@asphalt tango production : When Dona Dumitru Siminica sang drinking songs, laments or love songs in the Bucharest garden café "La Chirigiu" ... the tables filled with guests almost as quickly as the glasses with tuica or wine and the patron's till with Lei.

@Rock Paper Scissors : Back in the early 1970s, when a few bucks in hand meant years behind bars, Romania’s hottest cimbalom player, Toni Iordache, was picked up by the police with foreign currency in his pocket. He had acquired it during one of his numerous international tours and, rumor has it, he was planning to buy his wife a fur coat with some of the money he’d earned abroad.

@Robert Christgau : : In 1965, swift, facile, contained Romanian violinist Stoican was a guy who caught a spy, and as a reward got the crazed Ceausescu dictatorship to record a band he assembled. The even more understated trumpeter Costel Vasilescu was the true leader, leaving the mind-blowing to cymbalom virtuoso Toni Iordache, who pours on rippling rhythms of a startling vibraphone-meets-balafon sonority.

@Lăutari on Wikipedia : The lăutari drew inspiration from all the musics they had contact with: the pastoral music of Romania, the Byzantine music played in the church, as well as foreign music, most notably Turkish, but also Russian and Western European. While the lăutari drew inspiration from the local music, they also influenced the Romanian peasant music

@The Magazine for Traditional Music : Lautari are a class of professional musicians, some of whom play ersatz gypsy music in urban cafes for town dwellers and tourists, and some of whom play authentic village music for authentic villagers. .... That is to say, they are generally flashier and more virtuosic than rural musicians and, for me, they are correspondingly less interesting.

@Romania Gypsy and Folk Music Expedition : Blondu played a few folk tunes, but like I said he mostly stuck to the pop stuff. He suffered from the same delusion other Gypsy musicians I know have, that non-gypsies want to hear familiar music.

@Passion Discs : These musicians by trade are the fiddler players, playing an ancient instrument deriving from kobsa, now less often used. It was replaced mainly by the cembalo and the accordion. The fiddle is an instrument that was often modified in order to facilitate some peculiar sounds and sound effects, imitations or the effects meant to increase the expression possibilities of the accompaniment violin.

@Harmony Ridge Music : Maria Tanase interpreted folk songs and the so-called Romanian songs, composed by popular music composers in the spirit of folk music, in many of the Bucharest restaurants, Neptun, Wilson, Parcul Aro, Luxandra, Luther, Continental, etc. especially in the period between the two world wars.

to be continued… probably