Taraf de Haidouks, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Red-blooded gypsies who don't need Johnny Depp

The concept of "world music" may be widely decried as a reductive, even culturally imperialist Western marketing ploy, but without it, it is doubtful that Johnny Depp could have helped to turn this band of Romanian gypsy musicians into the international stars they are today. In the late 1980s, a Swiss ethnomusicological recording from their home village of Clejani fell into the hands of a young Belgian promoter, Stéphane Karo, who was so inspired by what he heard that he tracked the players down – no small feat in pre-1989 Romania, where Ceausescu had banned all maps.

At this point, gypsies were effectively forbidden to leave the country, but within two weeks of the revolution, Karo was back. He spent three months in Clejani selecting a multi-generational squad to represent its centuries-old traditions, christened them Taraf de Haidouks (taraf being a village band, haidouk a Roma word for brigand), and let them loose on the European touring circuit. In the past 10 years, they've played something like a thousand gigs worldwide, including a recent five-night sell-out run at the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

Depp first encountered them when they featured in a film he was in, The Man Who Cried, and now flies them out to Hollywood for parties. Yehudi Menuhin was another champion, and the designer Yohji Yamamoto employed them as catwalk stars for his 1999 Paris show.

Celebrity endorsements aside, the true selling-point is simply the band themselves – their frenetically virtuosic, intensely emotive music, and the life-affirming delight they take in performing it. Ranging in age from thirty- to seventysomething, the 13-strong, all-male crew includes fiddlers, accordionists, cimbalom players, and one each on whistle and double bass, with half also doubling as singers. Appearing mostly in configurations of four to six, they fire through breakneck, impossibly intricate dance tunes like men possessed, creating a sound that somehow harnesses both euphoria and anguish.

Breathtaking ensemble improvisation is augmented by even more flabbergasting solo and duo workouts, perhaps the most awesome of all coming from one of the cimbalom players, who seemed to fuse his wild gypsy strains with those of honky-tonk, boogie-woogie and even Latin piano. Interwoven with these instrumental pyrotechnics were a series of passionately articulated songs, heartfelt love paeans, and complex ballads. These were mostly performed, with splendidly operatic swagger, by the older men, whose four-part choruses formed the most red-blooded sound of a marvellously virile night's music.

Taraf de Haidouks will be performing at City Hall, Salisbury tomorrow night (01722 327676)