f26 Pearl Of The Balkans
When Amira sings sevdah, time stops. Elizabeth Kinder travels to exotic wartorn Heathrow Airport to meet Bosnia’s great voice. Pearly photos by Judith Burrows.
“A
mira is one of the world’s truly great artists. When she sings she has that rare ability to make it seem as
though time has stopped. Her songs tell specific stories but she conveys emotion that makes them transcendental. You feel a universal spirituality simultaneously co- existing with a particular narrative.” So says David Jones, the seasoned music pro- moter behind creative production com - pany Serious. A man of experience, Jones knows what he’s talking about, and hav- ing seen and heard it all before, he’s not given to hyperbole.
Nor is Ed Vulliamy, the celebrated journalist, when he writes in The Observer that Amira brings to mind Callas and Piaf and refers to her as the Balkan Billie Holi- day, particularly as her first album Rosa (Snail 2005) delivered the traditional Bosnian sevdah that is her oeuvre with a distinctly blues twist. Though thinking about Billie Holiday ‘funny’ does not immediately spring to mind, while it does with her Balkan counterpart. Not only is it difficult to imagine Holiday being as up for a laugh as Amira is, you’d be hard pushed to find anyone so charming and open and warm and generous as she, or with such huge lashings of talent and humility in equal measure.
On stage she is utterly compelling: magnetic and mesmerising. Vulliamy writes how the great Bosnian-American fiction writer Aleksander Hermon notes that “Amira’s singing brings tears to one’s eyes and unmitigated joy to one’s heart.” And this is the key to sevdah, and why she’s currently its greatest exponent. At its heart lies the paradox of profound joy in melancholy. In this it is like the cante jondo in flamenco, with which it shares Sephardic Jewish, North African and Ara- bic musical elements. The term ‘sevdah’ has its roots in the Arabic meaning ‘black bile’, a poetic metaphor for melancholia and is related to a word encapsulating both melancholy and unrequited love. And like flamenco, sevdah has its origins in gypsy music.
Off-stage, however, Amira would be hard to spot in a crowd of more than three people. We meet for the purposes of this piece at Heathrow Airport, the day after her spellbinding performance at Womex. Yet had we not previously met in Sarajevo – where for an incredible few days she was our guide and source of many wonderful encounters (fR 283/4) – if she walked by
today in her Levi 501s and stylish wool coat I would have had her down as an attrac- tive Eastern European housewife out on a rare trip abroad.
This says as much about Amira’s
unshowy, understated down-to-earth per- sonality as it does about my rubbish pow- ers of deduction. She is travelling alone which she likes: “Sometimes it can get tough travelling with other musicians.” She pulls upright the two small hand lug- gage cases she’s been dragging behind her and pushes the long handles down. One of the cases, she tells me, is full of merchandising and stuff from Womex. I suspect that if I was meeting an American singer of her brilliance then first, she would not be dragging any luggage around, however little, and second, I’d now be waiting for the OK from two PRs and three personal assistants to guide me through menacing personal security out- side the first class lounge. I would not be, as I am, jumping off my stool in Café Rouge for a warm hug and a “Hello!”
It’s a real joy to meet up with her
again. We’ve a lot to catch up on since those few days in 2007. For a start, Amira has released another three albums and participated in a two year long musical project that culminated in an amazing show in Trafalgar Square to a physical audi- ence of ten thousand and millions more on TV for the BT River Of Music – the cultural Olympiad that took place the weekend before the opening ceremony in 2012.
The project, which was instigated by Serious, began with Amira working with children from Balkan refugee families in London. With singer Tea Hodsic, Amira got the kids to form a choir and focused on traditional Balkan repertoire for a full-to- capacity performance at the Arts Depot. For the gig in Trafalgar Square, for which the underlying theme of the event was cross-cultural, Amira put together a ten piece band of musicians from across the former conflict zones in the Balkans (including Greece and Turkey) and as David Jones puts it, “Built something very strong, bringing together so many cultures with equality and power for a big audi- ence.” It felt, he says, “like a real expres- sion of the region on an epic scale, which only a great singer could pull off.” And she got the kids’ choir onstage for a song too.
This cross-cultural theme chimed with the driving force in Amira’s life, which is to foster unity in the former Yugoslavia, in particular to remind people in her beloved home city that before 1992
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