Dressed in all it's finery, la Kumpania Zelwer entertains in it's lounge, a beggar's salon, upholstered in worn velvet, walls hung with strange instruments. Between music and theatre, these imaginary gypsies swiftly carry you off into their poetic universe where glass bottles are played upon as if xylophones. Expressionist cinema is brought to mind, as are central European jewish weddings, Nino Rota, 1930s jazz clubs, fairground stalls....References that are dotted like brush-strokes upon an artistic universe unlike any other, where visual and musical aspects are linked very effectively.

To his heart's content, Jean-Marc Zelwer, moves with equal pleasure from the Indian santour to the accordion, the clarinet or the nickelharpa ( A swedish 12 string hurdy-gurdy).

Maryam Chemirani has recently added her enchanting voice to the Kumpania caravan.

The violinist, Dimitri Artemenko, both wild and baroque, seems to have escaped from a Kusturica film. The virtuoso of the Iranian zarb drum, Pierre Rigopoulos, has the look of a fairground wrestler and the elegant Jean-François Ott plays the cello standing up. The trumpettist Michel Feugère, more jazzy, struts across the arpeggio with a force to rival Zampano of Fellini's La Strada and Sylvie Cohen on keyboard, neglects neither toy-piano nor water-drums. Sylvie Jérusalem, a tuba player, seems to have emerged from a doll shop for English nannies of the likes of Mary Poppins. In the department of instruments from nowhere, one will remark the bottlophone, the stroviola, a wash-board, a jerry-can double-bass and last but not least, the crowning piece: human-chimes.

The songs are called En retard pour la messe (Late For Mass) , C'est pas tous les jours Shabbath (Life is not a piece of cake), Le roi des Schnorrers (The King of the Schnorrers), Terra Incognita. As for the title Daïssa , it sums up the absurdity of trying to formulate all of this, since in Romany, the language of the Tzigane gypsies, this word signifies yesterday as much as tommorow and, in modern Hebrew,the word signifies mash, or mixture...

With a desynchronised trumpet, a Tzigane violin, an hallucinated accordion, an ethereal cello, an inspired zarb... La Kumpania Zelwer inexorably carries the public along on a musical, poetic meander.