Romano Hip-Hop in the house…Gipsy.cz in the house…

One of my favorite Czech bands is Gipsy.cz! They are this amazing mix of hip-hop and Romano, with sounds from Eminem to classic gipsy (at least to my untrained ears). They sing in Romano, Czech and English. After listening to them for over a year, I finally got to see them in action at the Lucerna last night. And they rocked! The place wasn't very crowded, actually probably only about about 60% capacity, which meant we weren't fighting a crowd all night. I (easily) convinced my friends Laura and Paul to come with me and as we entered, we were each given a tea light with the instructions to wait until we are told what to do with them. So we waited – the ticket said that concerts start at 9:00pm but it was 9 and still pretty empty. Since this was the gipsy.cz Christmas party, they were playing Christmas carols in the background. But not Czech, English carols and religious ones like 'Away in a Manger.' At around 9:30, a man comes on stage, who I recognized as Gipsy but in a long wig. He instructed us to light our candles and then went through a number of covers, changing his wig and shirt with each one, from 'So this is Christmas' to Queen to James Brown, complete with afro and cape. (I know, by now, you want pics. All I had was my camera phone but Laura took some pictures and I hope to add them to the post later.)

Next came a group singing blues/jazz, including a cool jazzed-up version of 'Silent Night' in Czech. Finally, Gipsy.cz came on. We were able to be pretty close to the stage – it was a small venue after all. While it would be difficult to describe the show in full, here are some of the highlights or things that I thought were interesting.

• There were kids everywhere, as young as 4. We know this because they brought one little boy on stage sawing on his violin and asked him afterwards how old he is. You couldn't hear him and he wasn't playing correctly anyway but he was completely welcome. There were also a number of little girls, who appeared to be the group members' children singing or dancing in the corners of the stage, not detracting but just adding to the relaxed (yet still pumped up) atmosphere.
  
• They didn't take a break halfway through. They played a pretty long set, about 90 minutes but different parts took breaks. Sometimes the musicians (forgot to mention that Gipsy has a keyboard/accordion/acoustic guitar player, a violinist and a bass player, using the computer to fill in the rest) took a break and Gipsy sang with the computer accompaniment or Gipsy took a short break while the musicians played extra long interludes. At one musician break, Gipsy did the most amazing beat box routine I have ever heard – alive or on tv. I can't even describe it but if I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed that he was doing it all on his own. He also apparently has a love for American pop music – in addition to his "opening act," the last bit of the beat box-ing was a bunch of Michael Jackson songs from "Do you remember the time" to "Billie Jean."
  
• The crowd was a wide mix of people. Young and old, as in the type of older men you expect to be sitting in the pub drinking every night and the beer gut to testify to it. Gipsy's mom was right in front of us. A lot more middle-aged Czech people than I thought we'd see. There were some people who were obviously dragged by their friends – obvious since their friends seemed to be having a good time and knew the words and they didn't and stood there not even dancing to the most up-beat songs.
  

For the first encore, the violinist brought his son up to join them on his violin (this time a kid who knows the song and had a mic and everything) to do a traditional Czech Christmas carol. And, then Gipsy came out again and they did a non-computer accompanied version of "Romano Hip-Hop." Great show. I think I lost my voice.