The Roma Empire
In 2001, five gypsy bands from four countries toured the United States together for the first time. Director Jasmine Dellal's recently released documentary about the tour, When the Road Bends...Tales of a Gypsy Caravan, is both one of the best tour movies ever made as well as a valuable, enlightening, and sometimes heartbreaking look at one of the world's most misunderstood cultures. Originally from India, the Roma people, as they are more accurately known, currently number between eight and ten million. Although concentrated in Eastern Europe, at least a million gypsies (the name derives from the mistaken notion that they were 'gyptians from Egypt) have settled in the United States.
When the River Bends celebrates the common musical threads connecting the Macedonian "Queen of the Gypsies" Esma Redzepova, Spain's Antonio el Pipa Flamenco Company, Romania's Taraf de Haidouks, India's Maharaja, and Macedonia's Fanfare Ciocarlia brass band. Onstage, the musicians display variations on a happy sort of sadness, the indefinable mood the Spanish call duende. During the six weeks of their tour, their differences dissolve into a single communal spirit, and their offstage interactions are hilarious and touching.
As successful as each group may be, nearly all these musicians emerged from, and still subsist amid, shocking poverty and discrimination back home. Dellal's footage of their homes and families includes both a wedding (the marriage of one musician's nineteen-year-old son to a girl of thirteen) and a marathon musical funeral. (Veteran documentarian Albert Maysles, of Gimme Shelter fame, was the film's principle photographer.) In one scene, a group of men in Rajasthan debate the merits of literacy, and one of them notes that it helps to read the numbers on the bus.
When the Road Bends is an emotional cornucopia of music and stories originating in cultural contexts a long way away from our own. Roma pride is expressed in all five acts' music as well as in their (stubborn?) commitment to a very old way of life. "I've never assimilated for anyone," says Esma Redzepova proudly.