By Will Friedwald

The Wall Street Journal

Any discussion of gypsy music requires plenty of hyphens. By all accounts, the Romani people are a race of musical alchemists, continually traversing the globe and mixing different sounds together. The result is often a blend of traditional gypsy music, indigenous music and, frequently, jazz and pop elements imported from the Americas.

For years, it's been the ambition of the local club owner and impresario Sasho Dimitrov to gather as many of the world's leading Gypsy musicians as he can and present them all on one stage—although not literally under one roof. In 2005, he mounted an all-star event at the Club Roxy on West 18th Street, which has since be shuttered, but, he said, "to get the true feeling of what gypsy music is supposed to sound and feel like, you can't do it in a hall. It has to be outdoors."

In 2009 Mr. Dimitrov launched Gypsy Tabor, a three-day festival of music and culture, at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. It was a reasonable success, but in the years that followed, finding the musicians and navigating political hurdles proved to be prohibitively difficult. This year he has pulled it all together. Over the weekend he'll present the new Gypsy Tabor, a three-day, three-night marathon of gypsy music with at least 20 different bands, crafts and culture at the 350-year-old Vander Ende-Onderdonk House in Ridgewood, Queens.

"I discovered Onderdonk House and the grounds by accident, because my son is in the Boy Scouts in Queens." he said. "I've already booked it for a follow-up festival on Labor Day."

Where the 2009 edition of Gypsy Tabor focused mostly on the music, this year's engagement—with, among other events, a "Roma/Gypsy awareness discussion" with a Harvard-trained ethnomusicologist—will emphasize an understanding of the culture. "Several of the performers [in 2009] were Roma/Gypsy, but this year's event has a more proactive Roma/Gypsy awareness message," said one of the festival's organizers.

Mr. Dimitrov immigrated to the U.S. from Bulgaria in 1990, and within a few years had opened the first club Mehanata—the Bulgarian term for "Tavern"—near the corner of Canal Street and Broadway. By the time he relocated to 113 Ludlow St., on the Lower East Side, Mehanata had become ground zero for contemporary gypsy music, not just in New York but essentially across the Americas. Mehanata is where Gogol Bordello first earned its reputation, and thus can be said to be the birthplace of gypsy punk.

To enter Mehanata, especially on a Thursday night when the Bulgarian Gypsy saxophonist Yuri Yunakov (who received the NEA Heritage Fellowship) is playing, is to step into what at first seems like an alien landscape of sounds. Mr. Yunakov, who is headlining at Gypsy Tabor, generally works with tracks manipulated on a laptop by a DJ. The music uses a harmonic system closer to pentatonics than traditional Western tonality, and a heavy, insistent beat that makes most rock 'n' roll seem tame.

Mr. Dimitrov said that Gypsy Tabor was conceived as an annual event, but his effort to keep it going after the 2009 edition met with resistance from what he identified as "the Brooklyn Mafia."

"I had everything all booked with the company that controlled the space," he said. "The bands were already arriving. These guys saw that a lot of people were planning to come and there was a lot of interest."

But at the 11th hour, he said, he was asked to fork over a considerable amount of cash. "Since I didn't have that kind of money, I had to cancel the whole thing."

Presumably, that obstacle will not present itself this weekend in Queens. Mr. Dimitrov has assembled an eclectic lineup, primarily of bands and musicians who reside in the New York area, but also some visiting guests. To show how much sheer territory there is under the umbrella of gypsy music, there will be gypsy-styled klezmer (from trumpeter Frank London, of the Klezmatics), Middle Eastern music (from the Greek string virtuoso Avram Pengas), gypsy punk (Bad Buka), Slavic music (Brazda), gypsy flamenco, Russian gypsy and Japanese gypsy rock in the form of a band called Kagero.

On Sunday, Gypsy Tabor will feature the kind of gypsy music that New Yorkers are most familiar with, the hard swinging Jazz Manouche (which recently made an appearance on the soundtrack of "Midnight in Paris"), as pioneered by Django Reinhardt and realized by the contemporary guitarist Ted Gottsegen.

"Real gypsy music shouldn't be contained by walls and ceilings," Mr. Dimitrov said. "You need to experience it al fresco, preferably in front of a campfire. Bring your own tent."

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