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Shukar Collective - Urban Gypsy
The Shukar Collective was born in Romania from the meeting of new generation musicians with the gypsy traditions of Shukar founders Napoleon, Tamango and Clasic. Shukar play ursari music (ursar means 'bear tamer' or 'bear handler') using spoons, wooden barrels or darabuka to create a powerful and urgent sound that is at the same time emotional and soulful. Urban Gypsy combines Shukar's original ursari music with the new technology of the collective, resulting in their distinctive sound. Shukar Collective started purely as a musical project – out of love and respect for traditional ‘ursari' music, the music of street performing bear tamers. It wasn't long before we decided to bring two very different cultures together. We wanted to bring together rroma singers with a group of musicians and deejays to form Shukar Collective. On the one side of Shukar Collective are the rroma singers, often incorrectly called gypsies, from rural, sub-standard living conditions (even by eastern European standards), who work in terrible conditions for meager pay and have to feed large families. But they have passionate ‘ursari' music that is tribal, almost primitive, always changing and continually emotive. On the flipside is us – a group of musicians and deejays who have been active on the Romanian and international scene for a number of years. We are all individuals with various different approaches to electronic music, work and life. After an initial period of recording and production, our lives began to intertwine with those of the rroma singers. Since they live 40km out of Bucharest we each had to take turns helping them out – for instance we often had to take it in turns to drive them so that they could appear on TV, do a radio jingle or play at a club. We also bought one singer a TV and even a horse. The fusion between the rroma musicians and the deejays had started; in less than a year we started playing festivals in Europe as Shukar Collective. After a very short period of time we witnessed an amazingly positive transformation for the life of the rroma people. Our musical experiment continues in a multicultural society and we look forward to the integration of rromas in our modern day society – not only in music and technology but also coming about through real efforts for social change. Dan Handrabur, a Shukar Collective producer |
