mental archive of epic songs, doina, cintec de dragoste and dance tunes. Yet he could so easily have passed the wider world by. He cannot slip into insignificance once more!
Speranta Radulescu, a musicologist from Bucharest who captured a great many village musicians throughout her life, was the first outsider to pay Neacsu serious attention, recording him sporadically through the 80s. Eventually, in 1986, with Swiss musicologist Laurent Aubert, a recording of a series of dance tunes and ballads was made and released on French label Ocora, featuring, with Neacsu, a number of core members of what would become those famous Hadouks. The album, now out of print, was given the title Roumanie: Musique Des Tsiganes De Valachie. It is a breathtaking early window into the local village style and Neacsu’s playing is by far the most arresting on it. It is an album now being exchanged for over a hundred pounds on the internet, probably more money than at the point of recording, Neacsu had ever held.
(As an etymological side note, the word Tsigane is not one I would wish to use normally, carrying in its origins the weight of centuries old oppression and persecution that the Romani people have had to endure (I will not detail its genesis here but surface to say it is a word riddled with inhumanity and the ubiquitous spectre of misconception) but this is a label still sewn into the fabric of everyday language in Romania when to travelled around its byways (and certainly was during the naming of these albums- hence their unfortunate nomenclature). See too the word ‘gypsy’ another etymological dead-end that once more proves the relentless and cruel fetishisation of a people who have always deserved better, used here only to reflect the names of the albums released)
Uneducated and largely illiterate, Neacsu had the presence of a king, and eyes which darted with intellect, wit and wile. Watching him bark orders at the Macedonian brass band, Kocani Orkestar, at the Band of Gypsies concerts (seen by many as the Rosetta stone of their recording career), in heavily accented Romanian, when not a common word was spoken by any of these distant Roma cousins, you got a brief insight into his musical world. ”…You. you, your horn should sound like a frog, hey frog watch this! You should tip your hat to me!’ Everything was by feel, improvisation, and association. He had no ‘formal’ training, simply years of hard work. As a lautar, he said on many occasions, you had to steal everything you knew, listen intently to every new song and then play and play and play until it stuck. So a horn sounding like a frog- that made complete sense, because that was how he heard it. “The one who plays it certainly won’t teach you,” he once said, ”Yes, the violin is light in your hand, but it is heavy to learn.” A true lautar, he felt, should always learn by ear. And what an ear he had, recounting tales a hundred and more years old with precision, or playing high wailing notes ‘din caval’ (like a long pipe), sitting proudly, back straight, burnished strings shimmering.
In the 1960s, over a hundred of the Romani inhabitants of the village of Clejani were Lautari. And to be a lautar was and, in some cases still is, a profession. So Neacsu, for decades, played at weddings, funerals, first haircuts, local celebrations, harvest festivals and baptisms; plying his trade. And this was no easy task, lautari would sometimes play for days on end, often with only cimbalom and cobza to accompany his violin and vocal expressions. This was physical labour, not a romantic artistic idyll. Neacsu also supplemented his meagre income through selling contraband cigarettes, but still only had a single shirt and suit to his name for more than 6 decades. It is somewhat bizarre therefore that he ended his life and his career playing to packed audiences around the globe, and counted Johnny Depp (then at the peak of his fame and reputation) and Yehudi Menhuin as devoted fans, recorded with the Kronos Quartet and modelled for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Before all this success struck, his wife Floarea died leaving him a widower, never able to see his talent reach such a wide audience. Later, at the close of the 80s, following a fall, he badly broke his leg. Unable to play standing as was the peasant tradition, he had given up. Bedridden, leg in a desperate and decrepit state, he stopped playing and waited for death- haunted by the imminent spectre of deeper, hunger-gripping poverty. Many of the Roma and rural Romanians had already grown tired of his archaic repertoire, a musician from an increasingly distant and dying age, and though he could still play virtuoso dance songs to match any of the young bucks he had tutored; it was not until he was re-discovered by the Belgian music promoter Stephane Karo, that his songs were once more truly respected. Indeed it was their link to an increasingly unknowable past that captured the imaginations of the west. As soon as the stage light was once more shed upon his stately silhouette, that despondence that had been crippling him disappeared like the morning mist, and Culai was reborn.
Brought to greater fame by French Romani film-maker Tony Gatlif, in the film Latcho Drom (Safe Journey in Romani), Culai, battered hat angled across his darting eyes, appears in the film’s most arresting scenes and delivers one of his greatest compositions. Drawing a horse hair tied to the g string of his violin coarsely through his finger and thumb, it emanates a strangled, eerie and yet utterly captivating sound, a creaking, groaning, monstrous thing, decorating his vision of the fallen dictator, The Ballad of the Tyrant. ‘A canta la fir de par’ in Romanian, this unsettling string technique, also heard on some even earlier Romanian field recordings made in and around Clejani in the 50s, is an unearthly rasping creak, but one which Culai excelled in and arguably has never been matched. By reworking the ballad in this way, Neacsu was constantly bringing the storytelling form into contemporary relevance, altering an existing frame to devastating, potent effect. The ability to balance simple tambal rhythmics with the odd flourish of improvised violin is heavy stuff indeed, and the song carries with it all the pain, sorrow and joy of the Romanian peasant and Romani life. ‘Tyrant! You have destroyed Romania!’ he admonishes.
A western pop market saturated by saccharine, pedestrian music, manufactured via board meetings and focus groups, gave the Taraf and Neacsu the mask of unparalleled authenticity. And it was the medieval epics that were his speciality which really gripped the western audiences; they were truly unlike anything they had heard before. This authenticity of course is in part itself a fiction, although most of the band were neighbours and relatives, and many had played together in small local tarafs for weddings etc, they had themselves been manufactured by an outside group for a specific purpose. But rather than shaping them to western ears, Karo’s desire had only ever been to spread with uncynical joy the rare and wonderful music of these Romani Romanians. He was also less studious in his concerns than Radulescu who had forbidden the concert cimbalom or accordian to be included in those early Clejani cassettes (much to the chagrin of some of its best musicians). No- he wanted their joy and sorrow to be unencumbered by academia – to be the living, breathing energy that had so captured his imagination as a teenager and which he knew would set the world alight. And the taraf were triumphant. Their 1991 debut, Muzique des Tziganes de Roumanie topped the European world music charts, and set in motion a new life for them all, not least Neacsu, now declaring himself the best fiddler in the world with characteristic chutzpah.
After starring in ‘The Man Who Cried’ alongside Johnny Depp, he became their most vocal of supporters (at the time, a life-changing positive), even inviting them to perform at private parties with a gamut of Hollywood a-listers. But even to the very end, Neacsu wore the same battered trilby, and returned after every tour and packed concert hall to the bare earth and simple existence of Clejani. During his final tour, following the great success of the Band Of Gypsies album which won Taraf de Haidouks the best European artist award at the first BBC Radio 3 world music awards, he announced he would return to Clejani, because he was going to die. As matter of factly as that. But he did return home, he made it back to the village, to the sun-baked soil of his home to die in his sleep. His funeral gathered people from far, wide and near, and saw Caliu, his talented protégé, leading the musical vigil through the night and then into the following day too, tears streaming down faces but still the music played on. It is hard not to see Neacsu as one of the Haidouks of his stories. He did in his way steal from the rich, and give to the poor. After the funeral, Caliu said, ”On the other side they’ll ask where he’s been, and he’ll say, ‘I’ve been all over this world.’ And so he had. And so he had.
Though not in himself the most technically perfect violinist, Caliu for example had and still has more capacity to play in a strictly classical style, there was no-one to match him for his ability to improvise. Even in his more subdued playing, he shaped a far greater emotional weight than any of his contemporaries or the legions of new blood from the younger generations of musicians. His voice was also of great note, though lacking range and without the guttural inflections of Ion Manole and the typical old-village style, his cigarette bruised larynx still coaxed great authority into all his story songs. His throaty timbre was also the perfect balance for Cacurica’s high lonesome wail, who with Iorga on those early recordings for the Bucharest Peasant Museum engaged in the dialogic tunes so typical of Clejani and the region.
Neacsu gave gravitas to the folk song in a way no western folk revivalist is able to do, because these songs needed no interpretive rediscovery. They had existed for centuries in the memories, mouths and finger tips of the lautari, and thanks to him continued to exist. Take the song Corbea the Haidouk, wherein the brigand of the title is captured by the Emperor Steven and his men, who throws him into jail. In the jail there lives a female snake who rips the flesh from Corbea’s body to feed her young, but the Haidouk has his revenge! Neacsu tells it with such conviction and relish, his violin flowing back and forth to match the intricacies of the tale itself. Incredibly, the songs that found their way onto Taraf de Haidouks recordings were more often than not much shorter versions of songs that in the past Neascu and his fellow lautari would animatedly tell over the course of half an hour, such was the depth and detail of his memory and understanding.
Towards the end of his life, reflecting on what the last 10 years had brought him, he had this to say: ”When I was little, three fates came to visit me, one destined this and one destined that, and then the little one asked me, when would you want an easy life, when you are young or when you are old? And I said, ‘When I am old. When I was young I could bear the hardship of life, now I am old, and I am fine.’ It is better to be happy in old age, and that little fate granted me her wish.”
Nicolae ‘Culai’ Neacsu, songwriter and violinist, was one of the final lautari to maintain a tangible link to the mediaeval courtly ballads of Wallachia, as well as those deeper, intrinsic connections to a millenia-spanning Romani consciousness; with the passing of Ion Manole, Dimitru ‘Cacurica’ Baicu and Ilie Iorga, (and now Gheorghe Fălcaru, Paul Pașalan Guiclea, Marin P. Manole and Costică Boieru gone too) that link has dissolved. But it should not be forgotten. It must not be forgotten.
Thanks to Stephan Karo and Michael Winter, as well as Radulescu and other field recordists- there is a wealth of songs that have been captured that could have so easily been lost entirely that can still be explored (those on the sadly defunct Ethnophonie label are well worth seeking out). Of the famed musicians of Clejani, very few remain. Caliu has formed a taraf from those still left, but there’s something oddly perfunctory about their playing now- despite his incredible skill and presence. Maybe, it was a foolish dream to believe such things could last. In the end, perhaps, this was an inevitability. Modernity is a rampant beast that devours traditions and history unflinchingly (but who am I to impose my personal taste as righteous stance – it is an absurdity- life must go on…change is like the wind, it will not cease and it would be wrong to try to stop it!). And, just because a tradition is no longer living does not mean it has to die entirely. Listen to the words and music of Nicolae Neacsu; it will open your heart and your mind and your soul and show, I believe, that the past is still a place where we can speak to ghosts, and dance to a secret song and fall in love again.
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
