Unclassifiable classical duo is ignited by world rhythms and jazz
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Goran Ivanovic and Fareed Haque
Taking a fluid approach to boundaries of all kinds, classical gui...Goran Ivanovic and Fareed Haque
Taking a fluid approach to boundaries of all kinds, classical guitar duo Goran Ivanovic and Fareed Haque draw inspiration from the musical idioms of the Balkans, combining propulsive rhythms, improvisational flights of fancy, odd meters, and insane bursts of speed and crafting an original sound of startling originality and beauty. On their new CD, Seven Boats, as on their stunning 2001 debut, Macedonian Blues, Ivanovic and Haque’s classical- and jazz-infused solos and duets transcend geographical, cultural, and musical identity and defy any easy characterization.
The two guitarists build their unique rapport on backgrounds that couldn’t be more dissimilar. The Chicago-born and widely traveled Haque (www.fareed.com), 41, is the son of a Chilean mother and Pakistani father. A master of both jazz and classical guitar, with pop sensibilities, he has performed with artists as diverse as Paquito D’Rivera and Sting, recorded a cover version of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s entire Déjà Vu, formed both the experimental Fareed Haque Group, in which he plays a guitar-sitar hybrid, and the newer jam band Garaj Mahal, and has taught at Northern Illinois University since 1989.
Ivanovic (www.goranivanovic.net), 27, was born in Yugoslavia to a Serbian father and a Bosnian-Croatian mother. A child prodigy, he left his war-torn country at 12 to study at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, joining his parents in Chicago in 1996. Studies completed, prestigious competitions won, and with the desire to break from strict classical repertoire, he found musical direction in Haque’s looser, club-based style. “His way of playing is furious,” says Ivanovic, who approached Haque after hearing him perform. The two soon began collaborating. But while their mélange of musical inheritance is apparent, their music goes much further and deeper than ethnic eclectic.
“When I came with a few arrangements, he could feel it right away,” Ivanović says of Haque’s affinity for the folk-based music of the Balkans, a cross-fertilization of Jewish, Gypsy, Turkish, Spanish, North African, Egyptian, and Indian cultures. Using old recordings of village musicians, Ivanovic worked out the melodies and harmonies and then, with Haque, created new arrangements. The pieces are primarily based on dances in meters like 7/8, 5/8, and 11/8 that are unfamiliar to American ears and belie the notion that popular music is necessarily simple. “When you go to Bulgaria, where people have been dancing in 11 and 9 and 14 and 19, or India, where you turn on pop radio and the melodies are full of altered scales, you realize that the human condition can appreciate great complexity.” Haque says. But only if it is organic, he maintains, based on the natural rhythms of the human body.
The music also refutes the corollary that classical music need be as sterile and inorganic as it is serious. To this end, the duo embraces an exuberant improvisational approach. Believing that the loss of improvisation in classical music accounts for its shrinking audience, Haque has long cultivated such spontaneity. “The hard part is to improvise in a way that is stylistically related,” Haque says, “to have it fulfill the function of the development section in a typical sonata. Can we take some of the motifs and try to vary them and develop them in a way that relates to the overarching architecture? When it sounds like a spontaneous development of the material, it’s really exciting.” “Zajdi Zajdi,” from Seven Boats (Proteus, www.proteusentertainment.com), is a case in point, a simple folk tune that was almost completely improvised as it was recorded. When they work together, Ivanović says, things sometimes take off and “completely new parts come.” They both maintain that working together has broadened their playing. “I enjoy classical music more now when I am able to be more relaxed in terms of rhythms,” says Ivanovic, who has also started the Goran Ivanović Group to play upbeat “loosely Balkan” music.
This melding of the complex and the passionate, the classical and the improvisational, makes for exhilarating listening. The alchemy is apparent on the evocative “Walls of the White City,” the driving “Topansko Oro,” and the dreamy “Seven Boats,” which moves from a hypnotic repetitive motif to a sultry improvisation embedded in an elusive melody. Each guitarist’s beautiful individual tone is most apparent on their respective classical solos—Haque’s rendition of Georg Philipp Telemann’s Fantasia in D, which he transcribed, and Ivanovic's “Pour le Moment.”
How can a duo maintain the spontaneity required to reinvent their music every time out? “Trust,” says Haque. “Hopefully, when Goran and I play, people will get excited about the music and will forget that it’s classical and just think it’s fun or moving.” They are planning several long tours to further deepen their rapport and a new CD of perhaps half originals and half Spanish Baroque music. As Ivanovicsays of their ongoing collaboration, “It should always be a new beginning and a growing experience.”
What They Play
On Seven Boats, GORAN IVANOVIC switched between Frederich Holtier (www.holtierluthier.com) and Richard Bruné (www.rebrune.com) classical guitars. The Holtier has a double spruce top, Indian rosewood back and sides, and “volume, warmth, and character.” The Bruné, a 1985 with cedar top, Indian rosewood back and sides, and mahogany neck, was adapted for Ivanovic with an extra soundhole he calls “really cool, very funky looking.” Ivanovic uses D’Addario EJ-46 strings.
FAREED HAQUE played his “old, trusty” 1974 cedar/Indian Germán Pérez Barranco (www.geocities.com/Nashville/8901/granada.htm) on his solos, except for the Telemann. On that and the duets, he used a 2002 spruce/Brazilian, 650 mm.–scale guitar made by Jeronimo Peña Fernández (Utica, 7 Marmolejo, Jaen, Spain). He praises the instrument for its fantastic projection and sustain. Haque uses D’Addario composite strings.
Portrait of the Guitarist as a young man
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“DEEP DOWN, EVERY CLASSICAL AND JAZZ MUSICIAN WANTS TO BE A ROCK STAR.” Goran Ivanovic, one of th...
“DEEP DOWN, EVERY CLASSICAL AND JAZZ MUSICIAN WANTS TO BE A ROCK STAR.” Goran Ivanovic, one of the most exciting guitar players to emerge on the Chicago music scene in years, divulges this secret truth, in a thick Slavic accent, to the 50 or so people who’ve come to hear the four-piece Goran Ivanovic Group play on a Thursday night at HotHouse, the world-music nightclub in the South Loop. The quip is met with scattered laughs, in recognition of the uphill struggle for mainstream success faced by any musician who plays something other than rock or hip-hop these days. In this instance, that means Balkan folk songs ladled from the cultural and musical melting pot of Macedonia and stirred up with American jazz (courtesy of saxophonist Doug Rosenberg and bassist Matt Ulery), gypsy, kiezmer and Mediterranean accents, and a dollop of flamenco guitar – hardly a surefire recipe for rock-star-style fame and fortune.
But for all his sarcasm, however, Ivanovic, who is 27, does, in fact, look a lot more like a rock star than someone who spent his adolescence learning classical guitar at one of Europe’s most prestigious music conservatories and, since emigrating to the United States eight years ago, has dedicated himself to discovering an entirely new musical vocabulary, one that achieves a balance between the technical sophistication of classical music, the simple melodies and infectious rhythms of Eastern European folk music, and the improvisational, emotionally liberating power of Western jazz. He wears beat-up blue jeans and beat-up sneakers. His black, wavy hair looks dense enough to have defeated countless combs in battle, and his goatee could probably use a maintenance trim on a more regular basis. After tonight’s gig, he’ll climb into his Jeep, roll himself a cigarette from his omnipresent pouch of Drum-brand tobacco, and return to the proudly unkempt bachelor pad he shares with a fellow classical-guitar-devotee roommate in Logan Square. He has a fine, dry sense of humor and a studied fondness for the word “fuck,” which peppers his conversation the way furious flamenco-style strums sneak into his polished renderings of traditional Balkan folk tunes.
He’s earned the respect of some of the finest classical guitar players in Chicago over the past few years, but Ivanovic has long since shucked the tuxedos, concert halls, and regimented caste structure and stifling formality of the classical music world. “It really didn’t make me happy when I played guitar competitions or for guitar societies,” says Ivanovic, who won several such competitions as a teenager, “because you’d have 50 guys just staring at you and hoping you make a mistake. It’s not healthy.”
the rest of this article can be found at www.goranivanovic.net
