Gogol Bordello founder blends his heritage, rock's energy
By BRIAN MCCOLLUM
Detroit Free Press
Teenage boy flees the Soviet Union, his gypsy family fearing fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Spends formative years in European refugee camps. Winds up in Vermont, U.S.A. Eventually gravitates to New York and forms a band that will become known as one of rock's hottest live acts, playing to increasingly adoring audiences around the world.
It's all so colorful and exotic it sounds like a fanciful short-story plot. But it's the real-life tale of Eugene Hutz, fountainhead of the band Gogol Bordello and an artist who's emerging as one of modern music's true renaissance men.
The charismatic Hutz and his compatriots call their music "gypsy-punk" - a flamboyant, mosh-ready style draped in the whirling sounds of Eastern European folk. As the Pogues did with Celtic styles two decades ago, so Gogol Bordello has done with Roma music, the band's accordions and fiddles leading the fiery sonic charge.
The group's records have started to garner attention - last year's "Super Taranta" landed on many critics' best-of lists - but it's the Gogol Bordello live show that seals the deal. The band's high-energy concerts have been hailed by both punk purists and world-music buffs for offering that most fundamental of musical pleasures: primal release.
History is filled with artists who have broken new ground by viewing a musical form from the outside, processing it through their unique filter and emphasizing traits the natives may have missed or taken for granted. The Beatles did it with American rock `n' roll, the British did it with the electric blues, and now Hutz just might be doing it with punk - spotting the cathartic energy it shares with the age-old folk music of his nomadic ancestors.
"There are not so many things that can provide that," says Hutz, speaking in the clipped but melodic accent that exposes his native Ukraine. "I have artists who were that release for me, so of course I want to reinvent that outlet in my own way, and to maximize it, actually. So there's a lot of merging of different cultures - cultures that rely strongly on that music as almost a drug to keep them high."
(MORE)
Detroit Free Press
Teenage boy flees the Soviet Union, his gypsy family fearing fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Spends formative years in European refugee camps. Winds up in Vermont, U.S.A. Eventually gravitates to New York and forms a band that will become known as one of rock's hottest live acts, playing to increasingly adoring audiences around the world.
It's all so colorful and exotic it sounds like a fanciful short-story plot. But it's the real-life tale of Eugene Hutz, fountainhead of the band Gogol Bordello and an artist who's emerging as one of modern music's true renaissance men.
The charismatic Hutz and his compatriots call their music "gypsy-punk" - a flamboyant, mosh-ready style draped in the whirling sounds of Eastern European folk. As the Pogues did with Celtic styles two decades ago, so Gogol Bordello has done with Roma music, the band's accordions and fiddles leading the fiery sonic charge.
The group's records have started to garner attention - last year's "Super Taranta" landed on many critics' best-of lists - but it's the Gogol Bordello live show that seals the deal. The band's high-energy concerts have been hailed by both punk purists and world-music buffs for offering that most fundamental of musical pleasures: primal release.
History is filled with artists who have broken new ground by viewing a musical form from the outside, processing it through their unique filter and emphasizing traits the natives may have missed or taken for granted. The Beatles did it with American rock `n' roll, the British did it with the electric blues, and now Hutz just might be doing it with punk - spotting the cathartic energy it shares with the age-old folk music of his nomadic ancestors.
"There are not so many things that can provide that," says Hutz, speaking in the clipped but melodic accent that exposes his native Ukraine. "I have artists who were that release for me, so of course I want to reinvent that outlet in my own way, and to maximize it, actually. So there's a lot of merging of different cultures - cultures that rely strongly on that music as almost a drug to keep them high."
(MORE)
Labels: Gogol Bordello, Gypsy, Gypsy Culture, Gypsy Music
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