Violinist’s group brings Gypsy trail to Edmonton
As Cam Neufeld tells the story, it started simply enough over his passion for the music of the legendary Gypsy jazz guitar master Django Reinhardt (1910-1953).
Reinhardt, along with his friend Stephane Grappelli, co-founded the Quintet of the Hot Club of France in Paris in 1934, one of the first bands to feature guitar as a lead, improvising instrument.
Neufeld had been playing “hot club” music of years in his own groups and others, reading about Reinhardt’s ethnic background and obsessing over the recordings.
“There’s a certain deep passion there that’s very appealing to play with.”
Reinhardt’s own short life packs an amazing story but Edmonton’s Neufeld wanted to know more about the music’s ancestral roots in Romani Gypsy culture. The violinist and multi-instrumentalist had no idea where his curiosity would lead him.
“2010 was my first trip to basically find the Romani trail that runs from India all the way to Spain. I had an interest in all this for a long time but that was the first time I got there.”
Two specific inspirations included the 1993 award-winning documentary about the Gypsies, Latcho Drom, and the Turkish tradition of “makam,” or improvisation.
“I remember thinking years ago, ‘Why can’t I play like a Turkish violin player?’”
On the way back from the Indian province of Rajasthan, he took in France’s biggest festival dedicated to Reinhardt’s music, then celebrating the guitarist’s 100th anniversary. Back home, he put together his first Road To Django tribute concert.
“I was taking Django’s music and extrapolating backward to India.”
Now, for seven of the past eight years, Neufeld has turned into something of a wandering Gypsy himself, journeying to the old world to seek out the ancient history of the Romani culture and its many musical connections through the Middle East, the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
Along the way he has grown into a self-educated ethnomusicologist, recording here and there on his laptop, meeting up and jamming with the locals from India to Istanbul, becoming an even hotter violinist.
Rajasthan, Turkey, Romania, Serbia and Afghanistan are just a few of the countries Neufeld has visited in his free-spirited fashion, absorbing artifacts of musical history, styles and theory, and learning to play new instruments most Canadians have never heard of.
Speaking with Neufeld, it’s clear the man enjoys a musical Esperanto when it comes to picking up the basics of exotic string instruments. It’s no surprise to learn he has hosted workshops for the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology.
To get to some isolated spots, he has put in more than a few uncomfortable trips on buses and trains. Certain states suffer from political instability and don’t always welcome foreigners, but he shrugs all that off.
“Sometimes it is jarring to witness the level of poverty that exists in certain places. It makes you appreciate what we have. Gypsy life itself has been greatly romanticized, but they live a hard life.”
Out of respect, he calls himself a “gadjo.” Translation: not a Gypsy.
The eighth annual Road To Django concert Saturday marks the recording debut of Neufeld’s everevolving
ensemble dedicated to exploring these musical streams, known as Gadjo Collective.
He calls it a Balkan dance band. The entrancing new album, Balkan Jam, is the first of two recordings from Gadjo Collective, caught live in concert at the Riverdale Community League hall in late 2016. It features two extended traditional Romani pieces among six other classic traditional numbers that capitalize on the group’s rhythmic vitality and spontaneous soloists. A companion album of his original tunes is already mixed and mastered and will be out by spring.
The Road To Django is more of a musical travelogue that begins in India and ends with Reinhardt’s music. For this show he has pulled together 14 performers on strings, horns, percussion and vocals, and four dancers.
Gadjo Collective becomes more of a multinational band every year. This time around its rotating cast will include new immigrants here from Syria, Iraq and Romania along with players from the roots, classical and jazz corners of the city.
Guitarist Clint Pelletier, saxophonist Spencer Murray, clarinetist Don Ross and bass/sousaphone player Keith Rempel are a few of the artists on the new album, along with Neufeld’s daughter Billie Zizi, who enjoys a solo career.
In following these Gypsy strains, the group’s music pieces together traditions like a mosaic.
“It’s arguable that there isn’t actually such a thing as Romani music, because as they travelled they just absorbed the music that was around them and they were working musicians. But I think they kept a sensibility — especially for improvisation — that probably evolved over thousands of years starting with the folk songs of Rajasthan. You find these same traces in Turkey and the Balkans.”
Neufeld sees Reinhardt as another example of this pattern of cross-pollination.
“He used American jazz as his foundation but infused it with his own sensibility.”
Neufeld grew up in a small Mennonite community around Medicine Hat, picked up a guitar in his teens and switched to violin at 21. His early career as a tree planter and planting crew co-ordinator out in the bush prepared him for the hassles of the road. He moved to Edmonton in 1985 to attend (then) MacEwan College and put out his first album, a live concert date, in 2005.
You will also find banjo and mandolin in his musical arsenal and, from his travels, Neufeld can now explain the basics of more exotic string instruments like the ravanhatta, (a distant cousin of the violin from Rajasthan that is played with a bow that has bells hanging from it), or the Arabic oud.
As he approaches his 60th birthday, Neufeld is as enthusiastic as ever on collaborating and using music as a bridge to experience other cultures.
Gadjo Collective is the living example of that.
“What we do live can’t be captured in the studio. It’s about interaction and sweat and emotion.”