RUSSIAN ROMA MUSIC: Russian Gypsy Guitar Album by "Kolpakov Trio"

Moscow (Russia) based Russian Gypsy ensemble The Kolpakov Trio is the first group of the kind to tour North America in the post-socialist period. The striking style of the The Kolpakov Trio reflects the training of its members at world known Gypsy Theatre Romen from Moscow, which arranges traditional music and dance for polished stage performance.

Aleksander Kolpakov, the group's director, was born in 1943 in the district of Orienburg in Eastern Russia. He was raised with music among the Servo group of Roma and began playing the seven-string guitar as a boy. In the 1960s he moved to Moscow and has since worked with a number of groups, including the Romen Theatre. He is a composer as well as a singer and instrumentalist.

His nephew Vadim Kolpakov mastered the seven-string guitar, the vocal style and dance tradition of Russian Roma Gypsy music at an early age and is from the Saratov region of Russia. In 1992 he moved to Moscow to train with his uncle. He has toured internationally and recorded with the Kolpakov Trio, and in addition sings, dances and plays the guitar in his own group Via Romen, which he founded in the United States.

Tamara Cherepovskaia is a well-known Roma singer, and has toured in France, Italy, Georgia, Latvia, and America. She is highly in demand in the contemporary Moscow gypsy scene as a solo singer and dancer, and has collaborated in several recordings.

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Mikhail Smirnov

Ensemble Barynya

New York

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