By Marcello Pedrolo

When I arrived to the States in the early 90's I was shocked by this prosperous society. At first site from the sky at night the city of Angels was a massive rug of lights paving the landscape from Long Beach to the Angeles National Forest, and tracing in all directions of this city of lights was the distinguished white and red lanes in constant motion on all mayor freeways, just like blood going through the veins of a body, this one wearing the name of Los Angeles.

As I settled in the west, even today some twenty years later I still feel I'm living a dream life, although I work and suffer happiness like any other immigrant out there, here I live among people that are constantly on the move. The average American is in carrier track from an early age thus going to college, moving constantly from city to city and from state to state is a common activity.

One of the landlords that I came across, goes hiking for weeks into the Los Padres National Forest and other people hick trails for days at the time, although packing incredible gear; they carry the minimum survival skills for the ultimate adventure in which many have not always come back from.

Another person I've met, crossed the country several times with a van, the camera and the loyalty of a spouse who went alone for the fun of it or not, I don't really know but the fact is that around here every other person you meet tells you a similar story.
What about Mark? He crossed Argentina from North to South in a bicycle! What about mentioning the few billionaires who flight solo in a balloon riding a wild wind from Europe to Asia, crashed their story midway to heaven on all the mayor news papers' front page sometime ago.

Aren't we all gypsies deep inside? Don't we all want to seek the unexpected and try other ways of life?
Fusion is to me a gypsy approach to music, remove Mark from the bicycle and give him a guitar, send him again to Argentina and let him come back with the harvested fusion. Is already been done by Gustavo Santaolalla and Leon Gieco with the album De Ushuia a la Quiaca back in the mid eighties. The point here is that the gypsies are inside ourselves looking constantly to improve our lives and enrich our culture by living new experiences every day, meeting new people and their cultures as well as we share ours.

In my opinion the moral is that keeping oneself to oneself and persist on it, is far from honoring what life is all about. I'm far from being an expert because I don't really believe an expert is out of this theory of keeping oneself to oneself, but that's just me, please draw your own conclusion.
The real gypsies are those who are believe to originate from Western India and move their way into Eastern Europe reaching as far as Andalusia, Spain but mainly settling in Romania.
So if you are still with me, from Romania, sharing roots with flamenco, here is this band bringing to the west and the world, the Roma music's tradition with the harvested fusion of oriental pop, rumba Catalan, reggae and manele, (the Roma pop).

Their name: Mahala Rai Banda
The Album: Ghetto Blasters
The Label: Asphalt Tango