Constantin Pârvulescu

Violin

Costi invents scales that don't exist and tries for notes that aren't there.

He has performed at venues such as the Library of Congress, the Hungarian and French Embassies, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Hungarian Ball, as well as numerous street corners, ferries, art galleries, folk festivals, dive bars, weddings, and functions.

Costi has played with orchestras, dance bands, Gypsy tarafs, rock and punk outfits, and once at a party, while under some influence or other, insinuated himself into a jam with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. They didn't kick him out.

Currently he is primás with Ensemble Sub Masa, which he founded from the ashes of the Motherland Ensemble in 1999.

Marchette DuBois

Accordion

Marchette has a Bachelor of Music degree from SUNY Potsdam, where she studied voice with Patricia Misslin. She started playing accordion in 1994. That same year, at Cornell University, she took a class on Hungarian and Eastern European music, and became obsessed. She moved to Seattle in 1996, where continued to play accordion, learn Balkan tunes, and write operas.

In 1999 she joined Ensemble Sub Masa. When she heard Taraf de Haidouks for the first time her brain exploded and she's been forced to travel the world looking for the missing pieces. Some bits were found as far away as Romania and Turkey in the summer of 2006. Other bits were sitting in the bottom of the accordion case in the closet.

You can also hear Marchette playing accordion with Hell's Bellows, Seattle's hottest accordion quartet, and Operadisiac, an operatic, burlesque surrealist troupe.

Nina Darko Vukmanic

Bass

Born in Sarajevo, Ex-Yugoslavia, Nina started her music education on classical guitar. During the war in Bosnia she left Sarajevo and moved to Karlsruhe, Germany where she graduated in classical guitar from the University of Music, Karlsruhe. Meanwhile, she also played electric guitar in different bands, stylistically ranging from country to heavy metal music. It wasn't until a few years ago and after she moved to Seattle that Nina picked up bass and started playing Balkan music as well.

In addition to Ensemble Sub Masa, Nina can be heard in Sahel and Opossum Wranglers (a.k.a. Jane and the Hula Boys). Or just visit her personal Web site for more info and sound files.

Nina identifies as female although she was born male. If you have any gender-related questions, feel free to ask her, and please don't bother her bandmates -- they aren't her spokespeople. More info to that topic can be found here: Transgender.

Paul Beck

Cimbalom / tambal

A multi-instrumentalist, Paul plays cimbalom on the Hungarian tunes and tambal on the Romanian ones. For the rest he uses whichever of the two instruments happens to be handy.

Paul got his musical start tapping tuned water glasses in Mrs. Ristad's preschool music class. He eventually parlayed that into a music degree from the University of Colorado, where he studied making sounds by hitting things.

He was introduced to the cimbalom in 1971 in a Budapest hotel restaurant but didn't get to hit one for another 25 years. He is now a member of the Cimbalom World Association, at whose biannual meetings he has seen more of the instruments than you can shake a stick at. Or hit with one.

Paul is not really as rude as this picture makes him appear.