Roma, Sinti and Manouche

Romani people left northwestern India more than a thousand years ago. On the European road they did not stay one public. In the German-speaking lands and the Low Countries many families call themselves Sinti. In France the close kin of that group are Manouche. In Spain, Calé or Gitanos. In Turkey, Roman. Roma is the wide name — used especially in the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe — and the name this archive uses when a family has not given another.

Inside that wide name the rooms split again. Romungro are Hungarian-speaking Roma, the professional string-band caste of the restaurants. Vlach / Oláh Roma kept a largely vocal, inward repertoire in Romani. Boyash, in Hungary and Romania, have their own songs. Lăutari in Wallachia and Moldova are a professional musician caste, mostly of Romani origin — a job name, not a kinship name.

“Gypsy” is the outsider word. It sits on old posters, on restaurant menus, and in the style name gypsy jazz. Many Roma consider it pejorative as an ethnic label; as a genre name it is still common in Hungary (cigányzene) and in marketing. This site keeps it only where the public already searches for it, with that history in view. The people on the stand had their own words first.

Sinti and Roma are kin. They are not interchangeable. The dialects drifted far enough that Sinti-Manouche speech and many Vlax Romani dialects are not simply two accents. You do not become Sinti by learning Django’s pompe. You do not become Hungarian Roma by learning a csárdás. Kinship is a family fact. Repertoire is a job.

Where the families settled, they became professionals of the music around them — and then changed it from the inside. Sinti and Manouche in France, Germany and the Low Countries carried a string tradition that, in the 1930s, met jazz. That meeting is gypsy jazz: guitar pompe, violin, the Hot Club. Rosenberg, Lagrène, Schäfer, Schnuckenack. A Sinti family line.

Hungarian Roma built the restaurant violin: primás, cimbalom, csárdás and nóta. Bihari’s line, Lakatos, Sárközi. Romanian Roma built the lăutar trade: wedding and listening music, doina and hora, the village taraf and later the restaurant taraf. Russian Roma built choirs and the seven-string guitar, and a romance repertoire the rest of Europe would later order as “Russian gypsy.” Spanish Calé shaped flamenco. Balkan Roma shaped brass and wedding bands.

Those are the usual rooms, not closed ones. A Sinti family can play a csárdás. A Hungarian primás can quote Django. The archive still files the family, because the public ear has spent a century collapsing all of it into one word.

Österreichisches Musiklexikon, on Austria: Burgenland Roma and Sinti have a long trade as professional musicians. They play what the room asks. For Burgenland Roma the main genre is Hungarian gypsy music. For Sinti it is Sinti-jazz. Both are ethnic mainstream: they carry identity, and they were made for a paying majority. A Romanes vocal tradition is almost gone, the lexicon says, citing Heinschink and Fennesz-Juhasz.

From the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the European restaurant wanted a standing violin and a set that sounded “Hungarian gypsy”: csárdás, slow nóta, a Romanian hora, then the Russian numbers. The paying public did not ask whether the band was Sinti or Roma. It asked for the sound.

So the same book travelled with different families. Hungarian Roma played it because it was their professional craft — Budapest cafés, then Rotterdam and The Hague. Romanian Roma played it with cimbalom and hora still in the seating — the Serban family at the Kurhaus. Sinti families played it too: Tata Mirando’s Weiss orchestra, Sinti to the bone, sat four violins and no cimbalom and still gave the Dutch rooms csárdás, hora and the Russian standards. The kinship was Sinti. The menu was Central European.

That is the Holland–Hungary story in one sentence: Hungarian Roma, Romanian Roma and Sinti in the same Dutch dining rooms, hired for the same appetite. Neighbours. Not one blood. Rosenberg pompe is another Sinti road in the same country — jazz, not the restaurant book. Same people-name. Different right hand.

The “Russian” pieces in that café book did not start in Budapest or in a Sinti wagon. They come from the Russian urban and Romani-choir repertoire of the nineteenth century: romances, guitar songs, the numbers Western menus later printed as Dark Eyes (Ochi chyornye), Two Guitars (Dve gitary), and the rest of that shelf. Fashionable in Moscow and St Petersburg, then fashionable everywhere a restaurant wanted tears and fire in the same medley.

Both families put them in the set. A Lakatos or Veres orchestra played them as part of the Hungarian restaurant night — after the csárdás, before the encore. A Mirando orchestra played them because Dutch hotels asked for “the Russian.” A Serban orchestra, Romanian Roma, played them beside hora. The Kolpakov and Loyko families play them as their own tradition, not as a borrowed colour.

So when a listener hears Dark Eyes from a Sinti band in Arnhem and from a Hungarian primás in Budapest, it is not proof that Sinti and Roma are the same people. It is proof that a repertoire can travel farther than a surname. The rooms copied each other. The families did not become each other.

Style pages follow the music. Family pages follow the kinship. A Sinti family playing Hungarian numbers is still filed as Sinti — see Weiss / Tata Mirando under Holland–Hungary. A Hungarian Roma family in The Hague is still Hungarian Roma — see Veres. The setlist may match. The origin line still follows the family.

Gypsy jazz stays a Sinti and Manouche chapter. Flamenco stays Calé. Lăutari stay Romanian Roma. The restaurant violin stays Hungarian Roma, with Sinti and Romanian cousins who learned the same book for work. When a page says “played by both,” it means the job, not the blood.