Reviving a culture one tune at a time

Kal, a Serbian Gypsy band, pays homage to Roma music while mixing it up with other genres. (mike bowring)

The Serbian Gypsy band Kal is on a mission to save Romani culture from kitsch, discrimination, and assimilation. In addition to jaw-dropping musicianship, the seven-piece combo's primary weapons in the fight against marginalization are rock 'n' roll attitude and dogged resistance to stylistic ghettoization.

"I strongly feel my national identity, that's my origin," says Kal's founder, guitarist and lead vocalist Dragan Ristic, speaking from his home in Belgrade. "But I'm also living in the 21st century. I strongly reject the stereotype of Roma music, that it has to be traditional. There is another road on which Roma music can be developed, a place for new Roma culture in contemporary Europe."

Ristic launched the band in 2004 with his brother Dushan, who has since moved to California but continues to run the Amala Summer School, a Romani cultural organization in their home village of Valjevo, Serbia. At least the fourth musical generation in the Ristic family, the brothers were weaned on Gypsy pride by their father, a pioneering Roma educator. But they also absorbed lots of contemporary music, from Leonard Cohen and Iggy Pop to Manu Chao and B.B. King.

In founding Kal, the Ristics sought a disparate cast of players, including accordionist Dragan Mitrovic, violinist Djordje Belkic, bassist Branko Isakovic, percussionists Neat Junuzi and Vladimir Stojkovic, and Vladan Mitrovic on accordion and vocals. While grounded in Balkan Romani cadences, the band draws on an international palette of styles, incorporating flamenco guitar arpeggios, Middle Eastern rhythms, surf rock licks, and keening Turkish clarinet lines.

"We're partly Roma musicians from the suburbs from Belgrade, and partly professional players from different Belgrade rock 'n' roll bands," Ristic says. "These are two different worlds that wouldn't meet if there wasn't Kal."

The band first made a splash in 2006 when its self-named album on the German label Asphalt Tango shot to the top of the European world-music charts, an unprecedented accomplishment for a Balkan Roma ensemble. A good deal of Kal's appeal flows from its high-energy performances and dramatic stage shows. Kal gives a free lecture and demonstration at New England Conservatory this afternoon (3:30-5 p.m. at NEC's St. Botolph Recital Hall) and performs tonight at the Somerville Theatre.

In many ways, Kal is an extension of Ristic's love of theater. A respected producer, he left Belgrade for Budapest in 1999 and founded the award-winning independent Romani theater company Vareso Aver (Something Else).

With Serbia's political isolation easing in 2004, Ristic returned to Belgrade to find a city undergoing a small cultural renaissance sparked by the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. Rather than continue his theatrical career, Ristic decided that music provided a much more potent megaphone for his message. And Kal's tremendous popularity sends a powerful signal to Ristic's most coveted audience, young Roma who are falling away from the culture.

"In our concerts around Europe I see a lot of young Roma people, and this is one of the important goals," Ristic says. "We are able to show this new generation a way they can express themselves as Roma."

The situation for the Roma across the Balkans continues to be precarious. Faced with widespread discrimination in housing, employment, and education, they are the subject of countless stereotypes and myths. From their origins in northern India, the Roma started dispersing throughout Europe and the Mediterranean in the 11th century, coming to be known as Gypsies due to the mistaken notion that they hailed from Egypt.

As Isabel Fonseca notes in her invaluable 1995 book, "Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey," the romanticized image of the wandering Gypsy stands in stark contrast to the reality of centuries of slavery in Romania, bondage that endured well into the 19th century.

The organization producing Kal's North American tour, Voice of Roma, is one of the NGOs working to ease the plight of a people buffeted by the fall of communism and the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Founded by Sani Rifati, a Romani man from Kosovo's capital of Pristina, and his American wife, Carol Bloom, Voice of Roma made its mark in musical circles by producing a 2004 American tour by legendary Macedonian Roma singer Esma Redzepova. Rifati sees Kal as a welcome development in Roma culture.

"What's amazing is this is a young group from Serbia playing traditional Romani music with an urban beat," Rifati says from his office in Petaluma, Calif. "They are into rockabilly, rock, jazz, blues, and Latin but maintain the roots. In the Balkan countries, they have this turbofolk with half-naked women, real trash with nothing to it musically. But Kal has attracted a wide range of audiences, especially among young people, with a new sound that's unmistakably Romani."