Hutsul magic. Authentic Hutsul Music from the Ukrainian Carpathians.

"The music in this compilation was recorded in 2007-2008 in the village of Shepit, located in the Kosiv district of the Ivano-Frankivsk area, Ukraine, an area of the Carpathian Mountains populated by a sub-ethnic group called the Hutsuls. Most of the tunes performed by Yura, Mykola and Mykhailo Danyschuk, professional wedding musicians, also known by their nickname, the Palahniuk brothers, and some of their children.

Mykola, the oldest of the Palahniuk brothers, was the reason they became professional wedding musicians. Until the second half of the 20^th century almost every Hutsul family owned some musical instruments, and almost every boy who tended the sheep in the mountains played a fiyarka, an open-ended flute with six fingerholes. When Mykola, born in 1944, became proficient on the fiyarka he was invited to play at weddings and dances with adult musicians. That gave him the chance to master on the tsymbaly (cimbalom) and the fiddle. Soon he encouraged his younger brothers to learn to play – he wanted to form his own wedding band. Thus, Yura became a virtuoso fiddler and a good fiyarka player while Mykhailo mastered the tsymbaly and became unbeatable on percussion.

All performers on this CD are genuine folk musicians in the sense that everything they perform was learned by ear from the previous generations. The younger musicians are musically literate; nevertheless, every Hutsul melody they play was learned the traditional way."

(the information is from the booklet to a compact disc)