Tamburocket Hungarian Fireworks (Riverboat Records, 2014)
Forget all the violin saturated Hungarian music you’re used to because Sondorgo’s latest release Tamburocket Hungarian Fireworks is about to set everything you know about Hungarian music on fire. Comprised of brothers Aron, Benjamin and Salamon Eredics, their cousin David Eredics and the non-related group member Attila Buzas, Sondorgo has pulled together a sound dominated by the tambura, similar to a mandolin that is thought to have made its way from Turkey.
Digging deep into the various musical traditions of Hungary and sifting through archives, Sondorgo has made its mission to give a new life to long-forgotten songs, as evidenced by their debut recording Tamburising: Lost Music of the Balkans. Exuberant and fiery, Sondorgo frolics through festive, folksy numbers and staggers and stuns listeners with more exotic tracks.
Awash with tambura, alto tambura, kontra tambura, tambura bass and cello tambura, Tamburocket Hungarian Fireworks enhances their sound with darbuka, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, accordion, shepherd flute and the Chinese snake charmer’s pipe the hulusi.
Opening with the Croatian folk tunes “Jozo” and “Marice,” listeners get a healthy dose of tambura and Sondorgo’s musical brilliance, but the further into the CD listeners get to the juicy, meaty bits with the deliciously worked “Evo Srcu,” an intertwining of two Serbian melodies from Vojvodina.
Offerings just get better with the Middle Eastern rich and impossible lush “Hulusination,” based on a Macedonian dance tune, the delightful but short “Drago Kolo,” from composer Bela Bartok and hulusi featured “Hulusi” with its derbuka laced edges.
Compositions “Majka Kceru” and “Srpski Madjarik” give listeners another couple of dazzling doses of Bartok, but “Landing Cocek” is perhaps my favorite with its hypnotizing threads of darbuka, clarinet, accordion and tambura.
Marked by extraordinary virtuosity, lush compositions and captivating passion, Tamburocket Hungarian Fireworks is indeed musical fireworks.
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Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
