Gheorghe Zamfir

Biography

In 1955 his father brought fourteen-year-old Gheorghe to Music School No. 1 in Bucharest: the boy dreamed of playing the accordion, like the lăutari, the Romani folk musicians. But he was placed in the nai class of Fănică Luca, and the accordion was left behind.

Zamfir was born on 6 April 1941 in the town of Găești, in Dâmbovița County. He received his first prize for a performance as early as 1959: according to Romanian sources, it was first prize at a national competition, and at the same time he recorded his first original pieces in a folk spirit for the radio. After school he studied at the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatory in Bucharest: in 1966 he graduated in pedagogy, and in 1968 in conducting, for choir and orchestra. Later, in 2005, he defended a doctoral dissertation on the nai, on the origin, development and meaning of the instrument.

He reworked the folk instrument. The traditional nai has twenty pipes, and Zamfir moved to 22, 25, 28 and 30 to widen the range, and learned to draw several tones from each pipe by changing the position of his lips. He builds the instruments himself from bamboo; by his own account, he tunes them by putting a little bee honey into the pipes. In 2003 he made a giant nai of 42 pipes. As a result the nai could now play doinas, lullabies and laments.

From 1966 to 1969 he conducted the Ciocârlia folk ensemble, one of the country’s main state ensembles, which toured abroad. In 1966 his first record appeared on Electrecord, with the pieces “Doina de jale” and “Doina ca de la Vișina”. In 1969 he left the ensemble, and in 1970 he founded his own taraf, a small band. He was not noticed at once: in the 1960s the Swiss researcher of Romanian folk music Marcel Cellier took an interest in him, and this contact opened the way to the West for Zamfir. In 1971 he gave 45 performances at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse in Paris. Film proved decisive. In 1972 the composer Vladimir Cosma took him as a soloist for the music of “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe”, and the film brought Zamfir his first tours in Western Europe. Then came “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975), Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), where at Ennio Morricone’s request he played “Childhood Memories” and “Cockeye’s Song”, “The Karate Kid”, and later “Kill Bill” (2003) and the Japanese “Only Yesterday” (1991).

In 1977 the single “The Lonely Shepherd” came out: the piece was written by James Last and recorded with his orchestra. Before that, in 1976, “Doina de jale”, used as the theme of a BBC religious programme, became a British hit: the single rose to number four in the charts. After this Zamfir performed at Carnegie Hall (1981) and the Kennedy Center, in Australia, Japan, Canada and South Africa, and also played for Pope John Paul II. In 1974 he composed the “Messe pour la Paix” for nai, choir, organ and orchestra, and in 1982 his first rhapsody and a concerto for nai and orchestra. Romanian sources speak of more than three hundred compositions by him; figures for albums sold differ between sources.

In 1990 he returned to Romania. He published poems, essays and an autobiographical book, “Binecuvântare și blestem” (“Blessing and Curse”, 2000), and exhibited his paintings at home and abroad. From 2001 to 2005 he taught the nai at the National University of Music in Bucharest. His honours include honorary citizenship of Chișinău (1990) and Bucharest (2001), the Moldovan Mihai Eminescu Medal (2000), the Moldovan Order of the Republic (2013 or 2014: the dates differ), the Romanian Order of Cultural Merit (2004) and the Order of the Star of Romania (2022). Zamfir lives and teaches in Bucharest.