Image via Asphalt Tango Records
It Wasn’t Hard to Love You by Fanfare Ciocarlia (Asphalt Tango)
A bunch of Balkan brass bands gained Western ears in the years after Communism fell. Prominent among them, Fanfare Ciocarlia marks 25 years with the release of It Wasn’t Hard to Love You. They emerged from rural Romania, six guys on trumpets and clarinets, a tuba player holding up the bottom and a drummer keeping time. Their madcap rhythms have affinities with Jewish klezmer and will remind film buffs of scores from early cartoons. They quote freely from classical as well as regional folk traditions and open the album with an unlikely cover—Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us” infused with the same melancholic urgency they bring to the rest of their material.
