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The Last Village Musicians
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The Days of the Polish Accordion The First Accordionists
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There Come the Metos! A Band from Glina
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This album presents Polish rural folk bands playing in the same style as their predecessors of over 150 years before, and to hear the basses and accordions of village musicians at weddings in the 1980s.
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In the early twenties accordions of specific construction, similar to concertinas, started to be built in Central Poland. Village musicians called that instrument "harmonia" and loved very much.
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Meto Brothers, playing only on fiddle and basses, created an immense wall of sound, while the bass voice of Józef Meto was more reminiscent of Mississippi blues than of Polish rural music.
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The End of the Basses Krasnica, Opoczno County
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The Songs of Polesie Ukraine
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The Four Sides of Rawa County Rawa Mazowiecka
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I could never control the ensuing tumult at recordings, much to my delight. he crowd tightly packed the room and the dancing began. This CD contains the music of this extraordinary village.
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The CD contains wedding and ceremonial choral songs, performed by women from the region bordering with Poland and all the way to Chernobyl. These women are the guardians of traditional culture in Ukraine.
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The little town of Rawa Mazowiecka was famous for its great markets, and a meeting place for musicians. It was a wonderful cultural melting pot, filled with the sounds of Polish and Jewish music.
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Kajoks Around the Kedzierskis
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Traveling through Roztocze
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Mazurkas for Rent
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Kajoks – the most mysterious CD we have produced to date. We made our way to a forgotten region, where the musical Kedzierski family has been teaching local musicians for two hundred years. This has resulted in some extraordinarily original music.
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Roztocze, eastern Poland, near the Ukrainian border. Here, wind instruments reigned supreme: Western concert flutes, horns, tubas, trombones. All of these accompanied the fiddle at weddings. The CD recording also contains groups of women singing beautiful and ceremonial songs – you can hear the Ukrainian influences in them.
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If I had to explain mazurkas in the simplest terms, I would say that they are the songs and dances of the white slaves, which is what many Polish peasants were even into the nineteenth century. The most important ingredients of the mazurka have always been the singing and the dance. In triple time, of course.
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Masters of the Polish Accordion
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Accordionists working in the Polish countryside after 1945 changed traditional wedding custom by widening their repertoires and introducing new instruments. The result of this was the gradual elimination of traditional ceremonial music; modern pop hits replaced the mazurka and oberek. The unification process of rural and city music had begun.
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