33f Albanian Activities

Two rare things are happening: a UK tour by an Albanian traditional supergroup, and a new production by the mighty Joe Boyd. Kim Burton has the background.

join them or clung to hawsers, were doing the rounds on social media. It was generally described as showing World War II refugees escaping from Europe to Africa, and inter- preted as a condemnation of the slow and inadequate response by European countries to refugees from the Middle East and else- where fleeing war and destruction.

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However, the pictures were actually from 1991, taken in the Albanian port city of Durrës, and showed young men attempt- ing to reach Italy, trying to escape the insta- bility and poverty that followed the collapse of the economy and industrial base of the country with the end of Communist rule, and hoping to find work in order to send money home to their desperate families. It was in fact, a modern example of the time- worn Balkan practice of kurbet, whose derivation from a Turkish word meaning ‘abroad’ testifies to its age.

couple of years ago pictures of a ship preparing to leave dock, its decks and superstructure teeming with young men as others strove up the sides to

All the peninsula’s nations have songs cursing the fate of both the emigrant, far from home, and their wives and family left alone and hoping for their return, as well as the countries which have taken them – once Egypt, then America or Australia, and now Germany, Greece and Britain. “Oh the road to Egypt, the road to Ioannina/Weep Maro, weep my daughter,” runs one famous song. Even the ships that bore them away are damned. “O steamship, barren timber/That parted us from our wives,” laments one song, Fol Moj Mike Një Fjalë, which is to be found on a new CD by south Albanian supergroup Saz’iso who are soon to be touring the UK.

The experience of kurbet and the cross- ing of borders is central to the entire project of that recording and this tour. Its genesis came when Andrea Goertler, a German working in Tirana, found that her Albanian colleagues were all aficionados of their tra- ditional music, and capable singers and dancers. Her encounter with Albanian music, and in particular the music of the southern mountains performed by the saze, and a

chance meeting between her and American- born British producer Joe Boyd at a beach party in Albania organised by another migrant, Tiranese Londoner Edit Pula (which eventually led to another party, a wedding in Berlin where bride Andrea danced an Albanian dance for bridegroom Joe), have flowered in the Saz’iso project.

t was not an easy road, although the couple’s determination to bring the music to the world outside was strengthened by a visit to the National Folk Festival in Gjiro kastër where “something sublime popped up among the re-enactments of wedding cere- monies, diaspora groups and large chore- ographed presentations.”

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Boyd remembers, “We ended up going to a few after-show concerts, in hotel lobbies and bars, and once late at night we were eating outside a café in a small street and a group of guys drinking there started singing all of a sudden, and it was great. So I pulled up a chair and stuck my head into the middle…”