The music everyone knows and nobody credits

A remarkable amount of what the world thinks of as Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish or Russian music was played first by Roma.

There is a particular experience familiar to most Roma musicians: hearing something described on the radio as a national tradition, and recognising it as your uncle's repertoire.

It is not a small claim and it is not a bitter one. It is simply the history. For several hundred years, across a wide stretch of Europe, professional music at weddings, in taverns, at court and in the street was played disproportionately by Roma, and the music that resulted got filed under the country it was played in.

Flamenco

Flamenco is Andalusian and it is Gitano, and it cannot be pulled apart. It grew in the Roma quarters of Seville, Cádiz and Jerez, out of a meeting between Romani, Moorish, Jewish and Andalusian folk traditions, among people who were being persecuted throughout. The deep forms, the seguiriya and the soleá, are not entertainment and were never written to be. The vocabulary is ours: duende, and cante jondo, deep song. The great dynasties are Gitano families.

Hungary and the Balkans

The Hungarian café orchestra with the lead violin is a Roma institution. Liszt built the Hungarian Rhapsodies on what he heard from Roma bands and then wrote a whole book insisting the music was theirs rather than Hungarian, which offended nearly everybody and was closer to right than his critics allowed. Brahms's Hungarian Dances came through the same door.

Further south: the brass. The Balkan brass band, the thing that shows up in every film about a wedding, is largely a Roma form: Serbia, Macedonia, southern Romania. The taraf of Romania, the lăutari, families who have carried a repertoire by ear for two hundred years and can play a wedding for eighteen hours without written music.

What it changes

Django Reinhardt was Manouche, and invented an entire branch of jazz with two working fingers on his left hand. The Gipsy Kings are a Gitano family from Arles. Esma Redžepova sang for fifty years and was called the Queen of the Roma, and meant it as a job description.

None of this is a request for credit, exactly. Musicians tend to be relaxed about who gets called what. But it is worth stating plainly, because the same countries that have Roma music at the centre of their national identity have not always been generous to the people who made it, and those two facts sit oddly together.

The music is on this site because it is one of the things that never needed defending. It went everywhere, it got into everything, and it is still going.