Zegar zivi
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Text of feature on Žegar Živi in fRoots magazine, May 2008
This is the text of a piece written by ...Text of feature on Žegar Živi in fRoots magazine, May 2008
This is the text of a piece written by Andrew Cronshaw that appeared in fRoots magazine, May 2008. (For the full piece including photos you'll have to look at the print mag!)
"And so we meet here, and we have finally done something, to show something to the world, for our people, for this rocky Bukovica, to preserve the old culture. That is my aim. I never wanted to make money or a career out of it; just to keep up the old traditions, to hand them over to the younger generation, thought it seems we don't stand much chance of that. Our good children are leaving and when they settle some place else they take up the new ways, forget the names of their grandfathers and where they are buried, forget the names of their grandmothers, and how they worked. They simply surrender to the new place and forget everything they learned here. What I have done is not much, but I believe that it will be appreciated some day in the future, when I go to the other world; somebody will remember me and the fight I have been fighting for twenty five years now."
Vojo Radmilovic is a Serb from the village of Žegar, which is in Dalmatia, the narrow strip that stretches south-eastward between Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Adriatic in the south of the C-shaped state of Croatia. Barely forty kilometres from the holiday hotels of the coast, Žegar and its surrounding area of Bukovica is another world, up in the Dinaric hill-country, a landscape of sharp concrete-grey karst outcrops, wide green valleys, deep gorges and clear blue-green rivers. Except for the sounds of water, piping frogs and the calls of swallows and bee-eaters, it's a quiet place; in the 1990s this region, known as the Kninska Krajina, was the scene of appalling violence and the widespread destruction and looting of homes, and the majority of the population fled. Those few who have returned, few of them young, have an uphill struggle, rebuilding their houses or, like Vojo and his family, finding theirs too devastated to be rebuilt and so finding another they can make habitable, moving on if its original owners return.
The long fight Vojo speaks of isn't the physical one at the behest of governments or self-appointed warlords, it's a struggle to keep a place in the present day for the rich rural culture of his region, particularly its extraordinary vocal music. The war scattered the population and halted the living tradition, but it didn't kill it – it lives on in Vojo, his wife Milja, his godfather Dragomir "Lujo" Vukanac, his old friend Obre Milic and some of the others who have returned. Alongside finding and rebuilding a place to live, and subsisting by means of their flock of goats, Vojo and Milja sang with their children and friends including Lujo and Obre. As well as songs in the na bas ('over the bass') harmonising style, the region is the last outpost of a truly remarkable and distinctive older form of singing, known there as groktalica or sometimes orzalica, whose relatives in other parts of Dalmatia, in Lika and the Bosnian Krajina to the north, and in western Serbia, have died out. Using loud, edgy voices, a solo singer first sings the lyrics, a second singer repeats and sometimes adds to them, then the rest of the singers hold a powerful unison drone while a third lays over it groktenje, a wild, oscillating, almost yodelling line that beats against the drone with a thrilling, percussive effect. ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
In Serbian culture Orthodox monasteries are landmarks and gathering places, and each summer many exiles return to meet at Krka monastery to the south-east of Bukovica. There in 2005 the Žegar group met Svetlana Spajic. To my ears she's Serbia's most striking singer of traditional songs, born in Loznica in western Serbia and now living in Belgrade, whom seekers after Balkan music might have heard on the three excellent Srbija Sounds Global compilations on the B92 label, or guesting with traditional band Belo Platno. She'd been fascinated by Dalmatian singing since seeing in Belgrade, in the early 1990s, Dalmatian traditional singer Jandrija Baljak with his then group Jandrino Jato ('Jandrija's Flock'). In 2005 she went to the Krka gathering, and there encountered Vojo and Milja, who were singing there with two of their three children. She sang, with Dinarke, a group of young women from Dalmatia and Lika who'd come together in Belgrade, Žegar polje goji janje moje ('Žegar field feeds my lamb'). The Radmilovics heard it, and the result was several hours of singing and conversation, in the course of which she asked Vojo if he knew what had happened to Jandrija, who with his 'flock' had been a very popular singer in the region before the war; it had been said in Belgrade that he'd died. Not so, Vojo told her; Jandrija had returned from wartime exile in Bosnia and was living with his wife back at their old home in the village of Bratiškovci, forty kilometres or so south-east of Žegar.
By the end of the afternoon Vojo and Milja had asked Svetlana to join the group, and she agreed immediately despite the fact that Belgrade is a twelve-hour bus ride from Bukovica. She began to make the trip to stay with the Radmilovics in Žegar whenever she could, and she suggested that they visit Jandrija and, if he seemed amenable, ask him to join the group. "Before that first meeting Jandrija didn't know about the Radmilovic family, nor about me. So he began as our teacher; he didn't want to join us at first because of, as he said, our 'poor quality'. But in time I persuaded him and he started singing with us." They named the group Žegar Živi – "Žegar Lives".
In Britain I'd been listening online to the traditional music programme presented on Radio Belgrade 2 by my friend Milica Simic, and there was a particularly fine singer I kept hearing. Milica told me it was Svetlana Spajic; checking the name I realised I already had recordings of her. I wanted to learn more about the rather elusive Serbian village music, to be heard on recent recordings in the archives but hard to track down live these days. Perhaps, while finding out more about it, I could also create a 'foreigner effect', draw some attention to it in Serbia and abroad, by doing some kind of project.
Svetlana seemed a promising person to seek out – a strong singer who, at her own motivation rather than on an ethnomusicological grant, spends time in the villages learning from the older people there. She reminded me of Mercedes Peón, who for years before she made her first album had been doing something similar in Galicia.
Milica contacted her and interviewed her for a programme, and it was clear she was the one. I didn't know if she spoke English; conveniently it turned out she has a degree in English literature! I emailed her explaining my thoughts for a collaboration with her and some of the musicians I work with, particularly Armenian duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan and Australia-resident Brit multi-instrumentalist Ian Blake. She was very receptive to the idea, and so I went to Belgrade and took her and Milica out to dinner.
She'd just returned from a visit to Žegar, and was buzzing about "the last of the Mohicans" as she called them, and her determination to record them for a CD, but she couldn't figure out how to do it or finance it. Without a second thought I found myself saying "That's easy – we'll do it! I'll bring sound engineer Jamie Orchard-Lisle and his laptop and some mics, and we'll come to the village. When d'you want to do it?" At this point I'd just met Svetlana and hadn't even heard her sing live, and I'd heard nothing from these Žegar people, but I trusted her.
So it was that three months later, in May last year, we were driving in the dark from Zadar airport into the hills, Svetlana explaining to an enthusiastic but slightly apprehensive Jamie that we'd be staying in a burnt-out apartment block. Vojo and Milja, their own house too wrecked to be restorable, have moved into a flat at the end of a long balcony on the top floor of the three-storey block, which used to accommodate teachers who once worked at the primary school across the road that serves the whole of the Žegar area. Before the war the school had over nine hundred pupils; currently there are just three. The rest of the flats are just shattered, window-gaping shells with swallows flying through them, but they've turned this one into a pleasant home with proper bathroom, electricity and running water. The balcony, its ceiling still smoke-stained, has a wide view across the green, birdsong-filled valley to the church, with its pair of bell-ropes hanging outside that Vojo tugs to get the bells ringing when, occasionally, there's a service.
They keep their four hundred goats in a still-gutted part of the school building across the road, and at 5 am each morning they get up to give them pure water from a spring nearby, take them up onto the scrubby, boulder-strewn hills to graze, protecting them from the wolves with the assistance of four dogs.
Svetlana had explained that it might take some time to get all five of the singers together and ready to start. And indeed it was so; Milja lay in a darkened room ill for two or three days, and Lujo was having voice trouble. So we settled into a rather idyllic life, eating good fresh food and drinking home-made wine and rakija, doing a little apprentice goat-herding, exploring the area on foot and in the car with Svetlana, and, while we waited for the group to gather, recording her singing solos sitting at the red and white oilcloth-covered kitchen table.
In the bright sunshine outside his family house in a nearby hamlet we recorded Obre playing the diple, a double-bored reed-pipe like a double bagpipe chanter without a bag, which is mouth-blown using circular breathing. Before playing he donned his traditional red cylindrical hat with its long black tassel. On the way back he showed us his own house, near to the apartment block, a sad gaping-windowed ruin with the remnants of his crockery ground into the kitchen floor. "This was all new", he said, moist-eyed.
On the third day of that week of perfect warm spring weather we at last got all this group of extraordinary, resilient, hospitable people gathered around the kitchen table, singing powerfully and wonderfully. Outdoors we recorded Vojo ringing the church-bells across the valley, and Milja and Svetlana calling as they herded the milling, bleating flock of rather beautiful and surprisingly non-smelly goats.
On the last full day, after several productive days of recording and eating, the group all dressed in traditional clothes for a photo-session. These, varying widely and creatively from person to person, were still normal garb in the mid twentieth century, and are inextricably bound up with the rural culture, music and skilful folk craft and not (yet at least) an airport-doll, colourful-folkloric uniform. By the early 1990s Vojo had gathered a collection of a dozen or so different outfits, but like his house, and the café he used to own in the village, they were destroyed in the war.
To show that things are improving, and that there is a good school if people return with their children (the current two girls and a boy, all very polite and well turned out, are getting an excellent education with a 3:1 pupil-teacher ratio), they wanted a group photo taken in the big modern marble-floored school hall, which has been well restored, together with a couple of the classrooms, as 'a gift from the Japanese people' as the rising sun stickers on the chairs declare.
As they lined up for the photo they spontaneously burst into song, revealing a reverb in the hall that, while probably an acoustic nightmare for a school assembly, is so cathedrally glorious for singing that, after a good last-day celebration dinner of which the centrepiece was a freshly-killed spit-roasted lamb, we recorded a couple of resounding na bas songs in there. One was Žegar polje, the song that had brought Vojo, Milja and Svetlana together at Krka. Obre celebrated the splendour of the hall's acoustics with an improvisation on diple, the little instrument reverberating like a hundred pipers.
As Serbia and the other Balkan countries rise economically from the disasters of war, it's unlikely that village music will be seen as much of an asset – unless, just perhaps, the surprise that foreigners are taking an interest in this music and celebrating it with such things as, well, for example, a CD whose design and substantial packaging displays the record company's faith in the music, might help give it a toe-hold in the esteem stakes at home. There's a small but growing number of young mostly urban musicians in the area of ex-Yugoslavia beginning to look to their roots music for inspiration and identity; communication networks between them are beginning to form by personal contact and through MySpace, and they're starting to release their own CDs independently or on existing labels.
But, while in Serbia there are substantial numbers of CDs of brass bands, dated though sometimes rather fine "radio singers", guslars (gusle-playing bards) and so-called "modern", band-accompanied frula playing, as well as swathes of the phenomenon that began as "newly-composed folk music", became the middle-eastern sounding, short-skirt kitsch that Rambo Amadeus jokingly named "turbo-folk" and is now fading into something closer to tacky showbiz TV-pop, there are vanishingly few commercially released recordings in Serbia, Croatia or Bosnia of present-day, living-tradition village music. The CD Žegar Živi came out in February. (Ž, by the way, is pronounced like the 'S' in 'pleasure')
At this stage, though they might make occasional short trips within the nearby regions, there are no plans for the Žegar Živi group to tour. Apart from anything else, there are those four hundred goats to look after, and there are Jandrija's and Lujo's wives to consider. But in August 2007 they and Svetlana hosted, for the first and very exploratory time, a small workshop week in Žegar, open to all be they Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or from further afield, to draw mainly local attention to the traditional music and crafts they have among them, and it seems to be have made an encouraging positive impression in the region.
And, Svetlana tells me, "after the recording of the album in May, Nedjeljka, Joka and Dara, three well-known women singers who had also come back to Žegar, and also some other women singers, have ended their mournful silence and started singing again, waiting for more younger singers, new heirs of tradition, to come and share".
Andrew Cronshaw
Transcription of ZZ CD review by Lucy Duran, Joe Boyd & Max Reinhardt
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Transcription of ZZ CD review by Lucy Duran, Joe Boyd & Max Reinhardt on BBC R3 "World Routes"
The...Transcription of ZZ CD review by Lucy Duran, Joe Boyd & Max Reinhardt on BBC R3 "World Routes"
The Žegar Živi CD was reviewed on BBC Radio 3's "World Routes" programme, presented by Lucy Duran, on Saturday May 24th. It's available for streaming on demand at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldroutes/pip/05677/ but only until 3pm on Saturday May 31st. So below is a transcript.
(This wasn't scripted, it was a spontaneous discussion, and is transcribed unedited with perceptions, factual information and opinions as they occurred to the speaker, and hasn't been tidied up or corrected; please don't take anything said here as 'ex cathedra' !)
Lucy Duran (host)(ethnomusicologist, record producer):
The music that we've heard so far has been by great professional Gypsy musicians. But I think it's much more difficult to find good recordings of ordinary songs that people sing in villages; and in fact the sleeve notes of Song of the Crooked Dance highlight the fact that rural village music was very often under-represented in the Bulgarian record industry. Obviously songs in villages are a really important part of local culture and identity, but often that's exactly the music that everyone takes for granted, and therefore nobody wants to listen to on disc. And so even though village songs can be really beautiful and fascinating, very often it's the first kind of music that goes. So here's a very special album of a unique song tradition that's beautifully recorded, against all the odds.
This is not music that you dance to, it's music that you listen to and you marvel at, for lots of reasons. It's from a village in Croatia called Žegar, and that's where the music was recorded, and the title of the album is Žegar Živi, which in Serbian means "Žegar Lives". And I've chosen a track from this album that's in a style of acapella singing that connects with the ancient styles of polyphony from eastern Europe and from the Mediterranean islands, and even as far as Georgia. So here's one astonishing example of that. This is Dalmatian village music for shepherdesses, from Žegar Živi:
(Plays track 3, Cetiri djevojacke pjesme (Four "maidens'" or "shepherdesses'" songs)
That song, the Serbian title of which I'm not going to try and pronounce, is translated as "Four maidens' or shepherdesses' songs". And it's sung by four people from the village of Žegar, and the fifth one is a singer who is also Serbian, she now lives in Belgrade; her name is Svetlana Spajic, and she's the inspiration, along with Andrew Cronshaw, for the recording of this fine album from Croatia, and it's actually on Andrew's label Cloud Valley.
While we were listening to it, Max, you were making some comments about village music…
Max Reinhardt (guest reviewer)(world music DJ, radio presenter):
Well, um, the first point I wanted to make is that although I love individual tracks, when you sit and listen to them all – and I think this is a kind of production point, 'cause it's brilliant that he, that you record stuff round a table, and if you're there in a small room with some fantastic singing or music going on in a small space, that's very overpowering and wonderful. But I'm very grateful that towards the end of the album he moves to a marble hall and you get a lot of reverb, real, natural reverb, on the voices, and for me it feels like a tremendous relief. Um, you, know, I love the whole thing…
Lucy interjects:
It gives it kind of a Mystère du Voix Bulgare sound, though, doesn't it? When you get that reverb. It's not meant to be…
Max interjects:
That's true, it does take the hard edge off it…
Lucy continues:
…it's not meant to sound like that…
Max continues:
… it does take the hard edge off it, but it's still very beautiful. But I'm not saying I prefer that, I'm just saying it was a relief, because… where do you listen to an album like this? Apart from odd tracks on the radio? If you said to someone "Look, I've bought you this for Christmas", when would they play it?
Joe Boyd (guest reviewer)(record producer, writer) interjects:
I would be very happy, myself!
Lucy:
Yes, I agree with Joe. I mean, I celebrate an album like this, because there are in fact so few recordings available of village music. Like the Georgian music that we recorded on World Routes some months ago; I mean, that is music that… OK, it's meant to be sung sitting around a table, with the table groaning with food, and you're drinking wine and toasting, and so on, but it's also a really really special, really beautiful music, that is threatened.
Joe:
And I… I mean, I agree with Max that it's, in one sense, I think that if a music is beautiful it's worth recording as well as possible. So if you can get it into a good acoustic chamber that enhances the sound quality, great. But I'm very happy to sit down and listen to a record like this from beginning to end. And it's also… I'm speaking not as an ethnomusicologist here, I may be completely wrong, but my impression is that this village harmony that you talked about from Georgia, which you can hear in Italy with the trallalero, and the Sardinian harmonies, and all this, is a tradition which seems to me the tradition that isn't carried by the Gypsies. This is a tradition which never, in a way as Lucy was saying, doesn't enter the world of commercial recording, partly because it wasn't done by people who had to make a living, who had to kind of travel around. This is definitely amateur village music.
Lucy:
Exactly! Amateur but extremely technically demanding.
Joe:
Absolutely.
Lucy:
I mean, Andrew Cronshaw says that that particular style of singing, which is called groktalica, is pretty much unique to this region of Dalmatia, where the village Žegar is, which was of course very hard hit during the war, and for fifteen years was totally abandoned, and he says that this village is the last outpost of this style of singing.
Max:
I mean, I think that you're right, very technically accomplished, and technically demanding; you'd have to be a lifetime steeped in the tradition to sound like that.
Zakosena zelena livada / The Green Field is Moved Down
Zakosena zelena livada / The green field is mowed
