Gypsy Music at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer

Gypsies from throughout Europe travel each May 24-25 to the town of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue region of France on a religious pilgrimage to honor their Saint Sarah in prayer and music. Here, at the end of the road in France, this gathering has become a crossroads of Romany music, inspiring and pollinating other types of Gypsy music from flamenco to Django Reinhardt's Gypsy Jazz, traditional Hungarian and Balkan brass to the Gipsy Kings' Rhumba. in 1943-44, Django even tried to compose an organ mass to be played for the ceremony. He never finished it, but today, his melodies such as "Nuages" have become hymns for the Romany evangelical church, complete with prayer lyrics. My children (ages 7 and 13) filmed the events during our family vacation—except for the knifefight, which I filmed by chance (my children were in bed, happily). I was shooting the church at night when the fight broke out; you won't actually see the blades, but the footage was shot amidst the panic as the crowd ran in fear. The fight was a crime of passion: a spurred Romany lover decided to slice his beloved. He tried to get her earlier in the day, then returned at night, leaving her with blood running down her arm and her clan vowing revenge. Next year, Disneyland instead. Ha! There's live shots here of music and dancing in the streets, including the jazz manouche band Raspoutine and the Tziganes group Urs Karpatz, complete with cymbalom. Added music comes from 1910s Romany violinist Georges Boulanger, Thierry Robin, and Django's great-grandson, Dallas Baumgartner. If you're interested in more on Django and Gypsy jazz, check out my biography DJANGO: THE LIFE & MUSIC OF A GYPSY LEGEND and DJANGO REINHARDT & THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF GYPSY JAZZ, both available via http://www.amazon.com/.

YouTube | June 16, 2007