专辑简介

Imagine what happens when a young music student raised in the mountains of northern Rumania falls in love with the iconoclastic jazz style of Charlie Parker. The result is contained in this recording, a unique blend of music rooted in the folk tradition of Rumania and the improvisational possibilities of jazz.The student in question, Anca Parghel, is now a mother of two children and a celebrated musician in her native country. Her celebrity is surely soon to be extended across the world with the revelation to a wider audience of her powerful musical expression. While still a child Anca discovered the beauty of the music of her native Rumania. Her first instrument was the accordion, there being no money for a piano. Classical studies of singing and piano followed in the local university town. And then came the gift of a single Parker tape from a fellow Rumanian pianist friend. Anca was inspired to undertake a personal exploration of this new musical world, beginning by attempts to imitate the excitement of Parker's staccato and phrasing and Dizzy Gillespie's agile precision. This was 1979. The following year saw her first jazz concert performance. The music found great resonance with the Rumanian public but was a shade too exotic for the regime. After leaving the conservatory with a dissertation on "Charlie Parker and the Genius of Improvisation" Anca found herself "offered" a teaching post far away from the capital. Luckily, pregnancy made it possible to avoid taking up the position. During the eighties Anca carried on playing jazz whenever and wherever she could and growing musically until she was spotted by an East German jazz critic and invited to the Leipziger Jazz Festival in 1988. This was the break she needed and further European concert dates followed. This enabled Anca to devote herself fully to her own creative development. On this recording Anca explores musically the folk tradition of her native land, itself a melting pot of Oriental, Slav, Germanic and gypsy influences. Each successive influx of foreign invaders has left its mark on the cultural life in the mountains where she grew up. The old Rumanian melodies she has selected are representative of this rich variety of traditional music whose harmonies lend themselves to Anca's individual jazz improvisation. As she says herself: "I've chosen these songs because I like them. They've been part of my mind for years and years." Anca believes in jazz as spontaneous creativity, seeing in this style of music the promise of infinite renewal in which the musician unconsciously is working towards something unpremeditated. She compares it to giving birth. She regards her vocalizations not as singing in the usual sense of the word but as the recreation of an instrument: "Since the beginning I was not only a voice but a trumpet or saxophone."