Borislav Zgurovski

I first met Borislav through the modern format for the oral tradition, Youtube. He was one of the first accordionists from the Balkans to give away accordion secrets (wow!) in English (double wow!). And it was clear from his Youtube videos that he was a good player. After the sample lesson clips, which framed a torso covered mostly by an accordion, the voice would say "Thank you for watching that." It became somewhat of a meme in my household after a bit of attention someone would say in a Bulgarian accent, "thank you for watching that."

In any case, in addition to Borislav's youtube presence, he has a fantastic educational website for Balkan accordion students called BGaccordion.com, and the whole thing is available in English (wow!). The lessons consist of a score with ornaments and fingering, and a video of Boris playing the piece at a slow speed. I had bought a few of the lessons over the past years and unlike many resources claiming to teach Balkan accordion, his materials were effective and accessible.

When I made plans to come to Plovdiv I reached out to Borislav to see if we might bring our digital correspondence into the real world. Borislav quickly responded that we could get together and began his email with "Thank you for trusting me." I knew I had found the right teacher.

Before I left the New Orleans my Bulgarian friend Georgi told me, "just remember, if you bring an accordionist a bottle of liquer the world will open before you." Minutes before I was to meet Borislav for the first time I ran to the local store to pick up a bottle of Jameson. I'm not sure if it was the Jameson or complimentary personalities, or both, but Borislav and I hit it off immediately.

A day in the life of a professional accordionist in Sofia

Bulgarian accordionist Ivan Hanzhiev once wrote his address and phone number on a piece of paper for me while on tour with the band Kabile. I organized a concert for his band at Mayo Street arts in Portland Maine and they all stayed in my house. When he left he handed me the sheet of paper with the assurance that his address would never change.

Fast forward three years and I have freshly arrived in Sofia on May 13th. My gracious host calls Ivan that night at around 9:30. A female voice informs us he is in bed and that we should call tomorrow. We call the next morning shortly before 10am. Ivan picks up the phone, pulls over to the side of the road, and informs my host that I can meet him but I have to be at his place of work in 10 minutes. No problem.

10 minutes later we pull up in front of the National Dance Academy where Ivan works as an accompanist. We recognize each other immediately and give each other a brisk embrace and exchange some mutually incomprehensible banter. Ivan ushers me into the building which is spacious and full of right angles, what once might expect from a communist-era dance school. The halls are overflowing with honed teenagers in tight black dance outfits and dance shoes. Ivan introduces me to to a few adults who are also honed and wearing black, who I presume to be choreographers. We walk into a large, bright room with a wooden floor and tall windows. Ivan lays out 5-6 pages of handwritten music and starts to play. The amoeba of teenagers quickly cleaves into flanks according to gender, and a choreographed routine ensues.

As someone freshly arrived from the US who has been fascinated with Bulgarian folk music for several years, I feel like I hit the jackpot. Ivan is a seasoned and beautiful musician, and the dancers express a grace and awkwardness that teenagers around the world carry themselves with. This continues for a few hours, with different groups and different musicians coming in and out, all accordionists. At one point the choreographer stops the dancers and the musicians to ream out a few guys who are not up to snuff. Screams at them in a tone that says to me "were you born yesterday you fucking morons?" This goes on for a couple minutes and then rehearsal resumes. My first indication that although I like the music and admire the dancing, this might not be the context in which I find the music I'm looking for, i.e. music that serves as a natural expression of a community, not as a symbolic form of nostalgia, propaganda, nationalism, etc.

After several classes Ivan takes me to the break room. There are several other guys in the room, which is narrow and contains a few bulky PCs and a few pictures of Bulgarian accordion heroes Ivan Milev (currently living in Connecticut) and Petko Dachev (1943-2010). A few of them offer me coffee, and I comply. Others peer into monitors as they listen to folk tunes on the PC media players. Verbalized riffs are traded among colleagues and I marvel at the seemingly beautiful simplicity of these guys' careers. They play folk music for dancers at the height of their youth and trade musical phrases and ideas with each other on break. One of Ivan's colleagues adopts me as a listener and tells me a lot about his work and Bulgarian music, despite my successful delivery of my line, "I don't speak Bulgarian very well." One thing I do glean is the name of a dance rhythm we were listening to, Djanguritsa. It is the same rhythmic structure as the Daichovo 9/8 divided into 2+2+2+3 but it is slower and distinctive of the Pirin mountains of southwestern Bulgaria.

The day winds to a close and Ivan tells me he is going to get ready for his next gig at a restaurant in Sofia called Едно Време (Once Upon a Time), close to the Eagle Bridge. Ivan gives me a ride to another part of the city and on the way we listen to an Israeli singer whose sound is decidedly un-Bulgarian in character but employs some of the same modes used across all of the Balkans (including Bulgaria). Ivan tells me several times how much he likes the singer, and it calls to mind a concept I first heard articulated by Ross Daly in his TED talk, that cultures which embrace modal music have an aesthetic bond that is stronger than geography would imply, i.e. Bulgarian music may have more in common with the music of Israel than it does it's close neighbor Slovenia.

Later that evening I find myself crossing the Eagle Bridge and I realize I can't be far from the restaurant where Ivan plays 5 nights a week. Sure enough tune my ears to accordion detection mode and follow the sound across another small bridge to find Ivan and his band playing for a crowded patio of diners. The band consists of Ivan flanked by two female vocalists in high heels and short skirt versions of traditional Bulgarian costumes. One of them plays the zills, or finger cymbals more or less to the beat. There is a guitarist and a tupan player but they are standing several feet behind Ivan and the ladies, perhaps to give a clear line of passage for the waitstaff or for some other reason unknown to me. On set break Ivan sees me and invites me backstage with the musicians to drink beer and Menta, a bright green minty boozy drink that's full of lemon slices. Nobody in the group speaks English so we have a few humorous words and charades about who I am and what I'm doing there. I drink more beer and look for the bathroom. A bartender sees that I'm poking around and offers me directions which clearly don't help me. He then gives me directions in fluent English and I realize that if an emergency arose that evening I would know who to talk to.

The band plays on to a generally ambivalent dining audience, I drink more beer and get more comfortable hanging out with the band. It turns out that a workplace implosion had recently taken place involving a manager running off with several weeks of unpaid salary to the staff. The English-speaking bartender joined us for drinks and it turns out he knew a Bulgarian friend of mine in New Orleans and her dad was his Godfather. Small world.

The bartender is the first of many characters I get to know on the trip. He is skinny with dark shoulder length hair. He's wearing a t-shirt that says, "This is not a beer belly it's a gas tank for a sex machine." He told me he designed and had it made himself. He has traveled widely and had thought about leaving Bulgaria several times, and got close on three different occasions. I asked him what kept him coming back to Bulgaria. "Girlfriends." Like many Bulgarians I met, he felt despondent about the state of life in Bulgaria. He told me that if you try to do anything without political connections, the mafia will eventually either want a piece or show up with baseball bats to shut you down. Now it seems this story is told so widely (and it may well be true) that few people bother to start businesses or initiatives on their own. As the night dragged on into the early hours of the morning, he told me about a joke that's common among Bulgarians. "We are just waiting for it to end," he said. For what to end, Bulgaria?" I asked. "Yes."

Soon after the restaurant got locked up and we all headed our own ways, but his "joke" haunted me for the rest of my time in Bulgaria. How is it that a country with such a beautiful and unique folk tradition and seemingly high quality of life be so depressed, economically and spiritually? I was reminded often of the damage that communism inflicted on Bulgaria, or more specifically the way Bulgaria used communism to damage itself. Any understanding of Bulgarian culture must be put through the lens of what it means to live as a colony, first under the Ottoman Empire, and then under communism. Now people are free from colonizers but not free from problems. As my host Vasko told me, "you ask people about freedom and they answer you about the price of salami."

A Master is Gone

Turkish Romani clarinetist Selim Sesler died on May 10, 2014 at the age of 57. After two years of waiting for a heart transplant, his heart failed in a hospital in Istanbul.

I never got to meet Mr. Sesler, although his music has enriched my life more than I could ever thank him for. He had a touch on the clarinet that was simultaneously powerful and sweet, mournful and driving. The world is a poorer place with his absence.

Here is a small clip from the film Crossing the Bridge, which features Selim Sesler in his home town of Keşan, in Turkish Thrace.

At my weekly gig on Saturday night we were playing the Ukrainian dance tune Trombon Hora, sourced from the fantastic group Konsonans Retro. The solo section consists of a vamp on a single chord similar to what is heard in the Turkish taxim, an improvisational form in which the soloist works through the steps of a musical mode before returning to the melody. I was passed the solo and immediately starting thinking of Selim Sesler, what music would be without him, and what he did while he was here. I thought of the darkness he trimmed with light, the friction in sound he used to generate heat. More than any other experience I've had since I started playing with the band, I felt like I touched on something real while I was playing, something that is more fundamental than technique or style - a conversation with - for lack of a better word - spirit. 

My solo ended, my awareness came back into the room and the song ended with the intoxicated applause and hoots from the room. As we launched into the next song a small dark-haired woman with glasses approached me and tapped me on the arm even though I had already started playing. I stopped playing and leaned in as the band went on. She told me her father, Al Matos, made his living playing Klezmer accordion, and that it would have made him so happy to have been there. 

Music, as perhaps the most ephemeral art form, only exists in the people who make it and those around them. Scores and recordings point to the music but should not be mistaken as the real thing. Selim Sesler's death is a reminder of the fragility of music as an artform and the nobility of its pursuit while we are alive. 

Tone shift

It's been just over a year since my last post on this blog and a lot has happened in that year, the most significant of which is a new job working as accordionist for New Orleans' Panorama Jazz Band, and a full uproot from Maine, which has been my home base for the past several years.

Now living in one of the richest musical hubs of North America, I find myself surrounded by music and musicians, in a culture and economy that make it all possible. As strong as the culture of musicianship is here, there is not much in the way of Romani music with the exception of the band I play in, and it's carnival formation, the Panorama Brass Band.

Nevertheless, a lot of the ideas and issues I thought about in my musical travels in Serbia are resurfacing, and I would be remiss not to flesh some of these ideas out if only because it doesn't fit into the department of Romani or Balkan music. So, for those of you who have followed my posts over the past few years (and I'm kind of surprised how numerous you are) I am going to revive this blog in the coming days and will be writing about life and music as I experience it here in New Orleans, and hopefully catch up on some lapsed posts from the past busy year.

Stay tuned, more from my perspective on music and life coming soon.

Muzika Balkana, the Balkan music blog to end all blogs

It's been a while since my last post and I hope to catch up on the past few months of backlogged posts. The first thing that warrants attention is a recent discovery introduced to me by my friend Connell, perhaps the largest trove of free Balkan music on the Internet. Digitized LPs from across the Balkans, Romania and Greece.

There are ethical issues at play here, as some of these albums are available commercially and some of the artists are still living. Downloading music from a living artist without paying for it is akin to stealing food from his plate, lest we forget that musicians labor for their art.

That said, here it is, the link that may change your life.

Some thoughts about music

While not directly related to the scope of this blog, I have recently begun playing with a 17 year old violinist with a great ear and burgeoning interest in Balkan and Eastern European music. In an effort to help her get some orientation, I wrote a brief brain-dump on this music as I have encountered it in the past few years. This description is by no means authoritative, and far from comprehensive. It's more a whimsical introduction to music I have grown to love. If anyone reading this has something to add or refute, the comment field is at the below. 

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Dear S,

There is a lot out there on the Internet about Balkan music, but I thought I would pass on some info and thoughts that I have gathered over the past several years of learning and playing this music. I hope this at least offers an introduction into some of the similarities and differences between the variety of styles in Eastern Europe. There is a lifetime of musical exploration in this often-forgotten corner of the world, full of challenges and reward to those who jump into it.

Below are some stream-of-consciousness thoughts about different styles and musicians from the area, I hope this opens some doors for your exploration of this music.

My approach to this music, in general, is one of an outsider learning a new language. The music exists apart from my participation in it, and I think it's important to acknowledge, if not recreate, the subtleties and norms that support these traditions. I realize this is contrary to a more contemporary approach to music as 'I play what I feel like playing' but it's the adherence to tradition that makes this music so awesome. It's also much more exciting to me to funnel creativity into the constraints of a musical language than to play something free of context and meaning. That said, I'm all for violating traditions once I learn them, but I think it's super important to learn them first.

Enough of my manifesto, here is a break down of the different styles we play, and a few examples or youtube leads for each:

Klezmer

I first got into Balkan music, like many Americans, through Klezmer music, which is the music of Jews in Eastern Europe (which in itself is not music from the Balkans). While it’s had an increase in popularity since the 70’s especially in the US and Western Europe, Klezmer music was effectively uprooted from Eastern Europe starting in about 1920, from waves of immigration of Eastern European Jewry to Israel and the US. On top of that, what remained of the culture that supported Klezmer music it was fully wiped out in the Holocaust.

In the 70’s, a handful of Americans, mostly of Eastern European Jewish descent, started hanging out with ‘old world’ musicians in New York. The most notable of these old world musicians were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein, two clarinetists who performed in New York and beyond from the 20s-70s. They both were performers in the Ukraine and Moldova, the area which is considered to be the heartland of Klezmer music . When they came to the states their styles quickly evolved to be more swinging, aggressive, and cosmopolitan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHxoEEsGwXE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXySfsSX6pg&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL7BD9C2369CE96ACF

The musicians who studied with them started what is generally accepted as the ‘Klezmer Revival.’ In some ways, this was not so much a revival as an invention of the term ‘Klezmer’ as a genre of music. Up until then, it was considered to be Yiddish music played by and for Jews, at life-cycle events like births, brisses, and weddings. By calling it Klezmer, it became marketed for the first time to non-Jewish audiences in the US and abroad. This was primarily a North-American movement.

Bands to check out from this era are Zev Feldman and Andy Statman, the Klezmatics, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Brave Old World, and Kapelye. There is an album that came out in 1996 called ‘In the Fiddler’s House,’ which features Itzhak Perlmen playing with some of these groups, definitely worth checking out.

There is a newer generation of people playing Yiddish music that I find a lot more exciting than the original ‘revivalists.’ An excellent violin player named Jake Schulman-Ment, who just spent a year in Romania and Moldova on a Fulbright Fellowship, Benjy Fox-Rosen, a bass player and Yiddish singer/poet, Pete Rushevsky, a cimbalom player, and David Krakauer and Michael Winograd, clarinetists. All of these guys are based in NYC or Brooklyn. Two fiddle-led groups in Europe to check out are Di Naye Kapelye, led by Bob Cohen, and the Hungarian group Muzikas with Marta Sebastian.

Another very interesting group is the ‘Other Europeans,’ led by Alan Bern, who was my accordion teacher for 2 years in Germany. They are reconstructing and evolving Yiddish and Romani music that coexisted in Moldova in the early 20th century. Sounds academic and crusty but it’s amazing music.

Romanian

I love Romanian music. In my opinion it is the strangest and most beautiful of all Eastern European music forms, and anything that can be said in music can be said in the format of the small Lautar (Romanian Gypsy) ensemble, which consists of cimbalom (hammered chromatic dulcimer), accordion, violin, double bass, and voice.
    Many people think that Romania is not part of the Balkans, even though it’s music is often clumped in the overarching genre of ‘Balkan.’ There is a lot that sets it apart from the countries that surround it. First, the language is a Romance language, not a Slavic one. There are a lot of linguistic similarities to French and Italian, and the music, in general, is more melodic than the music of its neighboring countries. There is one dance form, the Geampara, that is in 7/8, but other than that rhythms stick to 3/4 and 4/4, unlike neighboring Bulgaria and Serbia where rhythms can be in 5,9,10,11,15,25 etc.

Romanian ornaments art typically understated, legato, and deceivingly complex. There are a lot of great videos on youtube of Lautari musicians, here are a few names to check out:

violin:
Marin Bunea http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ3b9VvO8FA
Taraf De Haiduks (very famous and awesome band from Clejani, Southern Romania)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQn6Qb-9mD8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loZd4dPow4A&feature=related
Ion Dragoi
Ion Petre Stoican
Florea Cioaca
Nicu Bela

accordion:
Faramita Lambru http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDzaCQ_2qlw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8u_2xl-jYY
Marcel Budala
Ionica Minune
Vasile Pandelescu

Cimbalom:
Toni Iordache
Iani Ciuciu

Vocal:
Gabi Lunca
Romica Puceanu
Dona dumitru siminica

Bulgaria

Bulgaria doesn’t have the same down-tempo, heart-wrenching vocal tradition of other countries in the Balkans, but it makes up for it in it’s insane polyrhythmic dance-your-face off music. Bulgarian music combines the microtonal and compound rhythmic elements of neighboring Turkish music and sets it to the fast tempos and harmonic structures of Serbian and Macedonian musics. The result can be disorienting and may at first seem unlistenable, but as soon as you find the downbeat and can figure out the meter, it’s incredible.
    A typical Bulgarian ensemble consists of a gajda (bagpipe), tambura (like a small guitar/mandolin), kaval (open bore flute), tapan (drum), and accordion. Roma bands in Bulgaria may also include saxophone, clarinet, keyboards, violin, darabuka or dumbek.
   
A good place to start with Bulgarian music is with Boris Karlov, an accordionist from the 30’s-50’s who in many ways defined modern Bulgarian music. We play a number of his tunes, including Sedi Donka and Gankino Horo. I’ll send you some other tracks to check out of his.

Ibro Lolov and Petar Ralchev are also great. There is also a cool video of Petar Ralchev explaining the difference between Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian ornaments here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBWvJfy2t1M

If you want to hear some modern Bulgarian Roma wedding music, which is way beyond our means at this point, check out Ivo Paposov and Yuri Yunakov.

Serbia/Bosnia/Croatia - Former Yugoslavia

These countries basically all speak the same language, but have a huge variety of musical styles. Music from Croatia and Northern Serbia (Vojvodina) consists mostly of Tamburica (plucked guitar) and violin bands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgr6DRYfULA&feature=related

Southern Serbia is home to Brass bands:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbN9gmh7WtY&feature=related

Western Serbia focuses on violin and accordion. Most of the Serbian music we play comes from western Serbia, where I was this summer. This is a video of my teacher Ljuba and his brother, Misha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKi8FnA9YuU

Here is a short video I took of another violinist teacher a kolo to a violinist from Long Island:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMdtXnRp160&list=UUaORGwhQA1vZf5CiPcf0Scw&index=23&feature=plcp

another video of him and the grandmother who made me coffee every day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZY4rBXVR3c

Romani Music

Roma, aka Gypsies are the most prolific, accomplished, and creative group of musicians in Eastern Europe, but there is no singular ‘Gypsy’ music that captures the diversity of musics that Roma play. There are, however, common characteristics in Romani musics across Europe that you can see in Flamenco, Manouche (Django-style jazz), Lautari, and the Serbian Roma clips above. ‘Gypsy music’ is a problematic term on a lot of levels, and we should talk about it more if you’re interested.

ok, I think that’s my brain dump for this Tuesday morning. Let me know what strikes you on your Youtube trawling, I’ll put together a fuller repertoire list with mp3s to send to you soon.

Haiku

Below are two haikus I wrote in Romanes. These were written as rewards for people who helped fund my trip to Serbia. I still have one accordion-gram, 2 house concerts and 11 commissioned songs to write. As a note to self regarding my work habits, I am much better at completing tasks in a timely manner before I get paid.

Purane prne
achen te adzhukaren
jekh phabray perel

Old legs

sit and wait

one apple falls 

Tumen bashalen

putarav mure jakha
amen dzivdinas

You play

I open my eyes

we are alive 

Serbia via Queens

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting accordionist Peter Stan at his home in Queens, NY to catch up and share some of the music I had learned in Serbia this summer. Peter is a extremely accomplished musician in Serbian, Romanian and Romani styles. A series of lessons I had with him last year were formative in my understanding of the importance of ornaments and feel in this music.

Last spring, Peter introduced me to the music of the two current superstars of Serbian Romani accordion, Aca Cergar and Dejan Kostic. There are dozens of videos on youtube of these two duking it out under wedding tents, ripping unbelievable lines in rapid-fire to an exhausted bride and groom. I was fortunate to see both of these accordionists play together at a wedding in Grabovica. Unfortunately I left the wedding around 1am, long before the action really got hot, but even in the early hours of the celebration I knew I was in the presence of overlords.

Peter plays with Slavic Soul Party, Brooklyn's premier Balkan-plus brass band, as well as several other musicians in New York's Balkan and Eastern European music scene. Despite the recent frenzy for Balkan brass bands in New York and beyond, Peter described a general decline in interest in the music he plays. Where weddings and kafana sessions were once the norm, now only a few bars feature live music, and if they do it is usually comes in the electrified form of Manela or Turbo-folk.

In any case, Peter is an accordion virtuoso with a deep knowledge of several Balkan styles, and is an extremely innovative player. He knew all of the music I learned in Valjevo and for a while I felt like I had been transported back to Serbia by way of the L train.

Here Peter is showing me a Romanian tune that can be combined with another one he taught me last year. You can hear me playing a super slow version of it here.

Whatever New York's level of interest in Balkan music may be, shortly after my visit Peter's music was featured on Google's front page as the soundtrack to a giant pumpkin carving video. In an era in which one's degree of recognition is measured by view-counts, I think this puts Peter and his music pretty high up there, and for good reason.

Our School / Scoala Noastra

A few weeks ago I was invited to play accordion at the Camden International Film Festival here in Maine. The festival focuses exclusively on documentary, and this year there were several amazing films. As a musical prelude, I played my normal repertoire for all of the films, weather they were about returning Iraq war veterans, Fly fishing, or skate punks. On Friday afternoon I was happy to play before a film that was directly relevant to the music I was playing - Our School.

Our School, produced and directed by Mona Nicoară, follows three Roma children through the process of integrating Roma and non-Roma schools in the Transylvanian town of Targu Lapus, Romania. Thirty towns in Romania were given funds to integrate schools, and the production team chose Targu Lapus as the most likely to succeed. Integration was a resounding failure, and the Roma children who stayed in school were transferred into schools for the mentally disabled at the end of the 'integration' period. While similar stories have been repeated over and over across Eastern Europe, but perhaps most severely in Romania, the film poignantly shows how school administrators, teachers, and officials talk about racist policies that we most often hear about in headlines.

The filmmaker, Mona Nicoara, is a Romanian human rights activist who made the film, admittedly, from an advocate's perspective and with the optimistic assumption that the integration program was going to succeed. I spoke with her after the film screening about her experiences working in and outside of Romania.

One major difference of opinion between Mona and some of the Roma I met in Serbia is that Mona believes that the benefits of Roma integration outweighs its pitfalls. While acknowledging the difference between integration and assimilation, her position is that the fact that Roma have lived side by side with Gadje (non-Roma) for millenia is proof that their identity will remain intact regardless of changing circumstances. Even loss of language, what I would consider a strong indicator of the death of cultural identity, is something that she believes Roma will be able to overcome. In Mona's view, any theory, accepted truth, or prediction by anthropologists and social theorists, Roma buck.

One point of view she shared with my friends in Serbia - the European Commission's 'Decade of Roma Inclusion' is a conduit for recycling funds that leave Roma, quite literally, in the dust. Funds (which are substantial) for this initiative are explicitly structural. That is, they are distributed exclusively to NGOs who will reinforce government programs, in turn strengthening national objectives to assimilate or relocate Roma. A strange time we live in, when the name betrays the nature, a la Clear skies Initiative and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Citizen beware.

Our School closes with one of Gogol Bordello's most apt refrains, 'You love our music but you hate our guts.' The film has garnered much-deserved international acclaim, and perhaps more importantly, has received a lot of attention in Romania. Will this affect any positive change for Roma? Who knows. In speaking with Mona, she told me how the school system and the non-Roma Romanian families had no problem with the film crew focusing on the Roma kids. Perhaps in part, because the presence of the film crew underscored how they were exotic and out of place in a formal school setting. In any case, a candid portrayal of the situation did not threaten Romanian families or school administrators who blatantly and systematically filtered Romani children out of the educational system, and thereby society at large.

Goodbye Serbia, Hello world

It's been a slow time for updates but a busy time in life since I returned to the US from Serbia in late August. I have a number of posts that I have been meaning to catch up on, and hope to get the ball rolling again in the coming weeks.

Although I started this blog as a way to share my experiences studying Romani music in Serbia, I have been pleasantly surprised how much I have been able to continue my independent, low-budget, non-academic, highly anecdotal and personally thrilling research since I returned stateside. Highlights include hanging out with some amazing people over the past month - two Roma rights activists, a Romani dancer from Kosovo, a filmmaker from Romania, and an amazing Romanian/Serbian Rom accordionist living in Queens, NY.

So, while gears have shifted from Eastern Europe to the East Coast of the US, I'm planning to continue to write about my encounters with Romani music and issues as they warrant interest. In part to ease my pangs of Serbian nostalgia, but also as a way of widening scope beyond my own experiences from this summer in Valjevo, I'm hoping to use this blog as a way of gathering, filtering, and relaying topics that I, and hopefully you, will find interesting.

Food, Hrana, Xabe

Next to music, food has been the most time consuming and interesting aspect of my time in Serbia. When you can't participate in conversation at the kitchen table, understand the news, or read the newspaper, food takes on a heightened importance as one of the best ways to make sense of where you are. Call it coincidence or etymological fate, but the commands 'eat, drink!' in Romanes is
'ha, pi!'  Happily, indeed.

In the month I've been in Valjevo, I have only eaten out twice. The rest of my meals have been prepared by my gracious hosts, so I'm pretty sure that my food-based judgments have some basis in reality. Going through my catalog of pictures over the past month I also realized that I did not take any photos of the foods that are the real staples here. I think I have eaten more tomatoes in the past 30 days than I have in my entire life up to this point. Fresh hot peppers garnish the table at EVERY meal. The ceramic salt tray even has a hole in which the pepper rests when it is not being ripped into. Canola or sunflower oil is a given.

So without further ado, some of my ingestive highs and lows over the past month.






Burek, I hate to love you. Made with a variety of fillings - meat, cheese, spinach, mushrooms, Burek hides its guts in an inflated swirl of filo dough. Often topped with sesame seeds and always heavy with oil saturation, most of the burek I have had here is golden brown on top and black on the bottom. 






Watermelon, aka Lubenica, is plentiful and cheap. Plentiful as in pick-up beds overflowing with them. Cheap as in 18 dinars per kilo - about 11 US cents per pound.





This is bread porridge, one of my arch-rivals of Serbian cuisine. It tastes, not surprisingly, like buttered bread. Unfortunately it has the texture of buttered bread that has already been fully chewed. When served piping hot it is glutenous and sticky. When it cools it could be used as grout. In the picture above it is combined with Kajmak, a very salty cheese-like substance of Turkish origin.

I was told several times that this stuff is good for stomach problems, such as hangovers or surgery. If you can get it past your mouth, maybe it's true.





My absolute favorite in Serbia, apple burek, made with apples from our front yard. Note the salt dish with the pepper-holding hole (no pepper pictured here). On the other side of the dish were black pepper would reside in the US, in Serbia there is more salt. Yin and Yin.









Fresh fruit from the front yard. Pears, apples, grapes, walnuts, raspberries, and plums, the mother of Serbian booze. Both Slivovitz and Rakiya are made distilled from plum wine, and home stills are common. The best one I had was sweet and warming, from an old guy Dusan knows. The worst one I had reminded me of the smell of model airplane glue.

For reasons I cannot understand, at all, 90 percent of the fruit here is left to rot on the ground. From what I can tell, canning, preserves, juicing, or fruit salad, is unheard of. Every day the grandmother here rounds up the apples that fell from the tree, puts them in a plastic bag, and places it in the trash.



















Oink oink, we'll be pigs. I'm happy I'm not a vegetarian trying to find food in Serbia. Perhaps even more difficult than that is trying to eat Kosher, a concept which seems to be utterly untranslatable here for another American in the house.




A general store in a nearby Romani village. First time I've ever seen a balance in action.






Shopska Salad, tomatoes, cukes and salty cheese.




Two other unique dishes I did not get pictures of are Burania, a soup made from long, bisected bean pods, and Skanja (?) a hair-like byproduct of lard rendering. Tastes as delicious as it sounds.

And, I also must mention the joy of fresh sugary donuts with turkish coffee. No two are the same shape, all are delicious.

Play buddy

Rasha is a violinist from Grabovica I have met with a few times over the past week. I feel like I'm getting the better end of the deal playing with him, but it's affirming to have someone of his experience to want to take the time to get together to play music together. He said that if I stuck around I could start playing weddings. In my suave Serbian I responded, "hochu!"

 - I want!

I've learned about a dozen new songs and dance tunes over the past few weeks, so our session last night went on for quite a bit longer than the last one. Here is a Kolo that I learned the first two parts of last night. I love how rhythmic and smooth his playing is.

 

Why do we care about singers?

After slogging my way through a few hundred pages of peasant uprisings and beheadings in my brick of a book The Balkans, I very happily came across an (English!) copy of The Ground Beneath Her Feet in a pile of Serbian art history books. Salman Rushdie is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I have been wanting to read this book for a long time. Coming up on my last few days in Serbia, this passage struck a bell in my head that has not stopped ringing.

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.

Tamburica takeover

One of the highlights of last week was when a tamburica band from Vojvodina, northern Serbia showed up for an evening of music making. As was the case with the brass band I wrote about in an earlier post, these got out of the van, tuned, and started playing. They stopped playing about five hours later, with no break or signs of slowing down.








To my amazement, this band has no name. They all come from the same town, and as it was to explained to me, they are a subgroup of a few dozen musicians there who all share the same repertoire. This particular formation is one variation that might include all, some, or none of them tomorrow or the next day.

This is a pretty radical concept when compared to the culture of music making in the US that pushes brand identity before content. These guys are veteran musicians who fucking rock, and they don't have a name for their band.

They played their guts out. The videos don't do justice to the music or the vibe but they are a nice token from one my favorite musical evenings ever.

Guča trumpet festival

After three weeks of debating whether or not I would go to the Guca festival, the stars aligned and I got to see for myself the madness in all of its beer-soaked glory. For those of you who do not  know, the Guca trumpet festival is the largest music festival in Serbia, and one of the largest in Europe. During one week, one million people descend on what is otherwise a sleepy village in central Serbia to get drunk and be blown at by horns.

While this sounds like a grand time in principle, Guca has been criticized in recent years for a turn towards corporate showcasing and away from music. Which is not to say that music is not abundant. 10-piece brass bands play at full volume a few feet away from each other, separated only by a gaggle of hippie-dancing festival goers sporting newly purchased pink afros and green army caps. Brass bands are fundamentally the work of Roma in Southern Serbia, and nearly all of them are at the festival - if they are not competing they are working for tips under restaurant tents or in the streets.





One of the students at the Amala school was offered a set on the stage through the Australian embassy, so I got to tag along and hang out back stage at the cultural house.











One of the highlights of the festival was seeing some of the dances up close. Unlike in some of its neighboring countries, Serbian folk dancing is more performative than social. After spending the past few weeks working on the feel and ornaments of this music on the accordion, it was great to see similar gestures happening in feet. I came really close to buying a pair of these leather elfy dancing shoes, I'm regretting already.

Not much else to say about Guca, except that I could not help but notice a lack of acknowledgement of any Romani contribution to the festival, despite the fact that Guca exists only because it can draw from a longstanding tradition of Romani brass music in the area. The brass bands playing at Guca are function bands, gigging throughout the year at weddings and celebrations. Nevertheless, Guca is presented as being all about trumpet, not so much the people who play them. Trumpets are pretty boring if you don't have bad-ass musicians behind them.

A perk of traveling with the band is that I got a free meal ticket. This is the vegetarian option. Yes, that is beef floating in oil.

A musical dynasty

The other day I met Ljuba's nephew, Stefan. He is eight years old, speaks perfect German, and plays violin more expressively than many of the musicians I heard when I worked for the Portland Symphony. When I asked him how he learned how to play violin he told me that he starts playing when he wakes up and stops playing around midnight.

It also can't hurt being the son of the best Romani violinist in Serbia, Ljuba's "real" brother Misha. A short side note - real brothers are precisely that - someone who shares parents with you. In the leafy family trees of Grabovica, extended family members are often assigned the title of brother, sister, or cousin. The prefix "real" says, 'yes, he's my brother, but he's REALLY my brother.'

And Ljuba's real brother really is the best violinist in Serbia. There is an ongoing debate here with the power of interrupting meals: who is the best accordionist - Aca Cergar or Dejan Kostic. Not so in the violin world, as Misha is unrivaled as king of the fiddle. I was lucky enough to catch Misha and Ljuba playing a few tunes together in Baba's back yard.

The violin that Misha is playing here hangs on the wall of the dining room. Every visitor to the house has commented on how it's a good instrument. Everyone who has played it in my company has made it sound good. Yet the bridge looks like it's on the verge of buckling and there are several visible cracks that stretch across the belly. Another student here, a classical violinist from New York, could not believe the condition of the violin. When Branko, a local musician, played her 300 year-old pedigreed violin, he didn't like it.

Ljuba, Misha, and Stefan come from a long line of highly respected musicians. Their grandfather's real brother was Dushko Petrovic, one of the most well-known singers and accordionists in Yugoslavia. When I asked Ljuba how he learned how to play accordion, he said simply, "Ja sam harmonika" - I am the accordion.

Inclusion to what?

Grabovica, a Romani village located a few miles North of Valjevo, is an interesting place. It is located on a gentle ridge surrounded by beautiful views of rolling farmland. The air is cooler than it is in Valjevo, and oddly pleasant wafts of cow shit and burning coal circulate around the houses.


The architecture varies as much as the inhabitants of this village.  Smaller, older homes are dwarfed by sprawling kitsch mini-villas, bedazzled with over-sized lion gargoyles and brass fences. In the driveway a glimmering BMW or Mercedes is invariably parked, the license plate marked "A" for Austria and "W" for Vienna. While a house like this may go unnoticed in a suburb of Monaco, in Grabovica a house like this can neighbor a one-bedroom home with a tin roof. Just beyond the brass fence you might see a Yugo-era tractor loaded with salvaged wood.

Like many towns transformed by economic migration, Grabovica is a place where many people are from and few people live. As I walk by houses where kids are dancing to rippling accordion lines and men are asleep on patio furniture, it's hard to imagine what this village will look like in three months, when 90% of its inhabitants will return to Austria to work for the fall, winter, and spring.

While Roma are known as travelers by non-Roma around the world, there is neither a word nor concept for “traveler” in Romanes. For Roma, traveling is a tool for survival, not a lifestyle. The word traveler implies a homeland, something all Roma lack. Even Roma whose families have lived in Grabovica for generations have never, and maybe will never, receive the benefits that are provided to the majority population, scant as they may be.

Through several conversations I've had with Dusan, the founder of the Amala School, I have begun to realize how complex and convoluted this issue is. For centuries, the identifying aspects of Romani culture (language, music, and customs) have been maintained because of their separation from Gadje (non-Roma). During those times discrimination was obvious, and often brutal. In the Balkans, this surface-level vitriol is rarely shown anymore, but it has far from disappeared. According to Dusan, anti-Roma sentiments are often disguised in the very organizations that claim to come to their aid.

We are currently in the middle of the European Commission “Decade of Roma Inclusion.” Millions of euros have been dedicated to meet the council's objectives. But the very title of the initiative demands the question, inclusion into what? If it is inclusion into a society that is yearning to assimilate and dismantle a source of strength and identity, many Roma will opt out. However, the odds against Roma in this game are stacked. In one corner you have an organized, heavily funded institution with international support. In the other you have a group of people who basically want to be left alone, but out of necessity need to participate at some level in the political and economic systems in which they live. Abject poverty and lack of services (water, electricity, sanitation, schools) for many Roma communities ratchet the pressure to assimilate, or be “included” even more. But at what cost? I think of Liljana Petrovic, one of the greatest Romani vocalists of the last 50 years, who spent the last years of her life as a house cleaner in Germany. Inclusion provides no default benefits, especially into a system that is consistently a source of suspicion and contempt.

So what is in store for the future of European Roma? According to Dusan, change needs to come from within the community, spearheaded by Romani intellectuals. Education and equal opportunity for Roma are essential, and the frame of the discussion between Roma and non-Roma needs to encompass more than the concept of “problem.” It's a long road ahead.



 

Marjan Crstic Brass Band

This week I had the pleasure of hanging out with the Marjan Crstic band, a 9-piece brass band from Surdulica, Serbia. Each year Surdulica hosts a festival to determine who qualifies to play at the Guca trumpet festival (more on that soon). Of all the Romani musical idioms, the brass band has become the most widespread beyond the Balkans, and for good reason. They are loud, driving, and capable of inducing frenzy.

The Marjan Crstic band play as well as (and some times with) musicians from some of the better-known bands such as Kocani Orchestra and the Markovic brothers, but their circuit lies mostly within the functions of European Roma, which is often far more lucrative than playing for festivals and Gadje (non-Roma). One of the band members showed me a youtube clip of them playing at what looked like a private party at a men's social club in Belgium. The singer they played with made 10,000 euros that night. Not bad.

While working musicians play internationally, the musical traditions of Serbian Roma can be divided broadly into three categories, determined by region. Tamburica (similar to guitar) bands are from the north, violin-based groups are from the west, and brass bands are from the south. If Serbia were to have a national instrument it may well be the accordion.

When the band first showed up last week they got out of their yellow and black van (still faintly lettered for the concrete business that previously drove it) and started playing within minutes. You can' t tell from this clip, but volume was crushing.

Throughout the week the band played a number of gigs in the area, including two weddings I was able to attend. More than a typical wedding band, their role is to announce the arrival of the bride to the site of the wedding celebration. In the case of this clip, they were announcing he arrival some of the family of the bride, who are also our gracious hosts at the Amala School.

In addition to being stellar musicians, the members of the band are friendly and quick to laugh. Although my minimal Serbian and Romanes managed to work out a few vital facts and a misunderstanding about me wanting one of the guys to find me a bride, we found more common ground in a cross-cultural affinity for beer and sharing party tricks.

To market

As in many towns in Europe, the market is by far the most interesting place in Valjevo. When approaching by foot, one sees a gradual transition between random artifacts discarded on the street and those for sale on the outskirts of the marketplace. Shoes, bras, haggard stuffed animals, patriotic boutoniers, old records and VHS porn lie in rows to asking to be rooted through. There are no prices posted, and at least for our group of five, whenever the price was asked, the item was offered as a gift and money was refused. Therein shows the real reason people come to the market, buyers and sellers alike - to hang out, share news, and in our case, break dance.

This scene at the market was the first of it's kind in Serbia, but it has repeated over and over again since I've been here. What seems to be a serene and generally disinterested public vibe is transformed by a groundswell of energy. Within seconds a crowd materializes- performers, audience, and hecklers in full bloom. When the subject of the drama dissolves, so do the crowd, jeering, and focused attention. I wish I had more of the breakdance video but I was caught up in the 30-second build-up to what little I captured.







This is the shop in which Branca, our gracious hostess, sells dresses and the occaisional zip-off men's trouser, which she tried to convince me looked great, regardless of the size 38 tag. She is an amazing woman- cooking, cleaning, laundering, and caring for 8 people, always gracious and ready to laugh. Most of the morning she sports the end of a cucumber on her forehead, her individual cooling system and self-described "Gypsy magnet," which she was happy to see worked on me as well.





Some lonely abandoned stuffed animals. I was waiting for them to start animating themselves a la Jan Svenkmayer.





Who needs a truck?

No longer at the market, but in downtown Valjevo. Dusan buying popcorn, a popular and apt treat for watching the other people watching you on the promenade. Maybe it was the element of surprise, but this was freaking good popcorn.

Harmonika Ljuba - Accordion Love

 

This is my accordion teacher, Ljuba. I don't have too many words to describe what an amazing musician he is, so I'm not going to bother at this point. 

Here is Ljuba late one night. I'm pretty sure this solo was a dedicated attempt to woo a student here, it worked a spell on us all.

Here is Ljuba and Dragan, the younger brother of the household. Dragan is the bandleader of KAL, one of the few Serbian Romani Bands that have enjoyed a level of international success. They fall in the camp of Balkan Beat Box and Gogol Bordello - playing traditional music in the context of contemporary music fashion and demand, complete with samples and skanked guitar.

How family members living far away stay in touch, Valjevo-style.