Last night I went to see Fanfare Ciocărlia with the neighbours from across the hall, at the Muffathalle here in Munich. Fanfare Ciocărlia are a popular Romanian gypsy band whose music is the basis for parts of the Bucovina Club and Electric Gypsyland CDs that I love. It was good for the body and soul.

At the end, instead of a regular encore, the whole band walked down in to the crowd with their instruments (You don’t need an amplifier for all those trumpets, tubas, horns, clarinets, and drums), playing for another 15 minutes with the people dancing around them. Along the way, they gathered Euro notes stuck to their sweaty foreheads.