New album: Daniovci
"All the tunes we play are under a minute long. If you want money, you gotta convince the people who walk by that you're good 'cause they won't listen any longer."
Gypsy musicians duo Daniovci. Besides playing at local village weddings for decades, they busk on the streets for tourists in eastern Slovakia. How do these distant situations change their musical language?
On the sound recording, we hear a selection of their all-day performance with several geographical imprints. Their border-zone repertoire includes well-known songs of Slovaks, Gypsies, Hungarians, Rusyns, and Romanians in special abridged versions rearranged for the context of a busy town square.
Ivan Dani: violin, Robo Dani: guitar. Recorded by nohami.com in June 2022 and March 2023.
AND IF IVAN SPOKE
my father could neither read nor sign his name
and he didn't even know the clock. he listened to the radio because they tell the hours
but he knew seven languages, my gosh, even German
and Russian also perfectly because he was in the labor camp for three years
and he could play all the instruments, cimbalom, violin, double bass
he went to weddings all over the villages
I couldn't even follow him
he died early; otherwise, I would have learned more from him
I learned to play the violin from myself only
nobody ever showed me anything
me and Robo play on the street
everything we've heard somewhere
we copy and paste in our own way
it's just imitating because I don't even know the names of the songs:
maďare - hungarianesche
štraus - strausss
česka - tschechische
rumunska - romanian
moj otec nevedel ani čitať ani podpisať sa svojim menom
a ani hodinku nepoznal. počúval rádio bo len tam rozprávaju koľko hodin
ale sedem jazyky ovládal, ty kokso, aj po nemecky
aj po rusky perfex lebo bol tri roky v lagri
a vedel hrať na všetky nástroje, cimbal, husle, basy
chodil na svatby po všetkých valaloch
by som za ním ani nevládal
zomrel skoro, inak by som sa od neho viacej učil
ja som sa učil hrať na husle sam od seba
nikto mi nikdy nič neukazal
s Robom hrajeme na ulici všetko, čo sme dade počuli
kopírujeme a hrajeme po svojom
kopirovačky, bo nazvy pesničiek ja ani neznam:
maďare
štraus
česka
rumunska