Great Romani Artists – Tcha Limberger

The “blind Belgian violinist” (London Jazz News)  played in England as recently as 2013, but sadly I hadn’t ever heard of him then.

If I’ve understood the Dutch article in wikipedia correctly, Tcha was born in 1977 into a very musical family, and grew up playing first the guitar and then later the violin.  The London Jazz Review speaks of his “calling” to follow the Hungarian and Roma folk musical traditions, and youtube has a video of him playing beautiful Transylvanian folk music.

The web site dedicated to his music recounts how, having played in Budapest, he learned Hungarian in order to go back at age 23 and study there for 18 months.

If I’m right about his date of birth, Tcha is still only 37, and I look forward to seeing his fame grow.  You may like to join me in following him on facebook.

Great Gypsy Artists – Jimmy Rosenberg

Jimmy Rosenberg is a talented Dutch guitarist from a Sinti/Roma background, who achieved international recognition while barely in his teens. There is a wonderfully warm and affectionate tribute by Jon Larsen on facebook, which could hardly be bettered.  Jon includes a link to a wonderful musical archive, which will interest jazz guitar buffs. 

For my part, I found the youtube video of Jimmy at his first jazz festival, aged 12, very moving. 

The next youtube clip shows a more mature musician, but he still can’t have been very old when it was filmed.  Clearly an astonishingly virtuoso performer.

I would like to join Jon Larsen in his hope, which he expresses like this:

"For more than a decade we were like brothers in arms, but now I can only hope for a miracle – that one day my little brother will return to planet Earth and continue his magic."

The Chaplain

That's Adrian, the Chaplain, on the left in a dog collar.  He is Chaplain to Gypsies, Travellers and Showmen for the whole of the Diocese of Salisbury.  The picture shows him meeting with the group that supports him in this work.

Adrian's top concern at present is the education of Traveller children.  I've written before about how Traveller children underachieve in our school system as it is at present, but Adrian has identified a personalised teaching method that can be delivered either in school or by distance learning, and hopes to get it implemented locally.

Other concerns we discussed included the need for people travelling through our area in their seasonal nomadic journeys to have somewhere legal and safe to stop, where they will not be seen as a "problem" by anybody. The group is deeply unimpressed by the process currently going on to identify suitable sites, which is unlikely to conclude before the end of 2016 - and that's before anyone identifies funding or seeks planning permission!

I also want us to bear in mind the huge difficulties faced by Romani people in prison.  Not a great experience for anyone, I know, but to a Romani, being with his or her family is more than half of their personal identity, and they are lost without the culture they know - especially if they have lived nomadically - and especially if there are difficulties with communicating with family and/or with visiting. It is not possible to get figures from the Home Office for Gypsies in prison, because the Home Office stats don't have Romani as an ethnicity. So it is really important that we have a link with the prison service in some way, and can respond when there are difficulties.

The other problem that arises is that the Parole Board is very unwilling to allow people to be paroled to their family, and many Gypsy prisoners say they would rather serve their whole sentence than live in a parole hostel, which they perceive as being a hang-out for paedophiles and drug addicts. (Yes, that's how our culture looks to them!)

The good news we heard today is that Adrian has developed an excellent presentation for clergy in-service training or public talks.  We scanned a picture from "A Time to Travel?" which he plans to include in future.  It does a wonderful job of challenging the stereotype of the "New Age Traveller".  We see a young man with dreadlocks, wearing a jumper with the words "Special Brew", combat trousers and US Army surplus boots.  It is entitled "Is he a Traveller?" and is surrounded with words like Crusty, Drongo, Brew Crew, Dole Scrounger, New Ager, Hippy, and Cheesy Quaver.  Underneath, we read: "Actually it's Adam wearing a pullover his granny knitted him."

Great Romani artists – Django Reinhardt

Although I belonged to my school’s jazz club and my town’s jazz club, I don’t think anyone ever introduced me to the music of Django Reinhardt.  I wonder how many other music lovers are in the same position?  For the sake of any poor souls with a similarly deficient education, here are the main facts about his life.

Django was born in 1910 at Liberchies in Belgium where a jazz festival now takes place in May every year in his honour. 

As a “Minouche” (Romani or Sinti Gypsy) his early life was nomadic, but his family spent much time near Paris, and he is often referred to as being a French Gypsy. His name, Django, means “I awake” in the Romani language.

Django played banjo, violin and guitar-banjo from an early age, and by the time he was 13, was able to earn his living as a musician.  It could have been a great tragedy for music that he was badly injured in an accidental fire in his caravan (“roulotte” (French) or “verdine” (Romani) )when he was 18.  His leg was so badly damaged that amputation was proposed, but Django refused to accept the operation, and painfully learned to walk again.  Even more challenging was the loss of the use of the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. By the age of 19, however, he had switched his musical allegiance to the guitar, and begun to develop a unique method and style of playing that became known as “hot jazz guitar”. A recording featuring “The Sheik of Araby”, “Limehouse Blues” and“After You’ve Gone” illustrates his extraordinary virtuosity. He was widely considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

Despite being in Vichy France during World War 2, Django survived the holocaust, possibly because of covert admirers of jazz among the occupying Nazis.

In 1946, he toured America, and was rapturously received. When he returned to Europe, his personal appearances could be somewhat erratic, but his output of records was prolific – between 750 and 1,000 sides in his lifetime, of which the last album, “Djangology” was only released after his death. He died of a brain haemorrhage at Fontainebleau in 1953.

The untitled melody in this youtube clip is a lovely testimony to his versatility as a guitarist.

January 27th is a special day

On 27^th January each year, we remember the holocaust which took place between 1939 and 1945.

Among those who were systematically murdered were Jews, Gypsies, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses  homosexuals and people who had a mental illness.  Those who survived had been through extremes of suffering, mental, emotional and physical.

We remember the past so that we can plan the future. We remember so that we can say, with all our hearts, “Never again!”

Never again do we want to see people first marginalised, then persecuted and finally murdered in huge numbers, simply because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, their political affiliation or their disability.

That is why I am so passionately grieved to see the way in which disabled people and Travellers, for example, are being demonised and marginalised.  This satirical blue plaque says much of what I feel:

Our intercessor today expressed it clearly too.  He said, “A holocaust doesn’t just happen.  It’s a gradual process.”

From where I sit, that gradual process has been underway for a longish time in the case of Travellers. Legislation to limit the freedoms that their lifestyle requires has been piling up for centuries, but the first I was personally aware of was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994

Not only did Section 80 remove the duty of local authorities to provide caravan sites for Travellers, Section V also criminalised most temporary stops, which before had been, if a problem  at all, a civil matter.

More recently, I have been aware of a consistent current of anti-Traveller writing and broadcasting and a positive torrent of demonization and oppression targeted at disabled people. The New Statesman gave evidence about this in their March 2013 article: “Disabled people have never had it so bad.” 

If we allow this to continue, it will escalate until we arrive at our very own Kristallnacht – a government-initiated event of brutality, intimidation and humiliation that inaugurates a reign of terror.

And even now, today may be too late to voice this thought.  We know that there are already people with disabilities who live in a constant state of terror, and others, abandoned by police, community and “caring” services who have been hounded to their deaths.

So with Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, I pray:

May God, who continually shelters His people
as they journey on, make Himself known to us anew
in the next person each one of us meets -
in the stranger, and the one we find strange;
in the opponent, and the one who irritates us;
and in the silence which calls each one of us ‘beloved’;
so that God’s love can change
even this bowed and bloodied world, according to God’s perfect will.

Amen

Great Romani artists - Helios Gomez

If you've never heard of Helios Gomez, neither had I. 

Even the present-day Spanish authorities aren't too comfortable with his memory, and have partly or wholly destroyed the beautiful  Capilla Gitana, - Gypsy Chapel  - which he created by painting frescoes on the walls of his cell when he was imprisoned in the Modelo prison in Barcelona in 1945-6 and 1948-5).  I have only found two images of this once much-loved work of art, the most remarkable of which is this uniquely fresh and vivid painting of Madonna and Child.

Helios was a revolutionary who fought against Franco both as a soldier and as an artist.  Most of the pictures by which posterity will know him were published as anti-fascist propaganda, but his true legacy is lovingly remembered by the Associació Cultural Helios Gómez.

I only heard of Helios through an interview with Damian Le Bas by Clare-Marie Grigg, editor of Impirica.  Damian himself is editor of Travellers' Times as well as being a poet. I hope he won't mind my saying that you couldn't find a better introduction to him than Clare-Marie's interview and his own poem and video, Belong.

Guest Blog by Jake Bowers

I'm very honoured to have Jake's permission to reproduce this:

David Blunkett is feeding Romaphobia

The former home secretary's comments about Romany culture, and his claims we will cause riots, are ignorant and likely to fuel violence and prejudice

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  • The Guardian, Wednesday 13 November 2013 19.26 GMT
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David Blunkett said the behaviour of Roma people in the Page Hall area of the Sheffield was 'aggravating' to local people. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Ask any Romany woman who still reads palms and you will be told an essential fact – predicting a particular future makes it far more likely to happen. If you believe you are to meet a talk, dark, handsome stranger, then you are far more likely to find him.

However, it wasn't handsome strangers being predicted this week, but antisocial, ill-educated and dirty ones. When David Blunkett told BBC Radio Sheffield that the arrival of a large number of Slovak Roma migrants in his home city would lead to rioting, he wasn't so much predicting social conflict as adding to it. The behaviour of the Romany in the Page Hall area of the city, he said, was "aggravating" to local people. "We have got to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming community, the Roma community, because there's going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that." Among his charges was that we Roma don't want to educate our children, we congregate in large numbers on the streets, and we dump rubbish.

Romany individuals, of course, may well be guilty of littering and not sending their kids to school, but to suggest such behaviour is cultural is blatantly racist. From Gravesend to Glasgow I could take Blunkett to Roma migrant families who are fantastic neighbours, and parents who relish the chance to settle in a multicultural environment where they are no longer judged for being different.

Young men such as Artur Conka, for example, whose family escaped the grinding poverty of the Lunik IX ghetto in Slovakia, and who is fully integrating into British society. As a photography graduate he is using his skills to educate the British public about the plight of those he left behind – because he knows that every effort he makes to adapt must be matched by an effort to teach people about the community he comes from. Like every Roma migrant he attempts to disarm the fear evoked by the word Gypsy.

Such a fear of Gypsies is ancient and potent, but it has a name – Romaphobia. It recently led to blond Romany children across Europe being snatched and traumatised by state authorities. If politicians such as Blunkett make Romaphobia acceptable, it will indeed lead to racial violence in British cities. As January 2014 approaches and the anti-immigration lobby warns of the arrival of millions from Romania and Bulgaria, it's essential that progressive politicians – and I'm assuming Blunkett considers himself one – understand why 200,000 Roma migrants have already fled poverty, persecution and discrimination to live in the relative comfort of British cities. I'm sure Blunkett campaigned to end South African apartheid, but does he understand the social apartheid that blights millions of Roma across eastern Europe?

Ion Beldimari and his family. Photograph: Jake Bowers

Ion Beldimari lives in the ragged settlement of Smardioasa in southern Romania. He and his wife and five children live in a two-room mud hovel with no windows or doors. "We live in dread of winter because we have so little shelter," he told me when I visited in September. The family goes hungry if Ion and his eldest son cannot find enough scrap metal or plastic bottles to fill their horse-drawn cart. Like millions of Roma across Europe, they don't so much dump rubbish as recycle it to survive.

Then there's the myth that we don't like to educate our kids. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most Roma migrants I've met come to Britain precisely because they want their children to integrate, and not be forced into special schools where they are deemed "educationally subnormal". In the Czech Republic, for example, 35% of all children in special schools are Romany, perhaps 10 times the proportion in the overall population.

So as politicians churn out old prejudices about my community, I hope for just one thing – understanding. Because the thing we lack most of all isn't education, housing or even employment, it's the rarest commodity of all – empathy. And until media and politicians truly understand what we are attempting to escape, Romaphobia will continue to blight lives.