2004 Audio CD Cat No. ENJ-9442 2
Origin: Serbia

The tunes on "Rivers Of Happiness" are played in a private or improvised style and represent the cheeriest rarity for the music gourmet. When recording this CD the fellows were in a very good mood for being able to incorporate live improvisations by Dusko Goykovich whom they met for the first time. Goykovich who had been dreaming about this for forty years was in a boyish mood and fresh as ever despite his seventy years. At the beginning both parties held back in mutual estimation but during the recording this changed into a creative explosion with laughter and cheering. An old bebop fox when it comes to improvisation, Goykovich very soon found his place in the music profile of the orchestra but stayed loyal to his own way of playing. In the music of Gypsy Groovz you can hear the historical relations to Indian ragas, Sufi trance music, Egyptian and Armenian melodies, Turkish, Bulgarian and Macedonian patterns, the temper of Spanish flamenco, Sardinian and Dalmatian melodic polyphony, Serbian and Romanian love for variation. Ramesh Shotham, the Indian percussion player from Madras, had never met Ekrem's orchestra before but immediately recognized their story and their music as his own - and added a touch of the ancient Gypsies' Indian roots.