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even she had long lost track of, such as the widescreen yearning of Pesma Šeher Sarajevu, in which our knowledge of recent history can- not help but add pathos as she sings, into a jarring fade: “Let this beautiful song be heard, about the beauty of Sarajevo, the one who wants to be forever young with love.”
When the duo later found themselves lost in northern Bosnia, close to Srebrenica, with only mountain passes and a huge statue of Vladimir Putin for company, they may well have doubted the wisdom of their year long quest to prove the existence of a mighty Roma pop movement in Tito’s Yugoslavia. A few adventures later, however, they had unearthed a wide-ranging vinyl confirmation, a revelation exemplified by their emotional rediscovery and playing of Mede Cun’as beautiful clash of clarinet solos and tradition- al anarchic energy, Zanino Kolo.
Their research also took them to Koso- vo, where sets of diverse Balkan and Orien- tal sounds had disappeared as surely as most of their one-hit-wonder performers: Ah Bre Devla, for example, compelling dra- matics by Ava Selimi, who was forced into retirement by insinuating gossip that her very act of recording music and touring it was marriage-wrecking.
However, the multicultural melting pot
of Tito’s Yugoslavia clearly facilitated a gold- en age of cutting-edge Roma pop music by brilliant young musicians torn between folk- loric ritual and the sudden modern rush of an awesome outside world that mostly arrived by radio. Roma identity, granted the protec- tion and status of ‘official minority’, positive- ly revelled in a confused but exciting cosmo - politanism.
Muharem Serbezovski’s Ramu, Ramu is typical: glitzy banks of brass leading into a shameless fusion of Bollywood narrative and Turkish folk music, played on electric guitar and sung in Serbian by a Macedonian Rom.
Knox and Morris have actually rescued these precious recordings from decades of neglect and war, augmenting the superb pack- age with detailed liner notes, nostalgic sleeve reproductions, and smooth trans lations.
www.asphalt-tango.de www.vlaxrecords.com
John Pheby
D’EN HAUT D’en Haut Pagans PAG003
The high land in this case is the southern slopes of the Pyre- nees, the south of Gascony and what we
have here is the duo of Roman Colautti and Tomàs Baudoin singing in the Gascon lan- guage and accompanying themselves on boha bagpipes, three-holed flute, double bass and a wide range of percussion instruments.
Well, that’s a bare bones of description; now we have to find an explanation of how such a simple format can generate such excitement. Starting with the amazing per- cussion, you would have to imagine the sort of kitchen implement percussion that you get in some Rory McLeod or Ben Ivitsky produc- tions and imagine it carried to its logical cross-rhythmic conclusion. Where the bass is present it makes itself known in a thundering manner and the boha follows musical rules that are all of its own. The singing is excellent on songs that seem to have a narrow musical compass. When the two of them sing in har- mony, they sometimes stray into some unusu- al but compelling intervals.
Wyrd Folk is a genre that lacks an agreed definition and seems to mean differ- ent things according to who is using it. If it means traditional song that has been treated
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